Under Budget & Ahead of Schedule

Not all heroes wear capes. At nonprofits, they also don’t always land major gifts or create viral campaigns. Often the most quietly revered figures are those who successfully spearhead strategic undertakings, like implementing Salesforce. I have been a part of myriad Salesforce implementations as a Salesforce.org employee, an account manager here at Arkus, and most importantly as a nonprofit Salesforce user. I have seen colleagues and associates rise and fall on their ability to lead the project to its promised land within the anticipated time and budget - and learned from those who soar above the crowd by doing it ahead of schedule and spending less than anticipated.

These are three practices in implementing Salesforce I have seen that turn mortal nonprofiteers into icons.

Keep a Lean Team with Clear Roles

Poor management of a Salesforce project adds months to timelines and dollars to invoices. That is why Arkus builds project teams for efficiency: a Project Manager (PM) and an Engagement Manager (EM). Clients that move quickly and efficiently often also have a core team mirroring that structure: a Project Lead and a Project Sponsor. 

Arkus’ uniquely ubiquitous expertise means each Arkus PM can oversee all core components of an implementation, including consulting, configuration, data migration, reporting, and training. Every Arkus PM is adept at tapping all parts of Arkus’ internal knowledge and nearly 600 collective Salesforce certifications to act as the expert for their clients. The client's project lead is trusted with the responsibility to involve all relevant stakeholders to ensure that the organization’s needs, culture, idiosyncrasies, and personalities are properly factored into the solution and planning.

The Engagement Manager maintains a high level of involvement in the project, backs up the Project Manager, and serves as a QA check. Additionally, the EM is a source of internal accountability for the PM and a channel for feedback and escalation from the client. On the client slide, successful project sponsors are similarly involved on a high level to provide air cover when the project lead is struggling to successfully herd the cats, replace the project lead who is unable to fulfill their role and ensure that the project is progressing in a way that aligns with the organization’s priorities.

While a successful collaboration involves many minds coming together from the nonprofit and the implementation partner, a small core team with these clearly defined roles, and a focus on the project’s deliverables and timeline, makes maintaining momentum far simpler. 

Get in Sync on Being Async 

Want to know the best way to get stuff done? Have fewer meetings. At Arkus, we purposefully do not default to weekly project status meetings. Time is money quite literally, and the biggest drain of time tends to be on coordinating extra meetings. We utilize several asynchronous tools, from email to Slack to Trello, to pass information over to our clients — saving in-person meetings for when there is a clear need for discussion to achieve timely and informed mutual alignment and decision-making.

There are other benefits to maximizing asynchronous collaboration — decoupling the completion of tasks with meetings allows for each to happen on a schedule that makes sense. If I can get something done in one hour but know that I won’t be held accountable or recognized for its completion until a meeting in three days when everyone is available — then the project just slowed down unnecessarily.

And the timing of it is just one element. Some people are great in the morning, others in the afternoon, and some in the quiet of evening; some people live in California while others live in New York; some also like to absorb information and not feel the pressure to respond to questions or suggestions in real-time. Asynchronous communication enables individuals to work together while allowing each individual to lean into their own preferences for how they work, yielding higher quality work and decisions.

Embracing asynchronous work with strategic use of meetings accelerates a project’s timeline and increases the quality of its deliverables

Embrace a “Crawl, Walk, Run” Mentality

Before arriving at Salesforce in 2020, I worked at a company that was once the largest hardware and on-prem software provider in the world. Implementations at that time looked dramatically different in the pre-cloud days. That is because once initial configurations were made, users were generally married to those customizations. Adjustments were rare and costly. That is just the bones of software that is born on-prem, even if a cloud version of that product has been introduced.

And this is a major reason Cloud computing has taken over the world so rapidly. Beyond its economics, cloud-native software is flexible, lending itself to ongoing iteration, growth, tweaks, and evolution. This means that when adopting a solution, you can drop all the baggage of asking “Will this be what we need in one, three, or five years from now?”. Instead of trying to guess what your future needs will be, focus on the needs you have now. Salesforce can mirror your organization’s growth, pivots, and changes so you don’t need to get ahead of yourself.

We recommend a “crawl, walk, run” approach to adopting Salesforce. Inspire confidence first, then inspire the imagination. By starting with making sure all your basic needs are met and then incrementally adding in automations, plug-ins, integrations, and bells and whistles that fire up the imagination, you lower the risk of taking an all or nothing approach. It also means you can declare an earlier victory by having Salesforce operational and adopted earlier, instead of ending up in a “never-ending” implementation suffering from non-stop scope creep.

How do we avoid that? We make sure our deliverables are clearly defined at the outset of a project. Sometimes deliverables must change to meet the basic needs of an initial setup, and we are flexible to make those changes. When new deliverables are introduced that are not critical to initial adoption, we put them in a “parking lot” for future optimizations. That parking lot is crucial because our collaborative approach to projects often fuels the imagination and creativity of our nonprofit partners to take new, creative approaches to utilize Salesforce to increase the quality of their work and time. Often those ideas are fantastic and also entirely not included in our initial deliverables. Therefore we validate and document the idea, and position it to be evaluated as part of a future project.

When used properly, a parking lot filled with exciting optimizations often motivates everyone to stay on or get ahead, of set deadlines because they know the really fun stuff is around the corner.

These three practices are simple and fairly intuitive and yet can be challenging to maintain in the face of an inefficient organizational culture or challenging team members. And if they are kept with discipline, they can turn your project into a sea change, and you as the triumphant hero who made it happen.

Questions about guiding your project to success? Reach out to Arkus on LinkedIn or through our contact form.