💃 Greenfield vs Brownfield Salesforce Projects🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Hope all the readers who attended Dreamforce were not overtaken by these menaces!

Anyway….what do you think about these 2 choices-

1) An empty lot for you to design and build your house with all the fixings.

2) Remodeling your current house to include all the fixings- add a bedroom, bathroom, pool, solar panels, and hooking up to municipal pipes while removing the septic tank.

There’s a Salesforce version of this same decision, and this decision has HUGE impacts - costs, resources, timeline, risks, and long term success.

This will be the most interesting thing you read all week 👇

WHAT IS IT?

Greenfield and Brownfield. What are they?

As a Salesforce professional, you will be exposed to both greenfield and brownfield projects throughout your career.

Understanding the distinction between the two and how they impact your approach is critical to delivering successful implementations. Let’s break it down using our trusty framework.

Greenfield

A greenfield org Is a brand-new implementation. A freshly provisioned Sales Cloud org. A blank slate. A greenfield 😉.

Think about it…

No legacy constraints.

No technical debt (yet 🙂).

No poopy data 💩!

Just a wide open space to design and build your perfect CRM 🤩!

Brownfield

A brownfield org is working in existing structures.

Whether it’s upgrading, modifying, or replacing a CRM, you're dealing with established processes, data, and sometimes entrenched inefficiencies.

It’s carving out bedroom space to add a bathroom. Converting the carport into an enclosed garage. It’s removing the trees to make way for a swimming pool. You could even add a second story to your single story home 🏡!

But you’ve already been dealt a hand, and now you’re working with it.

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?

How This Impacts YOU 🫵

The difference between greenfield and brownfield projects impacts everything about your approach—from strategy and design to execution and stakeholder management.

Greenfield

Greenfield projects are a Picasso’s dream - a blank canvas to create.

But with that comes the challenge of building everything from the ground up, including processes, user training, and often convincing the client of what's possible.

These projects tend to take more time to mature because you're not just creating a system - you’re creating the processes around it and influencing stakeholders to your recommendations.

Brownfield

Brownfield projects, while seemingly simpler due to existing structures, bring their own set of complexities.

You must consider legacy systems, technical debt, data migration, and user adoption of new processes.

In a brownfield scenario, you’re straight-jacketed by what's already in place, and your recommendations will face stakeholder resistance because "that’s the way it’s always been done." 😩

HOW DO YOU MANAGE IT?

Implementation Tactics - Greenfield vs Brownfield

Greenfield

Discovery 

Discovery in a greenfield project is arguably more difficult because you have no baseline. No current state to stack up against. No direct references to communicate to stakeholders.

Design, Build

Big brain required.

Salesforce is an object-oriented application, and so has some built in structure and flow (Lead→ Contact & Oppty, etc).

But your business skills need to be as legit as your Salesforce skills. You’ll need to understand the business process intimately, and then have the big brain to overlay a SaaS CRM on top of it that hums!

UAT

This will be touch because of the no-previous-reference thing. Defining success criteria needs to be thoughtful, along with the infinite joy of writing test scripts 😘.

Go-Live

Assuming you secured that post-go-live support SOW, you’re gonna earn every penny 😅! But hey, it is a MASSIVE accomplishment to take a greenfield to go-live and everyone survives! It is literally a career-changing experience - a worthy notch on your resume. Congrats 🎉 👏!!

Brownfield

Discovery 

Discovery for brownfields is well-served by classic gap analysis. Define current state, define desired state, analyze and define the gap 🙌.

Design, Build

Ugh. This can be annoying in brownfield orgs because you have to consider all of the legacy things.

Regression testing is highly recommended but sooooo painful 😖.

And you better pray 🙏 you have a full development environment with seeded data.

UAT

Pick your UAT participants wisely 🧠. The stakeholder champion who loves you and the changes you’ve made will have a better perspective on this necessary testing phase.

Go-Live

All go-lives are hard. But a brownfield go-live requires significant cutovers.

Big business process changes (for the better, you swear!), perfectly timed production data conversions (downtime is for weaklings!), and flipping on new automations and integrations (gulp 😳).

Ensure you take the time to write up a thoughtful and practiced go-live sequence, and be available for the next 7 days to be that tier-2 escalation 🚨.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

Greenfield.

Brownfield.

Is one “better” than the other? That’s up to you.

They are each a unique experience with their own amazingness and awfulness.

To truly understand either of them, you need to do both of them - a version of steelman’ing.

POLL!!

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes