Why you should conduct Discovery on your Salesforce Delivery

As Salesforce Partners, you likely spend time in every project conducting discovery for your client. This is often the first step of an implementation project where your team takes time to get to know your client, identify their needs and business processes, and document their requirements.

Meaningful transformation for your clients starts with taking stock of their current state, identifying gaps and goals, and bridging that gap with the technology and processes that your firm is being contracted to provide.

To do this, your probably employ analysts and solution architects that have the knowledge and skills to peel back the surface layers and get to a deeper understanding of what is going on with the client.

At a minimum, effective discovery helps you and your client identify the following:

· Business stages and processes

· Roles and responsibilities

· Technologies, data, integrations

· Workflows, inputs, outputs, approvals

· Reporting requirements

· Time constraints (MSAs, deadlines, etc.)

· Stakeholders and their needs and desires

· Pain points, bottlenecks, system failures

· Goals and objectives

· Quick wins

In order to understand your own delivery processes and framework, it can be extremely worthwhile to ask these same questions about your own organization—to conduct Discovery on your Delivery.

What are your processes? Where does your delivery approach work well? Where are your pain points? Are you meeting your goals and objectives? Why? Why not?

As with any effective discovery, the value is in the details. Getting to specifics, documenting your findings, and validating with your team can help you tremendously. A journey map (check out Theydo.io) and flow charts can be of great help here, too. Nothing beats seeing your work processes in black and white.

You will also want to get input from across the broader team: Functional, Technical, QA, Training, Support, and even Sales. By incorporating more voices, you can learn more and pinpoint challenges with greater precision. What’s more, broader team members can bring a fresh perspective and help craft novel solutions.

By conducting Discovery on your Delivery, you will take the first step to transformation. You will have your AS-IS state defined, and will be well-equipped for the next step: defining your TO-BE state.

If you would like support in conducting this discovery, please feel free to message me. I am happy to help!

Kind regards,

Theresa