WIth Power Comes Great Responsibility

Companies simply have to do more with less these days.  Resources have been cut to the bone and spending approvals on items as small as a few thousand dollars are required all the way up to the CFO.  When a project is evaluated the first question is always, how can we do this more cheaply and with less risk.  Can we do this in-house?  Why don't we use Joe, have him add some more hours during his day to take this on so we don't have to show an additional expense and/or go through a budget approval process.

In some cases this is the wise move.  Cash is hard to come by and getting outside assistance may be a luxury.  However, in most cases you get suboptimal results which in today's economy has become the new norm.  Suboptimal results though scaled out to your salesforce or customer service operation though get magnified and increase costs significantly.  Worse yet, you increase the risk of the whole project being a failure.  And what organization is more important these days than your sales, marketing and customer operations teams?  Lack of usage, improper usage, decreased morale, inefficiencies and mistakes result in lost dollars.  This is not the area to compromise too much on.

I say this because we see lots of companies in need of what we call a "tune up".  They tried to set up salesforce.com in a way they thought was right but in the end caused them problems.  This is the conundrum with powerful, feature-full products -- there are 15 ways to skin a cat with Salesforce.com but probably only a few right ways to do it.  One customer struggled for nearly a whole year before calling in the cavalry.  Think of the wasted time and effort during that lost year and what could have been -- not to mention the added cost of migrating all the old information to the new set up.  "Restarts" can be costly and you can lose credibility.

Still, you have smart people.  They could figure out anything given time, resources and energy.  Do they have that luxury?  And, can you sustain it ongoing as well.  Your core competence should be your business levers that drive your success and salesforce.com administration and set up is probably not one of your desired core competences.

So get off to the right start.  Setting up the right data structures, configuring the tool in the correct way and establishing a simple and scalable process is essential to a painless future (or at least less pain).  More importantly, it'll mean more dollars for you in the medium to long run.

Dreamforce 2010

The Dreamforce 2010 by all accounts was a smashing success.  With exciting announcements like Database.com, Salesforce.com continues to establish its leadership in the cloud apps space.  The value-added stack continues to grow, enabling small, mid-sized and large scale companies benefit strongly from the cloud. The role of IT within mid to large organizations is shifting.  The disruptive benefit for small companies is the ability to have leading edge infrastructure without the time and expense.  Another big trend at Dreamforce was mobile.  The mashing up of back end technologies and front end consumption computers and devices is exciting for any customer, particularly those with employees on the move.

MondayCall Solutions had a great time meeting the community.  The theme was collaboration and there was plenty of collaboration with Salesforce.com employees, technology partners, fellow implementation partners and of course, customers.  The place was wall to wall with suits, casual developer garb and expo booth company uniforms.

Some of our friends that had a presence (booths and/or speaking ops) at the conference included:  Boomi, Luminosity Group, Silverpop, CRMFusion and more.  It was a big cloudfest that resulted in excitement, opportunity and best of all, results.

It's going to be hard to top Bill Clinton, Stevie Wonder but looking forward to Dreamforce 2011.

Project Methodology

At MondayCall Solutions, our methodology is meant to deliver value, predictability and transparency to our consulting projects.  Our methodology is highly flexible, matched to the needs of every individual customer.  We leverage our best practices experience but customize, customize, customize to maximize the benefit to the customer.

While every project is unique we have a basic structure to our engagements.  Many of the heading names are familiar as classic project management steps but we describe the variations that we focus on.

Needs assessment	Good planning means good execution.  We understand your business drivers and work with you to prioritize the right requirements to meet your business goals.  What's going to move your business KPI's?  We leverage our best practices experience to properly scope the project so that you have a clear roadmap on what should and can be done.
Discovery	We assess your current environment and create an execution project plan.  This reduces risk and leads to good scalable design.
Design	We architect the best-in-class solution that will meet your business goals while being scalable and easy to maintain
Development	Our experienced consulting team creates a solution based on the specification.  We use iterative development so that you can see progress early.
Testing	We thoroughly test each solution and document its usage and maintenance procedures.  Consultant and most importantly, user acceptance testing is key
Rollout	It doesn't stop when the code is finished. We provide a full range of training, mentoring and support assistance to help roll the solution out to a large user base
Ongoing Support and Administration	We provide flexible support services so that you always have access to an expert to help you not only rollout but sustain the value ongoing.

All throughout the project, we build multiple milestones throughout the project so you can see progress early and all of our engagements have management oversight to ensure a high quality deliverable.  Our goal is not technology delivery, but solution delivery.