Best Practices for Rolling Out New Functionality
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The document discusses best practices for rolling out new functionality within Salesforce, emphasizing the importance of a solid deployment strategy and outlining three key phases: pre-deployment, during deployment, and post-deployment. It highlights common reasons for deployment failures, such as inadequate training and communication, and stresses the need for thorough documentation and user validation. The document also offers practical tips and tools to enhance the deployment process and improve outcomes.
Best Practices for Rolling Out New Functionality
- 1. Best Practices for Rolling Out New Functionality March 1, 2017
- 2. Today’s Speakers Jackie Doan Practice Lead, Declarative Development Xede Consulting Group @jackiedoan Mike Gerholdt Director, Admin Evangelism @MikeGerholdt
- 3. Forward-Looking Statements Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: This presentation may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. If any such uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions proves incorrect, the results of salesforce.com, inc. could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements we make. All statements other than statements of historical fact could be deemed forward-looking, including any projections of product or service availability, subscriber growth, earnings, revenues, or other financial items and any statements regarding strategies or plans of management for future operations, statements of belief, any statements concerning new, planned, or upgraded services or technology developments and customer contracts or use of our services. The risks and uncertainties referred to above include – but are not limited to – risks associated with developing and delivering new functionality for our service, new products and services, our new business model, our past operating losses, possible fluctuations in our operating results and rate of growth, interruptions or delays in our Web hosting, breach of our security measures, the outcome of any litigation, risks associated with completed and any possible mergers and acquisitions, the immature market in which we operate, our relatively limited operating history, our ability to expand, retain, and motivate our employees and manage our growth, new releases of our service and successful customer deployment, our limited history reselling non-salesforce.com products, and utilization and selling to larger enterprise customers. Further information on potential factors that could affect the financial results of salesforce.com, inc. is included in our annual report on Form 10-K for the most recent fiscal year and in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the most recent fiscal quarter. These documents and others containing important disclosures are available on the SEC Filings section of the Investor Information section of our Web site. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other presentations, press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase our services should make the purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com, inc. assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.
- 4. Get Social with Us! @salesforceadmns #awesomeadmin Salesforce Admins Salesforce Admins The video will be posted to YouTube & the webinar recap page (same URL as registration). This webinar is being recorded!
- 5. Join the Admin Webinar Group for Q&A! Don’t wait until the end to ask your question! • We have team members on hand to answer questions in the webinar group. Stick around for live Q&A at the end! • Speakers will tackle more questions at the end, time-allowing bit.ly/AdminWebinarGroup
- 6. Today’s Agenda • Why do Deployments Fail? • Developing a Deployment Strategy • 3 Key Phases for Deployment Plans • Summary • Resources • Q&A
- 7. “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” - Unknown
- 8. #DeploymentFish Deployments Can Be Frustrating – But They Don’t Have To Be Thou Shalt Not Develop in Production! All changes should be made in a sandbox, then deployed – without exception! Admin’s #1 Rule:
- 10. Why Do Deployments Fail? Unable to move change set, full stop Can be caused by missing dependencies, deploying items out of order, or insufficient access Or, issues in production unrelated to your change People just aren’t using it! Training and communication is of critical importance when rolling out a new change. The change deployed, but it doesn’t work the way it did in test! Many possible causes: - Security improperly set - Data improperly loaded - Oops – our new stuff broke something that was there! Hard Failure Adoption Failure Soft Failure
- 11. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail!
- 13. Create a Successful Plan Accountability Communication Traceability Key Goals What will a plan provide? • Traceability to ensure the changes can be tracked and measured, reducing the possibility of missing components • Accountability to ensure key players understand and accept their responsibilities • Communication to ensure all team members, key stakeholders, and users know what to expect, and when
- 14. Key Questions Before Getting Started Considerations for building a plan Who? When? What Tools? Roll-Back Plan? Communication?
- 15. 3 Key Phases for Deployment Plans
- 16. Pre-Deployment During Deployment Post-Deployment 3 Key Phases for Deployment Plans
- 17. Pre-Deployment – Deployment Timeline For big projects, create a deployment timeline • Dates • Key people needed for each phase • Governance/ Change Management steps required by your organization • Training Schedule • Go-Live • (and don’t forget the after-party!) Document everything!
- 18. Pre-Deployment – Deployment Elements • Object • Data Type • Name • Change Set # • Manual Steps Needed • THIS ONE IS CRITICAL Create your document of deployment elements & decide on deployment order
- 19. Pro Tip #1 Use the Setup Audit Trail, or an app like Config Workbook to help you figure out the elements that need to be deployed.
- 20. What steps do we need to follow, and in what order? Pre-Deployment – Execution Steps • Create your change sets • Do I need profiles? • In what sandbox do I need to create the change set? • To what environment do I need to upload the change set?
- 21. Pro Tip #2 If you use Chrome as your browser, Boostr for Salesforce is a life-changing extension. Just a few of the features include: • Ability to search when adding items to a change set • Filtering by type when adding to a change set • Showing all items of a given type on one page when adding to a change set
- 22. Pro Tip #3 Apex Tests – Run them Early and Often! Run all of the Apex tests in your production org well in advance of your deployment to ensure you don’t have any bugs to fix before you start – and continue to run them throughout the life of the project.
- 23. Pre-Deployment During Deployment Post-Deployment 3 Key Phases for Deployment Plans
- 24. Pro Tip #4 Quick-Deploy is your friend! • If you have a single change set, or multiple, independent change sets, this feature is fantastic. • Allows an admin to run the tests once for a change set during validation, and SKIP ALL TESTS for deployment. • Note that if you make ANY configuration changes after you validate, the Quick Deploy option goes away!
- 25. During Deployment What steps do we need to follow, and in what order? • Do I need to deactivate anything before I can deploy? • Deploy your change sets • What other manual steps are needed? • Activate Flow Versions • Activate Workflow Rules • Configure Security • Load Data! Pull the trigger!
- 26. Pro Tip #5 Remember the nuances of change sets! • If you deploy a queue, the unformatted list view comes with it – and the visibility is set to ‘All Internal Users’ • If you included profiles in your change set, security is set for only those items included in your change set. • Custom settings deploy, but custom setting RECORDS do not! Consider using Custom Metadata Types instead of Custom Settings during development. • Some items are not deployable with change sets, like changes to standard pick list fields, and certain object settings. • Business Processes will only show up under the ‘dependencies’ section of your change set – not selectable in the list!
- 27. Pre-Deployment During Deployment Post-Deployment 3 Key Phases for Deployment Plans
- 28. Post Deployment What steps do we need to follow, and in what order? • Updating existing data to reflect new values • Deactivating old Approval or Entitlement Processes • User Validation • Just because it works as a system administrator, doesn’t mean it works as an end-user! Check your work!
- 29. Pro Tip #6 Go with the flow…and the process too! • Flow versions and processes are deployed as ‘inactive’ by default. You must manually activate them • If you’re deploying an entitlement process, make sure you run an update! • If you are able to, enable ‘Administrators Can Log in as Any User’ to make your life much easier when it comes to validating your changes post-deployment!
- 30. Summary
- 31. Summary Planning makes perfect… The single most important thing an admin can do to ensure a successful deployment is create a solid plan …but if things go wrong, learn from your mistakes! Even the best-laid plans can fail, but learn from the errors to make things go more smoothly the next time Document all the things! It’s impossible to over-document when it comes to deployments Validation is REQUIRED You must test as an end user to ensure that everything deployed properly There are tools that can help! Things like the ‘Quick Deploy’ feature, Setup Audit Trail, Config Workbook, and Boostr for Salesforce can make an admin’s life easier! 1 2 3 4 5
- 32. Resources
- 33. Resources Salesforce Community success.salesforce.com Trailhead Badges Change Management Application Lifecycle Management Custom Metadata Types Webinar Registration Page Document samples will be posted after webinar bit.ly/newfunctionality Direct @jackiedoan on Twitter jdoan@xede.com