💃 Salesforce Avengers! Assemble! 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Ever wonder what the Avengers version of a Salesforce implementation team is?

Scroll down 👇 to find out!

GREAT TEAMS, GREAT PLAYERS

A Great Team

The Avengers 🦸

The 1992 Dream Team ⛹️‍♂️

The 2024 Arizona Cardinals 😉

Great teams that have accomplished great things - from saving the world 🌎 to winning olympic gold 🥇.

Salesforce Teams also accomplish great things - from converting users off of spreadsheets 👨‍💻 to implementing 1 million SKU CPQ solutions 💪.

And a great team needs great players.

The Avengers had unwavering leadership from Captain America, the genius of Tony Stark, and the brutal violence of the Hulk.

The Dream Team had 🐐 Jordan 🐐 , Larry Legend, and a prime Charles Barkley.

What does a great Salesforce team have? Take a look 👇

SALESFORCE AVENGERS

A Great Salesforce Team

Business Analyst

If you’re a regular ChaCha reader, there should be no surprise who is leading off our list of superheroes - the Business Analyst.

And don’t get hung up on the title. If you can break down business process, perform gap analysis and put yourself in your user’s shoes…..a rose by any other name would smell as sweet….you’re a business analyst!

What a Business Analyst brings to implementation

💪 Heads down. Doing the work, putting pen to paper. Interviewing the users, gathering requirements, writing user stories, and creating diagrams.

💪 Constantly laying the foundation for solutions. Everything a business analyst does in service of an effective solution overlaid on top of a business process.

💪 Swiss army knife. When you look at billed hours, it’s the analysts who are leading the the charge. Of course, there’s financial reasons for this, but they’re the only resource is who is contributing to the turkey and also the mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, and stuffing!

Project Manager

It’s a painful reality that there are a lot of…underwhelming project managers out there. But when the good ones are doing their PM thing, it’s like Steve Nash in his prime.

What a Project Manager brings to implementation

💪 Holds the team accountable. There’s a lot of PMINO’s out there - project manager in name only. Accountability is the easiest way to identify the real ones from the posers. It starts with themselves - coming prepared to every meeting and keeping the Jira board clean. Then it emanates across the team, because if you don’t come prepared, a good PM will set you up for success so that you do.

💪 Grease the wheels, keep the high-value resources clean. A good PM understands analyst hours are plentiful. But technical architect hours are not. So the PM will set the table for the high-value resources, ensuring the client is getting the best bang for the buck, and minimize the risk that your company is writing down $500/hr of a TA’s time.

💪 Wills the needle movement. The epitome of simple, but not easy. A quality PM keeps the needle moving to the right 👉. Sometimes with great support from the team, and sometimes through sheer will!

Developer

What a developer brings to implementation

💪 Industry experience. When a quality developer also has industry experience? That’s a cheat code. Responsible for the most leveraged solutions, a developer is already going to have an outsized impact. Knowing the industry will decrease their effort while increasing their solution’s effectiveness.

💪 Roll their sleeves up. You may think of a developer banging out code all day. But the good ones know there’s a lot of dirty work too - field creation and mapping, API documentation, and devops integrity.

💪 A very advanced admin. Anything a good admin can do, a good developer can do better…prove me wrong. In an implementation, having an additional expert configurator on the team is an embarrassment of riches!

Project Lead

Tony Stark was the hero 💯. Captain America was the leader 🫡. It’s the same in Salesforce implementation - the leader’s role is to get their team into position to succeed…and then let them succeed.

What a Project/Engagement Lead brings to implementation

💪 Industry experience. The lead is required to earn the trust of the client. And no client of a 9+ digit revenue company is going to respect a partner who doesn’t know their industry.

💪 Trust. Yup, it’s so integral to project success, it gets it’s own line-item. Trust of the client. And, more importantly, the trust of their own team.

 💪 Works outside in. On the surface, this is an advanced technique to manage scope creep, but it’s so much more. Sure, it focuses the team on what to work on. But the real juice is that it focuses the team on what NOT to work on. Ironically (in a good way), this gives your team more freedom!

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

So you know what a good team looks like. What do you do with this information?

If you’re on a Salesforce implementation team now - do an assessment. Does your team have the knowledge and experience you just read about? What impacts is each team member making? What impacts are you 🫵 making?

Understanding what makes a strong team is key to promoting to the senior role that puts the teams together. Understanding your role in the team - your strengths, your weaknesses - will set you up to look outward to your team to take advantage of their strengths, and prop up their weaknesses.

The ability to assemble an effective team is a powerful skill, indeed.

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes