Apprentice Hoots: Documenting a Salesforce project for learning provider LDN Apprenticeships

Apprentice Hoots: Documenting a Salesforce project for learning provider LDN Apprenticeships

 As part of my Apprenticeship with learning providers LDN Apprenticeships, I was tasked to write a document on a project I had delivered to showcase my knowledge and experience as a business analyst and Salesforce consultant working at Coacto. I wanted to share with you a brief overview of the 112 page project report document that I worked on and have completed over 3 months.

What I chose to write about

The project I chose to write about was one of the first projects I helped to deliver – implementing a brand new Salesforce system for a coworking serviced office company. Within the LDN project document I explained:

  • The customer situation;
  • The sales approach we took;
  • Soft systems methodology techniques used; and
  • Coacto’s five step service delivery process we followed to deliver this implementation

The customer situation

Within this section I wrote about the customer’s situation and why they reached out to us.

  • What they do: the background on the company that I delivered a system for;
  • Why they approached us: an overview of the as-is process (existing circumstances);
  • What they needed: the to-be needs (where they wanted to be) ; and
  • The challenges:  the pain points the company was experiencing.

The sales approach / engagement

  • Within this section I covered how we procured the enquiry and the process we took to turn this opportunity into a customer. This included discovering:
  • The start date and desired implementation time frame
  • The budget
  • A high level discovery and documentation to collate the list of requirements
  • The scope
  • The statement of work
  • Our sales pitch

Soft systems methodology

We use a soft systems methodology when working with customers to ensure the changes and solutions introduced by us and our systems are managed safely and effectively. This has taught me the importance of structuring complex organisational and political situations to ensure we deal with customers in an organised manner and understand their business entirely. Within the document I showcased all the soft system methodology techniques I used when carrying out this project. An example of a few techniques I used are:

  • PESTLE: standing for political, economical, socio-cultural, technological, legal and environmental, this is a technique used to analyse external factors that may impact decisions made inside an organisation.
  • Porter 5 forces: a method used to understand a businesses competitive strength and position of their business in the market to input processes that could maintain their strengths and improve their weaknesses
  • MOST: a technique used to improve processes by understanding the organisation’s internal environment
  • Resource audit: a tool used to discover the strengths and weaknesses of a business in terms of the resources they have, consisting of physical, human, financial, reputation and their know-how resources
  • Boston box: a technique used to discover which products or services are a strength and which are a weaknesses
  • ​SWOT analysis: this stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. SWOT provides the bigger picture of all of the above, using the MOST and resource audit techniques to understand the strengths and weaknesses and the PESTLE and porter’s 5 forces technique to understand the opportunities and threats.

Coacto’s five step delivery process we followed to deliver this implementation

The final and main section within my project document was writing about how I followed Coacto’s five distinct phases to deliver the coworking office space’s Salesforce system. The five phases we followed consisted of:

  • Discover: this consisted of gathering all their requirements and understanding their processes, determining how they would like their processes to be and defining the gap.
  • Document: we document all the requirements we have gathered into a user story document and prioritise the user stories to understand what is key to work on.
  • Design: we create a data model of how the customer’s business and processes will eventually sit within the Salesforce org.
  • Develop: we begin building and configuring the customer’s Salesforce system. This also includes our testing, and UAT (user acceptance testing) where the customer also tests what we have developed has reached their requirements.
  • Deploy: Once the customer is happy we deploy the system sometimes transformationally and other times incrementally. This also includes training everyone how to use their new system.

I showcased the analysis techniques I used throughout the delivery process, such as the gap analysis and business activity models, as well as screenshots throughout the five stages showcasing my documentation notes, data models of my designs and a step by step guide with screenshots of how I developed the system.

I am now one project down, and only two more to go. As I covered a huge amount of the standard within my first project document, this will make the next two of my projects much easier as it is a matter of only needing to cover the small amounts of the syllabus I didn’t cover within this project.

It has been a challenging yet fun experience and I look forward to writing my next project with the structure and understanding I now have. 

Owl see you later… 

Charlotte

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