💃 Salesforce Professionals - Mind the Gap!🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! Have you ever perfectly followed a recipe, only to have the dish looking more like a Picasso than a Vermeer?

Similarly, have you experienced a Salesforce project feels smooth at first…and then three weeks later you’re in “surprise requirement” purgatory?

That’s often caused by a gap - something nobody captured between current state and desired state - that came back to haunt you.

Great gap analysis can minimize the project pain…but what does great gap analysis look like? How can you bottle it up and pour it over your own projects?

👇👇👇

INVERT

Gap Analysis What-NOT-To-Do’s

Let’s immediately narrow the scope of a monumental task like gap analysis. Here are 3 things NOT to do when conducting your gap analysis

❌ Do Not Eat the Elephant - you eat an elephant 🐘 a bite at a time. Same thing in a Salesforce project. Don’t attempt to analyze the entire project. Gap analysis is only effective when breaking processes down to bite-sized pieces.

❌ Do Not Pamper the Happy Path - it’s natural to gravitate towards the happy path 💯. The happy path lacks complexity, it’s easier to define than gaps, and it’s the natural baseline to start gap analysis. But happy path is just the honeypot 🍯 the devil uses to keep you from effective gap analysis 😈.

❌ Use AI, But Do Not Relinquish Accountability - dump all your artifacts and SOPs into ChatGPT! But don’t copy/paste the output and stamp it as gospel. Would a developer copy/paste AI code? AI will generate good insights but there are to serve you to develop the best gap analysis possible. Review and adjust AI-output vigorously 🫡.

DON’T EAT THE ELEPHANT

Business Process Breakdown

Don’t eat the elephant! Ok…then what should you do? What do smaller bites look like?

Good news - Salesforce being an object oriented platform supporting a pretty basic process (sales 🙄) you already have a simple template to get to bite-sized chunks. Here’s what we mean -

• Lead

• Account/Contact

• Opportunity

Ok, still a mouthful. Let’s break it down further

• Lead

  • Inbound Lead

  • Lead routing

  • Lead nurturing

  • Lead conversion

• Account/Contact

  • Lead conversion field mapping

• Opportunity

  • Lead conversion field mapping

  • Opportunity routing

  • Opportunity nurturing

  • Opportunity closed

    • Won

    • Lost

Excellent! Now you can eat this with a fork instead of a saw! These sub-processes will guide your documentation, too, which you’ll get into after the next section 🙂.

QQ (QUICK QUESTION!)

Gap Analysis Questions

A simple framework for gap analysis questions is asking “What If?” and modifying the who, what, when, or where. Here’s some examples-

Who

❓ “What if a user with the Marketing profile does it?”

❓ “What if the user who isn’t assigned to the record executes that Flow?”

What

❓ “What if 100 prospects fill out the form at once?”

❓ “What if no one has viewed that report in 2 years, it should be removed from the migration list?”

When

❓ “What if it’s outside of business hours, does the 1hr SLA still stand?”

❓ “What if the field is updated after the scheduled batch job runs?”

Where

❓ “What if the user responds in the webapp instead of the Salesforce managed package?”

❓ “What if the user updates the Appt date/time field on the Lead, but not the Event in the Activity?”

✍️

Document the Gaps

This isn’t the time to freestyle on a blank sheet of paper 🙅.

Instead, paint-by-numbers will produce consistent, repeatable outputs that the solutions architect responsible for solving for the gaps (🫵 you, probably) will thank you for.

You can try this template ⬇️

You can see the sub-processes you defined earlier will help guide your template build out, further filling in the gaps 💪.

You will likely add columns to your template, like “solution,” “status,” and “owner.”

When you’re done with discovery, your document will be the size of an elephant, but can be digested in spoonfuls 😋.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

Gap analysis is more science than art, and that’s a great thing in your highly ambiguous world that is Salesforce enhancements and support.

You can follow a playbook 👉 don’t try to eat the elephant, breakdown processes, ask good “what if” questions, and document the gaps to be closed - and you’ll have added value.

Nothing fancy. Tons of needle-moving value. Just another day minding the gap 😃 🙌!

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes