Lightning Ready in 6 Weeks
Starting with the Winter ’20 release, Salesforce will turn on Lightning Experience for all orgs on a rolling basis. Start preparing today!
If you manage an Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition org, and if the automated push to Lightning Experience promised in Winter ’20 makes the hair on your arms tingle, there’s good news! At the time of writing this blog post, Winter ’20 is still over 6 months away, and you can be Lightning Ready in just 6 weeks.
Sound like a “beach body” commercial? Try this six-week plan to roll out Lightning Experience and decide for yourself.
Week 1: Start the backlog
How long is the global rollout going to take? The only way to find out is to do the analysis and estimate the work to be done in your team’s backlog, and a team of three including a product owner is usually enough to get the ball rolling. The path can be pretty straightforward.
- Fix obvious problems from the Lightning Experience Readiness Report
- Schedule 2-hour discovery workshops for each of your user personas
- Invite one or two representative super users to each workshop
The workshops can follow a simple agenda.
- Turn on Lightning Experience for your super users in production (or in a Full sandbox if production feels too uncomfortable)
- Ask your super users to run through their daily routine
- Ask your super users to try completing their most complex activities
- Take notes on what works and what really needs attention!
- Convert your notes into user stories
Week 2: Build confidence to handle elephants
Chances are the workshops confirmed your worst fears: There are some elephants in the org. These elephants are the custom components or entire packages from the AppExchange that work poorly or not at all in Lightning Experience. No problem, just take a deep breath.
Then take stock of your elephants, and tackle them one at a time with spikes that create architectural runway for your team.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
In the meantime, if you have more personas to discover, repeat last week’s discovery workshops to continue building the backlog in parallel.
Week 3: Start delivery for your early adopters
With stories in the backlog and a smooth runway, it’s time to deliver! First, prioritize the stories for your early adopters. The ideal early adopter is someone who embraces change and whose day-to-day activities in Salesforce require the least effort to convert. Then, with the backlog prioritized, you can apply scrum, Product Engineering Methodology or your favorite agile framework and rev up the delivery engine!
Once you’ve covered good ground with converting features from Salesforce Classic to work in Lightning Experience, make use of your sandboxes and show your work to a few super users. This will keep your users engaged while also giving you time to respond to feedback before the first pilot release.
Week 4: Deliver to your early adopters
Have you made a release yet? If not, now would be a good time to get the goodies into the hands of at least one pilot group in production. Change management is critical to the success of your pilot. Keep in close touch with these early adopters, watch them do their work, give support, collect feedback and resolve any major issues that are uncovered.
Also, continue delivery for the next set of personas!
Week 5: Incorporate real-world feedback
With the pilot live, feedback should be making its way to the product owner and into the team backlog. While the product owner refines and prioritizes the new stories, continue delivering for the next set of personas!
Week 6: Wait… are we done already?
Five weeks into this repeatable process, your team is operating at a pretty steady pace and delivering stories left and right. Depending on the complexity of your org and the number of personas supported, you may already be done by now! And if you’re not totally done yet, you should now have a well groomed backlog that enables you to forecast when the rollout should be complete across the organization.
The rollout process for each persona is summarized below.
- Fix obvious, easy issues identified in the readiness report
- Run a workshop and/or collect feedback for the persona
- Write user stories and create architectural runway
- Size and prioritize the stories in the backlog
- Deliver the stories
- Release the goodness to users in that persona (including communications, training, etc.)
There’s no time like the present
Are you excited to start rolling out Lightning Experience? Are you still anxious? Check out the additional resources below, and let us know what’s on your mind!
- Lightning Experience Transition Assistant
- “Make the Move to Lightning Experience” on Trailhead
- “Develop Your Lightning Experience Rollout Strategy”
- * Lightning Now! * group in the Trailblazer Community
