COE

The Roles and Structure That Guide a Successful Salesforce COE (Part 2 of 6-part COE series)

At 10K, we tackle many business and technical challenges. However, one of the most rewarding initiatives is helping set our customers up for long-term success by designing and building a Salesforce Center of Excellence (COE).

As I mentioned in my last blog, “Why a COE should be the CEO of your Salesforce program,” if you’re looking to get more out of your Salesforce investment, building a COE is one of the best initiatives you can undertake. COEs don’t have to be complex to be effective, but they do have to have certain components, namely:

  • Defined and assigned team roles and leadership structure
  • Adopted and managed delivery standards and processes
  • Models for governance, change, and release management
  • Clearly defined end-user support processes
  • A method for growth and education around the Salesforce platform

Part 2 of this 6-part COE series dives into that first area: the team. Specifically, what roles do you need in a COE, what are those roles responsible for, and how is that team organized and led?

See our latest research on Salesforce talent 

Roles and Responsibilities 

Every COE is unique, but all successful ones have something in common —  they involve both business and IT stakeholders. 

Business stakeholders help drive the strategy and provide key feedback to the technical team. They might be involved in first-level support, user testing, as well as change management and user adoption. The IT stakeholders are integral in defining the standards and best practices that ensure whatever is put in place is not just valuable to the business, but realistic, scalable and supportable over time. IT also plays a critical role in defining organizational data standards, selecting tools, managing infrastructure and integration, and much more. Whether your COE aligns under business or IT leadership will depend on your organization’s structure. 

When it comes to the specific roles within a COE, here are the most common ones we see:

COE Lead: This role is responsible for overall program execution. He or she establishes the standards and guidelines that anyone who touches the Salesforce system must abide by, coordinates the resources needed to execute the established strategy, and manages partners and vendors.

Admin: This role primarily supports those across the business who use Salesforce. They tackle everything from creating dashboards and reports to managing configurations and campaigns to communicating changes and updates to end users. 

Business Analyst: This role works hand-in-hand with the business to review operational processes and identify opportunities to automate and improve those processes using Salesforce. He or she gathers and articulates requirements and serves as a change management agent across the business.

Technical Architect: This role owns the technical design of the Salesforce system, ensuring declarative and non-declarative features are used appropriately and that the org can scale as the amount of functionality grows. Our recent research into Salesforce Best Practices and COEs indicates that architects can play an outsize role in improving ROI.

Developer: When your requirements warrant non-declarative functionality, this role is responsible for building it using platform features such as Apex Classes or Lightning Components. This role may also be responsible for integration development, configuration changes, and solution design for complex features.

Other roles that you might need (depending on the scale and focus of your COE):

Release Manager: This role is responsible for environment strategy and coordinating the testing and release of code to ensure nothing breaks in production. This person also reviews the testing approach for each work stream.

Quality Assurance Specialists: This role (or team) provides overall QA best practices and reviews the testing approach for each work stream, often in collaboration with the release manager. They manage testing plans and scripts.

Integration Specialists: These specialists provide technical guidance, create integration designs, and implement integrations between Salesforce and other applications.

Salesforce Functional Specialists (Communities, CPQ, Einstein, etc.): These subject matter experts provide the guidance and technical skills needed to get the most out of niche Salesforce platform investments. These roles are often outsourced based on current needs.

The roles and responsibilities within your COE may vary based on your organization’s size, structure, complexity, budget, and other factors. In some instances, one person plays all or most of these roles in some way, shape, or form (this is the life of a solo admin). Larger organizations may have multiple experts in each of these roles. However, most companies fall somewhere in the middle and use a combination of internal and external expertise to build and manage their implementation. According to our research into Salesforce best practices, 61% of respondents say at least half of their implementation was built by consultants.

Leadership and Structure

Depending on the size of your company and/or Salesforce program, there can be several levels of leadership for a Salesforce COE, but they typically encompass two primary types of committees. 

First is an Executive Committee, which is made up of C-level or VP-level sponsors from sales, marketing, IT, and other major business areas. This group meets on either a monthly or quarterly basis and sets the strategic priorities for the program based on the business’s short-term and long-term objectives. It defines the success metrics and, most importantly, provides the funding. 

The Salesforce Steering Committee is usually made up of sponsors from the business and IT, but the individuals are one or two levels lower than the Executive Committee. This group establishes the tactical roadmap for the strategic initiatives laid out by the Executive Committee. It sets the program scope and lays out the deliverables. It is also on point to review and prioritize requests as they come into the COE, and helps the Executive Committee understand the potential impact and cost of certain decisions so that they can be funded and make their way into the roadmap.

Common COE structureOne tip for success is to include the COE Lead in as many committee meetings as possible regardless of whether or not that role is an official committee member.

Putting the right team in place is just the first step, but a good team won’t reach its true potential without delivery processes and standards. We’ll dive deeper into these areas as we get into our next two blogs, but for now, the most important thing to remember is that the better defined your roles are, the more productive your team can be.

Download our guide to maximizing your Salesforce program ROI.

Why a COE should be the CEO of your Salesforce Program (Part 1 of 6-part COE series)

When I started my consulting career in the Salesforce ecosystem, I had never heard the term “COE”, much less did I know how critical it was to the fabric of multi-year business enablement programs. 

I came to know firsthand about the concept of a Center of Excellence while working with a global medical device company that had thousands of Salesforce users, dozens of Salesforce orgs, and a number of very large business units all using the platform for different aspects of those businesses — some related to each other, but many not. This company had created a Center of Excellence with other technologies they owned, and they were ready to get their Salesforce house tidied up.

The company’s goal was to coordinate better between orgs, standardize processes, drive efficiencies of time and cost, and, most importantly, create a better overall experience for their users and teams.

At some point during that engagement, something clicked. Many of the customer experiences I had seen before were now shown in a different light, with a new perspective. So many Salesforce customers of all different shapes and sizes were trying to accomplish the same things. 

However, even with this evidence, 40% of Salesforce customers have no semblance of a COE in place.

However, most were not intentional about making it happen. Most of them were in the same “COE ignorance” boat as I was, so they gravitated to what was either familiar, easy, or fed to them by their Salesforce partner or AE. If these partners and AEs really wanted a long-term customer, the best way to ensure their customer’s success (and thus their continued engagement) would be to help get the core tenants of a COE established from the beginning. 

At 10K, we’re not shy about having opinions, and we do our homework to inform (and sometimes evolve) those opinions. In our Project to Program research report, we found that 91% of companies that report the highest levels of ROI from Salesforce have a COE in place. That is an overwhelming number, strongly correlating ROI and COEs. We also found that 82% of those companies giving their Salesforce implementations an “A” grade had a COE, yet another nod to the importance of having a plan and structure in order to succeed with Salesforce. 

However, even with this evidence, 40% of Salesforce customers have no semblance of a COE in place. This presents a huge opportunity for hundreds of thousands of Salesforce customers to get more from their existing investments.

 

COEs can come in many different shapes and sizes. But they don’t have to be complex to be effective. For Salesforce, they should encompass (at a minimum) the following areas of focus:

Team roles and structure

Who on the team does what, how do you articulate responsibilities, and how do you define and develop solutions?

Delivery standards and processes

What do you have in place to ensure you deliver capabilities to the business in a predictable and consistent way?

Governance, change, and release management

How do you prioritize requests, communicate across teams, and roll out changes in an effective way?

End-user support processes

How do you ensure your end users get the answers and solutions they need in a timely manner to increase usage and adoption?

Education and growth

How do you and your team keep up with the constantly expanding Salesforce platform to help your stakeholders?

In some organizations, there is a team of one, or a “solo admin”, responsible for everything. Others may have over 100 experts working on their implementation. Regardless of the team size or composition, to create successful outcomes with Salesforce, you’ll want to have these bases covered.

Download our guide to maximizing your Salesforce program ROI.