Best Practices

Top 12 Early Signs Your Salesforce Project Is In Jeopardy

“In poorly run projects, problems can go undetected until the project fails. It’s like the drip… drip… drip… of a leaky underground pipe. Money is being lost, but you don’t see it until there is an explosion.” – Joy Gumz

Joy Gumz aptly mentioned these words as you always have some leaks in your projects that indicate the failure of the project. According to teamstage.io, 70% of all projects fail. And, you do not want your Salesforce project to fail. As they always say, there is not a single reason for a project’s failure. There are always multiple reasons. We are going to help you to identify the early signs of project failure. To make your life easier, we have categorized the signs into four different sources:

1. Management

2. Project Team

3. Technical/Tools

4. Customer

Let’s look into the Top 12 Early Signs your Salesforce Project is in Jeopardy.

Management

1. Priority

Any company will have limited Management team members. Each management team member is involved in multiple projects. As management members, they have to resolve issues within the project team and cater to the customer at the same time. This leads to chaos for the internal management team since the priorities are not defined properly. The same chaos is passed on to the project team.

2. Motivation

The Management team does not communicate enough with the project team members to pass on the motivation. They do not share appreciation received from the customer. Management does not provide extrinsic motivation (pay raise, bonus, time off, and so on) or intrinsic motivation (internal motivation to overcome challenges and deliver the project the way it should have been).

3. Strategy

The key strategy of a project is decided upon by the management before the project starts. It also involves conveying and agreeing on the decided strategy with the customer. Your project can be successful if the customer agrees with and supports you at every step of the project. Hence, if your strategy has any loose ends, ensure you tie them and communicate constantly with your customers.

Project Team

4. Way of Working

One of the essential pieces of any project is the way of working of a project team. And, the team does come up with a newer version of what things work within the team. A project manager should ensure the entire team adapts one way of working, rather than some sticking to the older way of working - which brings distrust in the new way of working.

5. Knowledge Sharing

Knowledge sharing within the team is most crucial - as one team member must have had a conversation with the customer or management team, and did not pass that piece of information further to the team. Knowledge can be on any type - process information or update information. Not knowing the full scenario always creates disinterest in the team members, affecting the project in the end.

6. Deadlines

Not meeting deadlines is a major eye-opener of all time. It can be small meetings or demos or any small task that must have been done already but missed the deadline. A dependable task where we do not have control is still okay, but if we have the team is continuously missing deadlines due to one reason or another, the project is going to fail.

Tools

7. Lack of Tools

Having the right tools for managing projects enables the team to do the work faster and efficiently. If you are adapting to new tools, team training is a must. There are ample videos available on the internet nowadays, which can help your team to scale up on how to use the tools. If you are running on a tight budget, there are a huge number of free tools available online. Figure out which tools fit your team and the customer the best.

8. Product Delivery

Product Delivery and features are the backbones of any project - you have invested it all due to the product. Since we are using Salesforce, we do not have to worry about the product delivery - Salesforce has 3 major releases every year. You can design your releases or projects aligned with the Salesforce product roadmap to gain maximum benefit from the Salesforce products.

9. Technical Boundaries

Technical Boundaries refer to the technical limitation you reach where there’s no solution defined for your problem - it can either be from the product’s perspective or the resource’s perspective. If it is from a product’s perspective, you can figure out a workaround by working with the Salesforce team, if it is from a resource perspective, you can take help from the Salesforce community.

Customer

10. Management Connect

Being a customer, your Project Sponsor must connect with your internal team and the project management team once in a while. This ensures everything stays on track, and the customer management team does know everything going on in the project, which increases the seriousness amongst everyone.

11. Scope Creep

Being a customer, it is pretty normal to feel a need that more is needed. When you ask for big changes at the last moment, it affects the project timeline. Some customers do it after every demo - instead of minor changes, the customer modifies the requirements, leading to scope creep.

12. Timely Information

Being a customer, it might be possible you do not have everything you need to hand over to the project team. You have your existing duties, on top of which you have to enable project teams for the upcoming Salesforce project implementation - it is evident that you need more hours in your day! Prioritize the tasks based on the deadlines to manage your tasks.

Now that you have identified the top 12 signs your project might be in jeopardy, act on them. Prepare a plan to tackle these signs that are most common during any project. Remember what Joy Gumz said, it might look like a small drip in the beginning. In the end, the entire project will explode. It is better to take action on these signs and design your project accordingly. If you are at a stage where your project has already failed, connect with us to get your Salesforce org assessed. We can fix things for you, we are You:Digital.

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