Assess the organization culture for Salesforce adoption

In gathering requirements for a new Salesforce implementation, schedule a session with the executive sponsors to gauge among other things, the ‘culture’ of the organization. Focus on the aspects of culture when it comes to adopting new systems and the formal and informal means by which users get trained in using new systems

Culture is how things get done, what behaviors are rewarded or frowned upon in the organization. While a single Q&A session with an executive sponsor is not sufficient to get a complete picture of the culture, it’s a good start. Effective senior executives give thought to this aspect when it comes to their teams, so should have well thought through ideas on the subject.

There are a number of areas you should be touching upon with the executive sponsors; here are questions that focus on the adoption of the system

• What are the critical success factors for implementation of comparable systems in your organization? What are the ‘soft’ factors (read people and behaviors) that come to mind ?
• When you think of prior system implementations that went wrong, what was missing ?
• What formal and informal training practices do you recommend for the proposed Salesforce system ? Instructor led classroom training / super users training their teams / corporate training departments etc.
• Have you personally used the Salesforce system in any prior organizations ? What worked and what didn’t ?
• How do you personally intend to champion the use of the system ?
• What report or metric are you personally prioritizing, for which you anticipating using the Salesforce system for?