The Salesforce marketplace is filled with hundreds of partners with technical experience and know-how. Yet why do some partners succeed, and others struggle with delivering successful projects? The answer is found in their delivery framework.

Delivery defined

Delivery is defined as the people, process and technology used in providing Salesforce functionality to solve business challenges and help clients grow and prosper.

Every Salesforce partner is delivering according to some framework, whether they realize it or not!

The content and quality of their delivery framework is what will lead a project to succeed or fail. An effective framework needs to address what I call the 9 Pillars of Delivery Excellence:

1. Business Development & Contracting: Scoping, proposals, cost estimation, negotiations, and execution

2. Discovery: Requirements identification, documentation, presentation, signoff, and planning

3. Design: Architecture (Salesforce), data, and integrations

4. Development: Development processes, org strategy, quality assurance, and UAT

5. Training & Change Management: Approaches to training to align with client, and steps that vendor and client can take to increase adoption

6. Deployment: Deployment processes, roles, responsibilities, timing, QA, and acceptance

7. Support: Roles, responsibilities, timing, communications, and tracking

8. Customer Success: Check-ins and alignment with customers, taking their pulse, and identifying issues

9. Project Management: Roles and responsibilities of project managers throughout the delivery process

Each pillar has its own set of processes and tools, and delivery teams need to understand them and be comfortable executing on them. The best vendors and the best projects are those that take the time to plan for and execute on each of these pillars, leaving nothing to chance.

Although it can take considerable time and resources to implement and effective delivery framework, the rewards over time can be spectacular-- successful projects, happy clients, less staff turnover, and an overall feeling of greater confidence and calm.

We help Salesforce Partners develop and implement successful delivery frameworks. Contact us if you would like to learn more!