Organizational Change Management for Salesforce Rollouts

No matter the size of the organization that you are deploying the Salesforce system for, develop an Organizational Change Management Plan as part of your Salesforce roll out.
Communication around the business applications being rolled out is often an overlooked area in companies. Salesforce rollouts have their share of missteps in this regard.

An effective Change Management plan has roughly the following workstreams in it:

1. Stakeholder Management

Keeping the stakeholders informed and aligned on the progress of the implementation and rollout

2. Communication Strategy

Project kickoff and ongoing messaging to the broader user community around the system, benefits and speaking to ‘whats in it for me’

3. End User Training

Train the users on scenarios most relevant to their daily tasks and outcomes they are looking to accomplish using the system

4. Tracking the system adoption

Plan early for how you would track the usage of the Salesforce system and to manage proactively for system adoption

5. Project Scope Management

Tightly control the scope of the implementation in terms of business process, organization and data

It is a good practice to roll in the Change Management plan under the overall program management methodology and entrust the Program Manager with overall responsibility for it. Depending on the scope of the engagement (number of users being onboarded, number of divisions that can counted as stakeholders, business processes enabled), you may want to have specialists and staff focused on change management.