Promote Your Work with a Project Value Story

At Dreamforce 2022, we held a workshop in the Architect Vista called “Create Your Architect Value Story”. The workshop’s two sessions were overbooked, so we’re following up here for those that couldn’t be there. The workshop covered two types of architect value stories: project value stories and personal value stories. This post focuses on creating and communicating a project value story. For more on personal value stories, check out Susannah’s post, Promote Yourself with a Personal Value Story.

Key Takeaways

• This content is from a Dreamforce workshop on creating an architect value story focused on project stories.
• Clear and concise project value stories should highlight business challenges, solutions, and success metrics.
• Regular stakeholder status updates can include project value stories and help track progress towards benefits.

Why do you need a project value story?

An architect’s scope of work is broad and deep, requiring business, delivery, and technical leadership demonstrated through both strategic and tactical efforts. Because of this broad scope of responsibilities, architects serve many stakeholders across the business and IT. And because architects are also highly skilled, highly paid resources, your stakeholders want to know what you’re working on and the value you’re delivering. A project value story is a clear way to:

• Align stakeholders on the vision
• Connect technical solutions to business goals
• Communicate the value being delivered
• Showcase your value as a trusted digital advisor

What’s in a project value story?

Your project value story should be clear and easy to read by starting with an executive summary. The executive summary connects stakeholders to the vision and helps align them to value statements that follow with the challenges, solutions, and metrics. The executive summary should include an overview of the vision, goals, and stakeholders as shown in the example from the workshop below.

Cumulus Bank hired an Architect to lead their digital transformation. Strategic value will be achieved by delivering a single view of the customer in Salesforce for sales and service. Transformational value will be achieved with the formation of a center of excellence. Executive stakeholders are Taylor Swift, Chief Customer Officer, and Tom Brady, Chief Revenue Officer.

Next, you’ll highlight the value statements that will be used to show progress toward the benefits identified when you invested in Salesforce. Be concise and identify the business challenge, solution, and success metric for each value statement. The business challenge should clearly state the problem to be solved or the opportunity you are trying to pursue. The solution describes how you’ve applied people, processes, and technology to solve the problem. And the value portion details the success metrics identified to measure the value of your solution. As you think about value statements, be sure to highlight the challenges that most matter to your stakeholders.

Let’s look at an example value statement from the workshop:

Business Challenge:

Manual steps in the sales process are causing delays and inaccurate reporting.

Solution:

Sales Path to guide reps and Flow to automate opportunity stages.

Value:

Sales Cycle Time Decrease: 40%. The average length of the opportunity cycle.

You’ll notice the bold formatting indicates the problems: manual steps, delays, and inaccurate reporting. The solution indicates the technology used to solve the problem: Sales Path and Flow. And the value includes the metric, the desired direction (increase vs decrease), the unit of measure, and a description of what the metric is measuring.

During the workshop, participants practiced communicating each value statement as a single story like:

Manual steps during the sales process were causing delays in the deal cycle, missed opportunities, and inaccurate reporting. We used Sales Path to guide reps and Flow to automate opportunities through the sales stages. Our solution decreased the average length of the sales cycle by 40% across BUs.

When and how should you deliver a value story?

As noted in a previous post, you should be thinking about your project value story early and often. Include the value story in your stakeholder status updates. I position my value story right after my 30/60/90 day plan. This approach acts as a forcing function for you to regularly track metrics, and it closely connects the value delivered to the foundational, strategic, and transformational initiatives you are leading.

Depending on your stakeholder, you might be delivering these updates biweekly, monthly, or quarterly. Stay focused on delivering what matters to your stakeholders by capturing the relevant metrics on your user stories. Ask yourself, “If you can’t apply a success metric to a user story, should you be working on it?”.

More questions from the workshop

Here are some other questions attendees asked during the workshop.

How do I know which metrics to track?
You already identified the benefits expected from your Salesforce investment, so start there. Be sure to identify metrics that you can baseline before you sunset legacy systems or retire manual processes, because it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to baseline your metrics retroactively. You can find a list of common success metrics for a variety of capabilities here in this PDF.

What if we didn’t identify the benefits upfront or the metrics aren’t clear?
This question came up a few times. Upon further discussion, we found that many architects are delivering operational initiatives involving people and processes, like call center productivity, governance structures, and DevOps improvements. Start by creating a value story about the work you’re doing today. This will initiate the conversation with your stakeholders, identify additional metrics to track and demonstrate your ability to connect technology decisions to business value. We discussed the following examples:

• Agent productivity. Providing a single view of the customer in Service Cloud will increase agent productivity because agents will no longer switch systems to gather the information required to close a case. You can baseline agent productivity with a time study analysis to observe and measure the current state, and then represent the value delivered as a percent of the overall improvement.
• Governance. Implementing a governance structure (for example, a Center of Excellence) lets you prioritize intake requests based on what matters to the business, leading to an increase in user adoption. You can use Adoption Dashboards to baseline and measure the improvement. Even tracking the number of requests and user stories that have been prioritized is an operational metric that you can measure to show the value delivered here.
• DevOps. Transitioning from org-driven development to source-driven development will increase the speed and number of production deployments. Be sure to measure the current deployment time, the number of deployments, and the number of issues during the current process so you can report on the improvements from your solution.

What if we are still delivering the solution? Can I still create a value story?
Yes, the fact that you’re aligning technology to business strategy reinforces your value as an architect and the most trusted digital advisor. This question is especially relevant if you’re following the guidance to share your value story in your regular stakeholder status updates rather than at longer intervals or after delivery. If you’re still delivering the solution, it’s OK to provide projections with expected improvements from the baseline. You can indicate the status of the metrics as projected with an asterisk or other indicator. Avoid using color alone to indicate status to ensure you are following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 for proper use of color as meaning.

Get started

Start by creating value statements for your past projects. Ask yourself the following questions:

• How did you choose your metrics?
• Why are those metrics important?
• How did you (or how would you) baseline the metrics?
• Are you able to communicate each challenge, solution, and value delivered in just a few sentences?

We created the following resources to help you faster:

• Architect Value Story Metrics — A list of common success metrics for a variety of capabilities you might be working on.
• A Business challenge-focused template in Lucidchart — This template is useful when you want to communicate value statements individually.
• A Business Initiative-focused template in Lucidchart — This template structure is useful when you want to represent multiple value statements for a single initiative or capability.
• Create Your Architect Value Story — The slides from our Dreamforce workshop

Lastly, be sure to check out Susannah’s post, Promote Yourself with a Personal Value Story.