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How to Establish a Salesforce Center of Excellence (CoE)

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Even after investing heavily in your Salesforce program, are you yet to see a sizeable RoI?

Salesforce is a complex platform with several features and capabilities evolving continuously. Whenever new capabilities come in or changes are made to set features, it might create friction in existing customizations or implementations. This makes the team reluctant to drive innovation faster, especially when they’re puzzled about the impact of the update on platform customization.

A Salesforce Center of Excellence (CoE) solves this for you. It sets a clear system to manage standards, processes, models, and governance, helping stakeholders drive innovation faster to realize business value.

What is the Center of Excellence (CoE)?

A center of excellence is a team that manages leadership, research, support, training, and best practices for an organization's technology platform. The team ensures alignment with the company’s strategic objectives and improves productivity.

This team establishes governance and builds capabilities necessary for continuous improvement. They are responsible for overseeing and optimizing Salesforce usage.

Salesforce CoE primarily comprises Salesforce development, administration, and strategy. It aligns the Salesforce instance with strategic goals for your organization while acting as a bridge between users and executive leadership. This ensures your Salesforce platform is customized to meet specific business objectives.

A Salesforce Center of Excellence is critical in an organization because of a few notable reasons, including:

Reducing technical debt. Salesforce is incredibly flexible, and you can customize it to suit your purpose. However, without strategic direction, you might configure the platform inconsistently, establishing inefficient processes for the team, which accumulates technical debt. CoE establishes best practices and standards to ensure a consistent approach, creating a healthy Salesforce org.
Improving consistently. You need to make consistent improvements to make sure Salesforce remains a valuable asset to your organization. The platform requires continuous adaptation beyond the initial setup to stay relevant to your business needs. The CoE teams watch out for new technologies and emerging Salesforce features to allow continuous innovation.
Encouraging adoption. Salesforce CoE teams deliver the training users require to utilize the platform to its full potential. It helps the team make use of the platform effectively while using its different features.

Overall, investment in CoE helps you get more out of your investment in Salesforce. Essentially, the CoE should be the CEO of your Salesforce program. Based on the research of 10Kview, 91% of companies with CoE report the highest ROI from Salesforce.

How to Build Your Salesforce Center of Excellence (CoE)

When you’re setting a CoE up in your organization, it need not be complex, but it can carry these components:

Team roles and leadership structure
Delivery standards and processes
Models for governance, release, and change management
Define end-user support processes
A way to educate about the Salesforce platform

Let's go into the details of each component to understand it thoroughly.

Define Team Roles and Leadership Structure

Successful Salesforce Center of Excellence involves business and IT stakeholders. The former drives strategy, while the latter defines best practices and standards. Business stakeholders give strategic feedback to IT. The technical team establishes the organization’s data standards manages infrastructure, integration, and a lot more.

The roles that are common on the Salesforce CoE team include:

COE Lead. Oversees the program’s execution and establishes mandatory guidelines for Salesforce users to follow. They play a strategic role in managing partners and vendors.
Admin. Supports everyone who works with Salesforce while supplying the necessary details required for tasks and activities related to reporting, managing campaigns, or executing changes.
Business analyst. Reviews operational processes and finds opportunities to automate them with Salesforce.
Technical architect. Designs the Salesforce system to use its features and scale when the organization’s functionality grows.
Release manager. Look after the environment strategy and coordinate the testing and code releases to ensure nothing breaks in production.
Developer. Builds non-declarative functionality using the features of the platform.
Quality assurance specialist. Reviews each workstream based on QA best practices and works collaboratively with release managers to manage scripts and testing plans.
Integration specialist. Offer technical guidance required to create integration designs and implement them.
Salesforce functional specialist. Such roles are often outsourced based on the needs of an organization. They deliver technical guidance (specific subject matter expertise) required to get the most out of Salesforce investment.

This is a typical team structure for a Salesforce CoE. The leadership structure varies from organization to organization. Usually, it comprises an executive committee with VP-level or C-level sponsors, who meet monthly or quarterly to offer strategic direction in achieving a business’ short- or long-term goals.

You’ll also find the Salesforce Steering Committee, which is made up of sponsors from the business and IT domains. These sponsors are two or three levels shorter than the executive committee. They lay out a roadmap to achieve strategic goals laid out by the executive committee.

Set Delivery Standards and Processes

Your team needs delivery standards and processes to serve as a guideline while working with Salesforce. This helps reduce technical debt over time.

The guidelines would include both technical and delivery standards, including:

Metadata creation. Comprises naming conventions, help text, and description to ensure consistency in implementation.
Feature usage. You might choose to use certain Salesforce features above depending on implementation specifics and the needs of your team. Document how and when to use these features or add-on features such as CPQ.
Coding. Ensures codes are consistent and easy to maintain. It wraps naming conventions, code structures, test classes, and more.
Requirements definition standards. Lays out what information to include while defining user-centric requirements. It guides those who are collecting requirements to ask the right questions. To provide an efficient handoff to the delivery team, these standards lay down how to document answers.
Success criteria. Gives information on how to measure success and helps design solutions that allow stakeholders to achieve these success criteria.
User acceptance criteria. Offers details on specific actions that users should be able to accomplish with the solution.
Proposed solution design. Delivers details on how the solution would be developed and what technical components the delivery team would use.

Beyond the above points, set standards for your delivery process. Would you adopt the agile methodology or go with the waterfall model? The choice depends on your organization’s IT maturity. Most organizations go with an agile-like approach. More than 55% of Salesforce program owners release at least every other week.

It’s crucial that you plan these processes holistically. It is best to break down the process into its sub-steps, including scoping, backlog review, scheduling, capability delivery, release, testing, and production.

Model For Governance, Release, and Change Management

A Salesforce CoE gives structure, systems, principles, and processes to an organization while enforcing governance around the platform. This governance helps avoid conflicts or rework, preventing resources from growing into wastage. Overall, governance aligns system decisions with business priorities and expedites decision-making while increasing system usage and adoption.

You can’t create this governance structure in a vacuum. Instead, you need business and IT to collaborate effectively. How this model is set varies from small to large organizations. Small organizations might see people from different communities participate in the governance model.

When it comes to change management, a pragmatic approach is needed. Any change comes with some resistance, usually from the people’s side. When the change is about to modify the existing implementation, it meets people with even more friction. However, when the change comes with proper communication, like what change is, why it matters, and how people would benefit, it's usually welcomed with open arms. It’s best if you make people part of the change and give them sufficient time to adjust in their own ways.

This brings you to release changes. You need to establish processes to move changes into production. It’s best to use developer sandboxes to avoid breaking things in production.

All of this will take some time and planning. The models you set will need regular evaluation to keep it relevant.

Define end-user support processes

Building well-oiled support processes ensures Salesforce users make the most of the platform, potentially turning them into your program evangelists. When defining support processes, follow these steps to establish scalable processes:

Outline engagement rules

Not all problems are created equal. Some are more straightforward issues that self-service can automate. Give this Tier 0. The objective of Tier 0 is to minimize the number of support requests that go to Tier 1, which is your helpdesk. Make this Tier accessible via Slack, text-to-chat option, or by formally filling up a support ticket. This acts like a gatekeeper, preventing issues from escalating to specific teams at Tier 2.

Beyond Tier 2, only issues that impact business performance will reach Tier 3, where they’ll require customization and code fixes.

Identify required tools

After scoping the engagement rules, choose what tools you’ll use to manage self-service or case management. Salesforce Knowledge and Salesforce service cloud can help you in both.

Once the tools are set, make sure everyone on your team is aligned with how to use them the best way possible.

Assemble your team

Define the responsibilities of various roles across different tiers and train them. Ensure proper security for all team members based on their responsibilities. To assist in training, make some users "Super Users" and provide them with the necessary tools, training, and permissions.

Create an internal knowledge base

Establish this internal knowledge base as Tier 0 to aid self-service. This will prevent several cases from taking up valuable time and resources of support staff. Release notes or documentation from change management are usually used to create these knowledge bases.

Map feature request to the roadmap

Support processes exist to provide users with answers as quickly as possible. They also serve as an intake mechanism for bug fixes, feature requests, and other improvements. In such cases, it’s best to have clearly defined pathways of how feature requests or improvement suggestions will flow back to CoE to appear on the roadmap.

Some requests need necessary fixes in the system or require indispensable enhancements. Create a system that prioritizes and feeds such requests into the delivery process.

These considerations will help you set up fully functional CoE support. You must communicate these processes effectively to support teams and end users, giving both sides a good understanding.

Create Awareness and Set a Culture of Continuous Learning

Salesforce has been expanding the length and breadth of its solutions for the past 20 years. It’s nearly impossible to know it all. The platform keeps improving with changes and acquisitions such as Mulesoft or Tableau. The company now releases several new features three times a year. They don’t break the customizations in the old model. However, it’s important for your team to educate themselves on how best they can take advantage of the new features.

Set habits around continuous learning to help users educate themselves on new changes in the platform. Salesforce’s online learning platform, Trailhead, will help in building this habit with short content that covers deep dives into new features. In addition, you can set review meetings to debate the impact of new features to create and promote a culture of learning.

When you have a CoE with the right structures and processes, your Salesforce program is expected to deliver a higher return on investment.

How Flosum Helps Accelerate Salesforce Speed and Innovation

Salesforce’s complexity and numerous customizations sometimes become a hurdle in expediting innovation. Flosum offers the following capabilities to increase delivery speed, driving faster innovation. It transforms your CoE from a governance checkpoint to the company’s innovation accelerator.

Here’s how Flosum transforms the traditional approach to innovating faster on Salesforce:

Flosum comprehensively creates data backup while including metadata and records to make restoration and archival easy. It allows on-demand backups and helps users choose recovery points to restore data prior to known corruption points.

Even after CoE sets standards, processes, and models, existing implementations are likely corrupted due to new releases. Flosum reduces the risk while increasing your resilience in navigating Salesforce complexity without trading off with the speed of innovation. Its backup and archive solution gives you a reliable solution to fall back on when expanding your Salesforce program.

Automate Secure Backups, Restoration, and Archivals With Flosum

Flosum automates backups around your schedule while managing data according to GDPR and CCPQ compliance rules. You can choose your own recovery point and use granular filtering to restore the actual subset of records, fields, and objects.

If you’re thinking of scaling your Salesforce DevOps program, learn how to expand it effectively with Flosum.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. What is a Salesforce Center of Excellence?

A Salesforce Center of Excellence (CoE) is a dedicated group that sets standards, drives best practices, and promotes innovation for Salesforce solutions within an organization. They monitor performance and encourage knowledge sharing among stakeholders while streamlining processes.