Implementing a new cloud software into your organization can be daunting. With so much to consider, it’s crucial to align your organizational objectives with your implementation milestones at the beginning of your project to set your Salesforce implementation project up for success.

Before the pandemic hit, Traction on Demand had begun shifting the way we deliver projects, we call it the Traction Trail Methodology. This framework enables us to emphasize the most important phase of project implementation—the scoping process—to ensure we’re spending the right amount of time digging deep into business requirements and understanding how to implement them before jumping into the build phase.

Why the Scoping Phase Should Be Your Top Priority
Based on early conversations, you may have spent quite a few hours asking questions about current system interactions, maybe even had time to do a reverse demo. So why are we spending weeks scoping and defining projects once we get started on the implementation? This is a critical step in ensuring a successful implementation and will significantly increase your organization’s time-to-value.

Identifying Your Real Pain Points

something that comes as no surprise organizations can surface up many pain points within their current systems and processes. But when it comes to implementing new cloud-based solutions to get the most value out of the product, a deep understanding of true pain points is crucial to reach successful implementation. You’ll want to ensure your implementation partner is willing to dig deep with a thoughtful approach to identifying these pain points.

Our Approach

At cloudlinkinc, we start by focusing on the scope defined in the Statement of Work (SOW) and we translate it into user stories. Once the implementation team understands the organization structure, they unpack differences and similarities between different personas, to get to a high-level conclusion and start drafting these user stories. The refinement of these user stories is an iterative process done in joint sessions where key stakeholders of the project take advantage of our portal (Traction Enable) so findings are transparent in real-time. They’re based on the client’s day-to-day work and how they interact with their sales, support, and other systems—all written in their language making them easy to understand. This helps the implementation team uncover top pain points and how the team understands the needs of the business.