💃 The SOW - The Salesforce Consultant's Gospel 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Raise your hand if you've been burned by the Statement of Work ✋🏼✋🏼✋🏼✋🏼✋🏼! By the end of a project, we have them memorized - "the Reports and Dashboards deliverables are in the middle of page 7, right above the section with custom object line items." It's the first document anyone new to the project wants to see, and the last document the team reviews to check all the boxes and get that final invoice. It is gospel. What it says, goes.

Agenda for today includes

• The SOW - The Salesforce Consultant's Gospel 📜

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

The SOW - The Salesforce Consultant's Gospel 📜

A good SOW is hard. Distilling potentially years worth of work and millions of dollars of unrealized revenue into a document before any of the work has started is a considerable challenge and requires hard-earned experience to do it right. Be wary of the person who goes into a back office with a blank slate and, in a few hours, re-emerges with a completed SOW.

So what goes into a good SOW? Start with a clearly defined objective and also provide context. Since this will be referenced for the lifetime of the project, it will be a North Star for all project stakeholders to align to. It is highly likely that the project team on Day 1 looks very different than Go-Live, and the onboarding of new team members will always include reviewing the SOW. At a minimum, this document will ease the onboarding and offboarding of resources.

What else? Here are 3 more important attributes of a quality SOW

1. Organization - the SOW could be 3-30 pages, or more, depending on the complexity of the project. Segmenting the sections and ordering them in an intuitive sequence sets everyone up for success. Specifically for the deliverables section, Salesforce being a platform gives you a natural framework to structure and organize the solution (Lead, Opportunity, CPQ, Quote, reports, dashboards, security, etc). The implementation team will be grateful for a thoughtful layout as they will have this section memorized within a few months.

2. Reasonable Timeline and Budget - This is where a thoughtful salesperson is worth their weight in gold. Of course the client wants it as cheap and fast as possible. A salesperson who's primary concern is getting that dotted line signed may give up too much ground. A salesperson who cares about their own reputation and the implementation team's physical, mental, and emotional health will fight for comfortable (or at least not uber-aggressive) timelines. Very generally, budget should be around a resourcing framework (count and type of resource) and have a margin built in, however there is a plethora of use cases where pricing strategy is very different, with a specific intent.

3. What is NOT included, or in consulting terms, "this would be considered a Change Request" - These could be things that service firms are not staffed for, like user training or change management. It may also include things that were difficult to estimate at the time or the client hadn't made a decision on how to manage, like data migration.

The final important consideration in an SOW is the client's roles and responsibilities. The client is a major stakeholder in the project and will play a role that is agreed upon in the SOW. This could be for applications access and support, participating in scrums, owning UAT, and validating business requirements, designs and other deliverables. Clients are NOT bystanders in projects, and their role needs to be clearly defined in the SOW.

Daily Principle

Are your peoples discussing family, finances, personal growth, and habits? Or are they focused on the Kardashians/Jenners, the new Netflix reality show, and the political news cycle?

Do your peoples agree with everything you say? Or are they offering thoughtful critiques and blatant callouts when you are clearly in the wrong?

Be mindful of your top 5, they have a significant influence on how you proceed through life; and you have an impact on how they live, as well.

and now....Your Daily Memes