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We started to look at the 5Cs that are key to the delivery of Salesforce projects:
• Clear goal
• Concise requirements
• Clarification questions
• Challenge candidly
• Collaborate visually
We kicked off with; goals, requirements and questions, which you can find here.
Now let’s check out how we can challenge candidly but effectively and introduce collaborative visual tools for our teams and organisations. We started to look at the 5Cs that are key to project delivery:
Challenge candidly ❕
It’s ok to challenge, in fact it’s actually pretty healthy. There are benefits of challenging and disagreements whilst in good manners these can lead to a better future, leading to healthier teams and organisations. It doesn’t matter your role within the team or organisation, if something is not quite right, or you have some concerns over the requirement then stand up and say so. It’s important to have an honest, straight forward, data and fact based challenge. Challenging with no foundation will slowly over time be dismissed as annoyance.
Tip: Challenging abruptly, interrupting, and firm disagreement, is unhelpful and damaging to the team’s growth. Over time it will start to tarnish relationships, and confidence in speaking up, bringing new ideas and creativity, and slowly the high performing dev team will morph into robots. And we all know that robots don’t bring any life nor soul to the party.
Try instead these:
S: I am concerned that we are at risk of […] because after looking into […] this may impact […]
S: Looking at the […], it looks like the […] is a restriction
S: Could we explore that more as it may have an impact on […]
Q: Are we doing the right thing for the end user here?
Q: Are we moving towards the simplest option possible here?
Collaborate visually ️
Everyone needs to understand and have the chance to collaborate in building the solution to meet the desired outcome and deploy a feature to be proud of. Collaborating visually in Salesforce is as easy as ABC. In Fact by the time you have finished reading this article you could have started your journey to making the team more collaborative just by logging into the Salesforce AppExchange and installing the Agile Accelerator. Or if you need a simpler tool CloudCoach.
Visually, this is how it looks in Salesforce!
Note: Salesforce Labs has built the Kanban board highly customizable, enabling you to add more or less columns, swim lanes and grouping columns themself.
And CloudCoach as below:
Tip: Start with ‘Not started, In Progress, Complete’ kanban columns, nothing too complicated, and in the next team meeting, whether that’s daily or weekly (hopefully not monthly!) capture the items that come up on the kanban board, share your screen at the same time and start to show the team how they too can use the tool to update their progress. This is not only great for collaboration by it aids in memory, we retain information better when we see something.
Should you come across any resistance, how about:
A. Lead by example. Use it yourself to show the team where you are with your items, and any areas that you may need support in unblocking.
A. Protect and support your team if other parties abuse it as a place to just put waste items on without agreement. This will show the team that it is something for them and not for micro management, forceful actions or to use as a to do list for management command and control.
A. If the team or individuals are not making any progress don’t turn it into a weapon to embarrass them. This will just encourage false prophets, and by this I mean fake news of progress, covering up, fear for asking for help.
Remember: Visual tools should act as an information radiator, for openness and transparency.
Let us know what has worked for you in delivering successful Salesforce projects!
Don’t forget to get more insights from part 1 of Managing Salesforce projects effectively here.
Q = Question
S = Statement
A = Action
