💃 Salesforce Professionals - How to Prepare For Your Out of Office🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Hope you are having an amazing start to your summer and that you have tons of vacations planned!

Sipping on pina coladas 🍹 through a loopy straw under an umbrella on a sunny beach 🏖!

The only thing that could possibly make your vacation better is….knowing you setup your team and your stakeholders for success while you’re out 😊.

That peace of mind while you’re offline and have your phone on silent, tucked away in the hotel room, is totally worth it.

Let’s look at 3 things to do to prepare for your time away from resetting passwords 😉.

Agenda for today includes

• How to Prepare For Your Out of Office

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

How to Prepare For Your Out of Office

First, a few tidbits -

1) A good manager wants you to take time off. They don’t want you burnt out 🥵. Take your time off and don’t feel guilty about it!

2) Be responsible. If you knew of a big November Go-Live back in January, don’t take vacation during the Go-Live without a proper discussion with your manager 🙌.

3) Why do you have to put this effort into taking a vacation? Because Salesforce is an enterprise software solution that is supported and maintained by you 🫡.

It may seem unfair that the front desk person can take a vacation without planning. But the value that you bring as a Salesforce professional is objectively higher.

3 Things to do to Prepare For Your Out of Office

1) Warming Up Your Stakeholders

You want to let your stakeholders know that you will be out of office.

But here’s the thing -

You don’t wanna tell them too early and often, because you’ll dilute the message.

And you don’t wanna tell them too late, because then they won’t have time to prepare.

1-2 weeks in advance should be fine.

Discuss if you want to cancel meetings, and advise of the plan leading up to, and during your vacation. More on the plan in a bit…

2) Throttling Down

Say it with us- “Setting myself up for success is setting my stakeholders up for success".

What this means is don’t take on more work than you can handle, understanding you will be gone for X amount of days AND you will need a few hours to prep your “away plan.”

You do NOT want a crammed schedule leading up to your vacay.

If you receive new requests, ensure you are setting expectations of a reasonable delivery date. If there’s any doubt, push the date.

3) The Plan - Visible, Accessible Notes for While You’re Away

Plan to take a few hours to create and update this document.

For Consultants, this should include-

By client, by workstream, the statuses of deliverables/stories/requests, and their expected delivery date.

Include references and links to project documentation and Jira cards.

In-house Admins can use a similar format, minus the client.

Here’s an example-

ChaCha OOTO 6/19-6/23

Client Abco
Current State: project is in build stage.  Jira board is up to date.  Brad is running the the project meetings while I am away.  He will need support in QA'ing cards completed by the dev team.  

Action items
-<jira card link> - page layout client validation.  brad to review in client meeting
-<jira card link> - duplicate lead validation rule decision from client.  Then update the data conversion document.   

FYI, no action needed at this time
-<jira card link> - awaiting client's mapping doc
-<jira card link> - due 6/30.  Dev team to provide update

Client Xyzip
-Client agreed to cancel meetings while OOTO
-no action items.  

Ensure you are grooming the plan with your stakeholders leading up to your time off, aligning on expectations and due dates.

A day or 2 before you’re off, offer to review the plan with your manager, or someone your manager designates as your “backup.”

Your manager knowing that this plan exists will be a comfort to them. You managing this proactively is a huge help.

Enjoy your vacation 😎!

Daily Principle

and now....Your Daily Memes