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What is complexity? It is where certainty and the gradient of agreement meets. Let’s have a look at the ‘Stacey Chart’:
Where there is simplicity, you have high certainty and agreement. Within Salesforce these are opportunities to get them scheduled or even better automated!
Items at the top right, are not ready to tackle yet, further agreement and knowledge is to be gathered first.
So take your focus to the middle section. Complex. This is where we should value more responding to change over following a plan, so that you can base decision making from real-world results rather than speculation. As new information is discovered the team updates and informs next steps towards delivering value.
5 Strategic Moves
- Keep things simple
Keeping things simple allows you not only to finetune to reduce waste, but also to enhance and expand capabilities easily and to amend and refactor the existing ones. In a sense keeping things simple and modular allows you to manage future change less painfully, with minimal impact elsewhere.
The value is found in being adaptable, with a deep understanding that new things will emerge and supersede others, it’s part of nature. Build Lean.
“Any darn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple.” — Albert Einstein
- Ready backed features
Take advantage of Salesforce’s built-in platform features and powerful admin-level features to create less custom code. In Salesforce you have a ton of ‘ready to go’ things, aka ‘Out of the Box’ functionality.
Please don’t reinvent the wheel and always check what is readily available to you. Seek for native solutions. Don’t waste your time, effort and IQ with things that already exist and/or are easy to get out the door. Instead, focus on more interesting and challenging stuff. Over time minimizing technical debt and hassle.
- Frequent small releases
The work that we do is quite conceptual. Oftentimes, we only realise what we want and what we don’t want after we see the final product.
Slicing work can help, so that you can show that tangible outcome in small chunks and so that it can be used sooner. As the work is so conceptual, being able to see it helps to redefine constantly and reduce deviation.
Having many things in progress does not bring value, done enhancements and at the hands of your users DO!
- Visualise the work in progress
We humans are visual beings, we digest visuals so much faster than words.
Let’s correlate the concept of ‘the power of visuals’ to Salesforce. Think about the tools like Flows or Process Builder or even the diagram from Approvals. Suddenly you supercharge your conversations by showing the logic in a visual way to any discussion. Images speak louder than words.
These visuals come into play by having a place where all the team’s work in progress shows, where it’s open and accessible. This surfaces so much more than we would have been able to know without it. It acts as an information radiator.
Check out this great and free entry of Diagramming Salesforce Solutions, how visuals can help to convey agreement and valuable artifacts to have under your/team/companies belt.
- Documentation as a byproduct
Each finished product increment is what counts as the main result of every iteration, of every release. That is what we primarily measure ourselves against. We could think of documentation as a byproduct, rather than a step at the end in a linear path.
Documentation is to exist to bring context, explain what is trying to be achieved and why it’s that solution and no other (as there’s always more than one way), state institutional knowledge as you go.
Superpower
To round this up, you need agreement and a one dimensional priority list. Else if everybody is doing everything and doing it now; that’s not going to go well as you will likely end up with a lot of half baked features. Decouple dependencies and deliver value often.
