Lightning Experience Rollout Strategy that you can`t learn from book

Attention guys,

This blog is designed for Lightning Experience.

In my last blog your learned what are the basics of Lightning experience. If you didn’t check it then I would suggest go to Learn Salesforce Lightning Experience Basics In 15 Minutes and learn it. It will take hardly 15-20 minutes to learn those. It included the all basics which are required you before start the Lightning experience.

In this blog you will learn how to develop a rollout strategy to help your company and the users get started with new user interface which is the Lightning experience.

As you know in Lightning Experience, Salesforce focused on sales representative users and to support their sales processes with the new user interface which help sales representative users to sale faster.

But Lightning Experience is not only for sales cloud users, it also for the service, wave analytic, platform, apps and many more.

Lightning Experience is available for all users which include salesforce existing customers and new customers. If you are salesforce classic user i.e. existing user or the new user and want to study or evaluate the impact of enablement of Lightning Experience in your org, then this blog will definitely help you to plan your rollout strategy from start to end. And obviously you know strategy is very important whenever you are working on any project not in salesforce but in all projects.

In Roll out, you just extend business functionality to new breach from corporate office which may be a creation of new company code OR just creation of a new plant based on business process or requirement. Roll out steps are Preparation, Business Blueprint, Realization, Final Preparation and Go-Live & Support.

Let’s say you are the Salesforce Admin for your company. You have to decide whether to start with a pilot for a set of users (you can say it is like a preview) and gather the reviews from them or go for all and enable for all users at once. If your company employee strength(size) is big i.e. 3000+ users, then you might need Project manager for this rollout. 

But before start design or plan spend time to learn pros and cons of Lightning Experience interface. You have to find out your stakeholders, sponsors, multiple roles executives which are all affected department and group them all and create one committee. You need executive support to ensure you have got resources and alignment them to succeed i.e. from start to finish. Share everything which you know about Lightning Experience with your new form team or group. Once you and your team know benefits of Lightning Experience, you are fully ready prepared for business and technical evaluation for Lightning Experience.

With Lightning Experience rollout, you can perform your salesforce org gap analysis it will help you to know what are the workarounds you need to perform certain actions. For such analysis salesforce provide a tool to make light work of this analysis. Its Lightning Experience Readiness Check!!!

Here are the steps:

• Go to Setup and search for Lightning Experience Migration Assistant.
• Click on Get started.
• Click on the Check Readiness tab in the Migration Assistant.
• Lastly click on Check Readiness.

After this, Salesforce generate one PDF which is Readiness report and mail the same. Also Salesforce save this PDF in Salesforce files which you can access in future.

This Readiness report help you to find out Lightning Experience recommendations and advice. The Lightning Readiness check report does not analyze all Salesforce configurations and customization.

Then what are the best ways to find out how your salesforce org configurations and customization work in Lightning Experience before enable it in production?

• Use the Salesforce Lightning Experience Migration Assistant Preview.
• If you have any sandbox for your production org, then this is the ideal place to enable Lightning user interface and check configurations and customization.
• If you don’t have any sandbox, then use salesforce Developer Edition and enable Lightning Experience and test it.

After evaluation of the Impact, you are ready to showcase all advantages of Lightning Experience, and highlight the gaps which you found in Lightning Readiness check.

While presentation or in demonstration, make sure what you demo has data. Do not forgot to record your session, in future you can share with the members which could not attend the session.

Once you get GREEN Signal from your executive sponsors, then it`s time to execute your Strategy.

Here are some steps which you can perform for smooth transition: 

1. Decide the users which will work on Lightning Experience: 

    Right now you can use custom profiles or permission sets to enable Lightning Experience. 

     This help you for pilot release of Lightning Experience. If you are implementing this approach, then consider the following:

• Instead of updating custom profiles, Create Permission set for the Lightning Experience User permission and assign it to particular team or groups or users. 
• If you found any gaps in Lightning Readiness check then exclude those users who are using that particular functionality.

2. Create Chatter Group for communication: 

    You have your team members list, create chatter group add those team members and start broadcasting relevant updates, share project schedule files.

      3. Create proper project schedule:

    Which include All assigned task with task status which is easy to understand status of this project.

4. Marketing and Communication strategy:

• Email campaigning which include highlighting the coming launch and a “feature of the week”.
• Create a topic in Chatter for all your users.

5. Educate Users:

    Conduct training session for users and educate them how to use new features of Salesforce.

You can replace your customized functionality with salesforce configuration functionality which are:

Customized salesforce feature has:	Replace it with this:
Creates a related record	Process Builder
Sends an email or creates a task	Process Builder
Creates related records and updates existing records	Process Builder and Visual Workflow
Updates an existing record	Actions
Customized screen for user input	Visual Workflow
Customized time-triggered process	Workflow Rules

 And Finally here we are GO LIVE: Turn on Lightning Experience

We planned everything perfectly, execute them on time and GO LIVE date arrives. Even this also easy with Lightning Experience Migration Assistant, which you access before performing any step.

Go to Lightning Experience Migration Assistant and go to Turn It On tab and click on radio button which show Enable. So Easy.

Done GO LIVE, what after this????

Monitor, yes monitor your project success, survey your users and collect the feedback from your users and measure productivity growth, your business success and adaptation. With the help for reports and dashboards to track your project success metrics. 

Use this metrics and add them in your demonstration which help your executive sponsors about Lightning Experience success!!!

 Other blogs:

9 Best Practices and Guidelines for Implementing My Domain In Salesforce

Create Record Home Page Using Advanced Lightning Component In Salesforce

9 Configurations In Lightning Experience Tips You Need To Learn Now. 

Understand Lightning Design System Key Principles in 25 Minutes 

Learn Salesforce Lightning Experience Basics In 15 Minutes