In our final post on Salesforce Lightning, we will focus on the steps to migrating to the promised land - Lightning Experience. If Lightning is something your company has not yet considered or is starting to contemplate, this post will help you map out the steps to take. If you are wondering why you should make the switch, take a look at our post ‘Should You Migrate to Salesforce Lightning?’ to find out why you should make the transition today.
1. Outline Goals
Before beginning your journey to Lightning Experience, the first thing you want to do is be sure lightning is the right option for your business at this time. You don’t want to start the implementation process and suddenly realize your company is not ready for it.
Start by outlining your goals, making a list of what you want to get out of lightning and how it will improve your company. Maybe you want to increase productivity, have a better sales process, or reduce costs, or all of the above.
2. Plan/ Map
Once you know your goals, you can start creating a plan of action. First things first, take your time and create the following documents - trust me, it can save a lot of pain in the future:
- Management change plan:
Before migration, you will need to make a plan for your organisation. To avoid unnecessary stress and loss of work hours, you will need a plan to put to action during the rollout. This will allow you to prepare for any unforeseen complications, errors or additional tasks. Start by identifying each of the stages. You can then delve into and break down the stages, step-by-step, taking each of your goals into account.
Here's an example from Salesforce:
- Checklist
Creating checklists alongside or within your plan will help you complete stages before moving onto the next one. It will help you avoid errors or mistakes. Here is a great checklist to base off from Salesforce themselves!
3. Prepare yourself and your employees
Before migrating to Lightning, there are a lot of actions your company can take to prepare. One essential tool is - Trailhead.
Trailhead is a great way to prepare your employees for the user experience change. There are multiple modules and Trailmixes that can have your employees ready and up-to-speed with the new User Interface and features. Make them a pro at lightning before they even use it!
Here are two great Trailmixes to help your employees
Select a group of users to test it on first
Identify a group of power users who can test out Lightning first before rolling out to the rest of the company. This will help you identify any usability issues, problems with page layouts, as well as understand how your employees will take to Lightning before rolling out to the whole company. You can then make corrections and improve the configurations for your employees.
Readiness test
While Salesforce partners, like ourselves, can perform these tasks for you, Salesforce also gives you the opportunity to see how ready your Org is for lightning. From here you can see what needs to be done before rolling it out. This will help shape your plan. To request a readiness test, select setup at the top of your page, then select 'Lightning Experience' in the tabs on the left. Then you will see the ‘Check Readiness’ tab. Here you can request the readiness test which will look like this:
Within a few minutes, the document will then appear in your files, as well as being sent to you via email.
4. Prioritise
Time vs Setup
From your plan and goals, you will know which aspects of the project are most important. Your company might have a limited time frame to set up lightning, or you may be happy to take as long as needed to complete all the features and setup before attempting to go live. If you have a limited time frame, you will need to prioritise what features are most important. Are there any features that can be rolled out after going live? This leads to our next point.
Know when to get help!
Know when to get help when you need it. For some companies, the time associated with the migration is too high a cost. Migration time depends on many variables (Number of employees, multi-cloud, number of Visualforce pages, etc). For larger enterprise corporations, switching to lightning in-house can not only be difficult and challenging but incredibly time-consuming. Accelerators can help small to mid-size businesses set up fast, while full Lightning transitionservices from Salesforce partners will benefit enterprise level companies
5. Sandbox
The best way to start a test and isolate changes is in a designated ‘Sandbox’. This way changes, components and apps can be trialled and tested before implementing them into production. This way you can eliminate any errors or bugs before going live, which in turn will eliminate downtime for users.
6. Test, Test, Test.
Next, it is vital to double check and test all features. The objective of the test phase is to validate the quality of the Salesforce Lightning solution and confirm that the functional, and where possible, non-functional Business requirements have been met effectively. You do not want to come out of this project disappointed and unable to fulfil your goals.
7. Roll out
Your rollout is one of the biggest steps in your plan. You do not want to send a brief email to all staff telling them to switch to lightning. You will need to train managers, who will intern train their employee group. As we recommended above, the best way is to start with one selected group and then branch out to other sectors of the company. This is a part of your testing stage to see how your employees adapt and what changes you need to make before rolling it out to the rest.
8. Document
Before, throughout and after the lightning transition, you will want to document the process. This can help, not only if any errors arise but to also train new employees who may be inexperienced with lighting or might be involved in future updates of the solution.
Now, what should you do next? Contact us or download our brochure if you are still unsure or if you need help with migrating to Lightning.
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