Let’s start with a definition of what a Center of Excellent (CoE) is.

According to Wikipedia, it “is a team, a shared facility or an entity that provides leadership, best practices, research, support or training for a focus area”.

In our world, this can be translated into providing the “best of breed” across multiple facets of the Salesforce ecosystem. This includes a product owner, a healthy investment, a strategy, a clearly defined approach, the proper tools for the job, and the best design, implementation, and testing teams.

Going a level more granular, this can be reduced to 13 core pillars:

  1. Prototyping
  2. Project Management Office (PMO)
  3. Vision
  4. Standards
  5. Change Control
  6. Governance
  7. Methodology
  8. Tooling
  9. Change Management
  10. Architecture
  11. Leadership
  12. Metadata Management
  13. Security

Of course, not every org needs everything listed above. If you’re a small org, only a few pillars are critical. But as the project grows, they all become critical to long-term success. This roughly translates to the following:

Where

  • Small = Solo or small implementation team (< 100 users)
  • Medium = Medium-sized team, an SI, and external integrations (100 – 1000 users)
  • Large = A multi-org and multi-cloud implementation (> 1000 users)
  • No = Not critical
  • Maybe = Not critical, but recommended
  • Yes = Critical

The takeaway
We all know a Salesforce implementation that lacked direction and spiraled out of control. Well, a CoE is the best overall solution to manage that, as well as to minimize technical debt and to a higher return-on-investment (ROI).

Over the next several emails, I’ll take a closer look at each of these pillars in greater detail. In the meantime, if you’d like to learn about CoEs using a race car analogy, checkout the following article https://elements.cloud/blog/why-every-org-needs-a-center-of-excellence/

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