Apprentice Hoots: Learning the Coacto Service Delivery Process
There are many factors to consider when working on a customer project, especially during the planning stages. In this week’s Apprentice Hoots blog, Charlotte explains Coacto’s five distinct phases to our delivery process.
Learning the Coacto Service Delivery Process
As with most new customer projects, the first stages include lots of planning and design. Here at Coacto, we’ve been delighted to work with a few new customers who require completely different needs. This means I’ve had the opportunity to get involved in some projects right from the very start and have learnt all about our distinct five phase delivery process.
Stage One: Discover
The first step in Coacto’s service delivery process is discovery. This stage is important and requires gathering details and information from the customer and listening ears from us as consultants. During this stage, we take the time to talk with and listen to our customers finding out where they are at now and discover where they would like to be. We understand the current processes, determine how they would like the processes to be and we may discuss potential solution options of how we can improve these processes through utilising specific Salesforce technology. Throughout this stage, we hone in on how we believe the project will need to be completed and focus on what resources, technology, and processes will be required. Within this discovery phase, we discuss the plan and an estimate of how much time the project will take to be completed.
Stage Two: Document
Within this stage, we develop and utilise ‘user stories’ which are written from the perspective of the end users of the system, based on the information captured in the Discovery phase. These user stories capture the required behaviours of the system and are then shared with the customer to ensure that we have understood what was discussed in stage one and that all of the relevant information has been accounted for. We have often found that more detail will be required in this stage and that more discovery conversations are needed
Stage Three: Design
Once we know exactly what the customer requires we can then begin the design stage to explore how this might look in a technical capacity. This stage often involves creating a data model of where the customer’s information and processes will eventually sit within their Salesforce org. It is important to ensure that the design will deliver on the behaviours and both functional and non-functional needs are met.
Stage Four: Develop
Now that the plan is created, the design is done and signed off, we can put this into action. The development stage simply means that we begin building and configuring the customer’s Salesforce system,installing the relevant applications and building any integrations with third party applications.
Stage Five: Deploy
The final stage in the five step process is to deploy. After everything has been tested by our certified developers, we then start the final steps to deploy the system live for the customer to begin using. We do this by providing certain users with access to the org in a sandbox to carry out user acceptance testing to ensure what we have developed has met the requirements of the specification. Once accepted and signed off, the system is then deployed to the production environment to all users and our process comes full circle!
If your business is looking for a certified Salesforce partner to help discover, document, design, develop and deploy a Salesforce system or even just to tweak your existing org to align with new processes and the growth of your business, organise your FREE consultation here.
Owl see you later…hopefully at a Salesforce consultation! 😉
Charlotte
