Advanced Salesforce delivery methods – read this before deciding your strategy!

This is the concluding article in a series exploring Salesforce^® delivery strategy. It’s been launched to help you understand how VRP’s services, and the strategies used to deliver them, can best fit your needs, resources and end goals. This article is focused on some of the more advanced Salesforce delivery methods.

If you’ve been reading our previous articles on this topic, and you’ve gotten this far, well done — you might be an overachiever! It’s not a simple subject. To readers who are only just joining us, welcome, and check out the series introduction, how to select the right strategy, and a look at how our core service models relate to delivery strategy. 

In this, the last article, I’ll be tackling some vital final considerations that must be made before putting any Salesforce delivery strategies in place.

Continuous or temporary engagement?

The engagement with your Salesforce Partner (in other words, the contract) can either be temporary or continuous. Now, you may be thinking that all contracts, like all good things, must come to an end — and, strictly speaking, you would be correct. However, it’s helpful to think of continuous contracts as having a predictable extension point based on a calendar date, whereas a temporary engagement is really only done when the scope is complete.

So how does this idea relate to our different delivery strategies, which we examined in the previous articles? Take a look at this table to see whether each is suited to continuous or temporary engagement:

We’ve marked Staff Augmentation, Agile Sprint Teams, and Product Development Outsourcing with asterisks (*) here, as they’re special cases. They can be either continuous or temporary, depending upon your needs. 

It’s very important to have this discussion — continuous or temporary? — early on, ideally during the sales phase. Your Salesforce Partner’s team has to have an awareness of whether or not there is a particular goal for ending the engagement. That’s why it was absolutely essential to look at this advanced Salesforce delivery subject here, so that you know to raise and consider it with your partner before putting any final plans together. 

When all parties are clear from the get-go about whether it will be a continuous or temporary engagement, you can be more confident that the right delivery strategy will be selected, and you won’t need to change direction further down the road, when it’s a lot more hassle, and potentially more expense, too.

Now, let’s look at a concept that can be incredibly valuable in a more complex engagement with your Salesforce Partner: P3M.  

Project, Program, and Portfolio Management (P3M)

This is a topic so advanced that we could create a whole article — or even a series of articles — about it. However, right now, I’ll just stick to giving you the top-line information you need to know about Project, Program, and Portfolio Management, or P3M. The name “P3M” sounds a little like some kind of vitamin, and ironically enough, a course of it can be prescribed, when using more advanced Salesforce delivery methods, to keep everything healthy.

P3M refers to any situation in which you have one or more of the following:

• Projects: A single project to produce a new product, service, or result.
• Programs: A group or related projects that benefit from being managed together.
• Portfolios: A group of related projects, programs, and other work that benefit from being managed together.

As you can tell, these are scenarios where there’s a lot going on. P3M was devised to make it all much easier to handle for everyone involved — you and your Salesforce Partner.

You may be thinking “this is another delivery strategy, right?” Well, sort of. P3M can actually be used to wrap up several different service models and delivery strategies. For example, one Scoped Project Delivery (SPD) project and two Agile Sprint Teams (ASTs) supported by a Managed Services engagement. In this case we have four parallel sets of activities — all governed, managed and delivered in a controlled, efficient and effective manner.

Diagnosing a P3M deficiency

How can you tell if a good dose of P3M needs to be applied? We can boil it down to a simple test with three questions:

1. Is there more than one distinct effort happening at the same time?
2. Are there dependencies between those distinct efforts?
3. Will you and your Salesforce Partner benefit from managing those efforts together?

The more strongly you answer “Yes” to those questions, the more likely that you will benefit from P3M. But if you’re not sure how to answer those questions, it may be helpful to understand what might happen if P3M is needed, but missing:

• Unexpected delays occur on one activity because of a delay on a different activity. In extreme cases, this may even happen like a domino effect.
• Resources are divided across too many different activities, or the priorities for their work are unclear.
• A team’s work processes have to contend with some work that just “doesn’t fit” in with the other work (e.g., mixing things that need to be deployed together with system changes that need to be performed right now).
• Deployments have to be done in a very specific order to avoid “code collisions”, or if this is not managed, deployments are very painful because they do not mirror what exists in lower environments.

That’s not to say that these problems can’t occur (or be handled) without P3M. However, these problems often “smell” like smoke, and P3M may be the water needed to throw on the fire. 

We usually use P3M for engagements with different Service Models and Delivery Strategies in progress that need a higher level of delivery direction and management for success. In these cases, it’s worth exploring the value of providing a Delivery and Architecture leadership team above the project engagements to ensure all parallel activities and dependencies are controlled as a program or portfolio. We’ll be sure to suggest the P3M route if it’s in your best interests. 

Other things to consider

We’re almost at the end of the article, and our series on Salesforce delivery strategy, but there are a couple more items on the agenda that we should cover first. Here they are:

The 9th delivery strategy: advisory

Advisory is different from the other strategies we’ve discussed, but definitely worth mentioning. It’s within the Consulting model of service, but it differs from Discovery & Design in that the client procures services to consult and advise based upon past experience and deep SME knowledge. It usually occurs very early on and allows you to make the most of our senior executives’ experience and expertise in opportunity analysis, product development, and program shaping. However, this advisory consultancy can also be brought in at any time and sometimes if an independent and trusted partner is needed to consult on strategic needs. If that sounds like something you need, VRP will be very happy to help.

Changing needs and strategies

Selecting the right delivery strategy up front is important to laying the foundation for a successful engagement. However, sometimes your needs only become clear after we begin working more closely together — and sometimes they simply change over time! If you aren’t getting what you need from an engagement due to the wrong delivery strategy, we’ll work with you to find the right one —and identify for you when any tweaks or changes of direction would help. After all, our main goal is your success.

Ready to use even the most advanced Salesforce delivery methods

With more than 13 years as a full-service Salesforce Partner, hundreds of successful projects, and expert certifications in PDO, managed services and more, VRP Consulting is deeply experienced in identifying the right service and delivery strategy for every need and kind of organization that engages us. Our teams, including Delivery and Customer Success, are dedicated to working in seamless synchronicity to ensure excellence for our clients, in both technical and delivery terms. 

Ultimately, helping you succeed is the core goal of any engagement with VRP — and it’s at the heart of our mission as a Salesforce Partner. We’re committed to shaping the perfect delivery strategy for what you need, just as we are to crafting the innovative, award-winning technology that we’re well known for. We believe the two go hand in hand, and when you engage our services, you’ll see why. 

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About the Author

Mark Crutchfield

Principal Delivery Manager, VRP Consulting

Mark is our Principal Delivery Manager in the United Kingdom and Ireland. He has worked in the IT and software industry for more than 20 years, across many different sectors and technology platforms, with his focus now on Salesforce portfolio, programme and project delivery.