Implement Your Salesforce CoE’s Core Capabilities
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Execute your leadership’s vision for the organization through a CoE.
- Establish standards for data security and a friendly user experience through a CoE.
- Introduce technical standards for your Salesforce team’s processes through a CoE.
- Support your users’ and Salesforce team’s needs through a CoE.
We’ve established the kinds of responsibilities that a CoE has, but what does a CoE team actually do? To help grow a sustainable Salesforce environment, a CoE must do more than just approve changes. They must do work across all four core capabilities, balancing technical responsibilities with the growth of the organization and ensuring that Salesforce is an asset, not a liability.
Transformation Management
This capability focuses on the overarching “Why” of your organization’s roadmap. It bridges the gap between big-picture goals and actual Salesforce initiatives, ensuring that they’re directly linked.
Executive Alignment
Representatives from the CoE coordinate with the organization’s leadership team, informing them of progress, successes, and needs. Those representatives also communicate leadership’s requests and vision back to the rest of the CoE.
CRM Vision and Roadmap
The CoE assembles an ordered list of requested Salesforce projects, tasks, and initiatives, and organizes them into a schedule of upcoming features and milestones. The CoE is responsible for publishing and updating this roadmap so the organization can see what’s coming.
Business Cases and ROI Metrics
The CoE ensures that the Salesforce team prioritizes projects that generate higher ROI, deliver on the organization’s vision, or clear away technical roadblocks. This prioritization protects your Salesforce team by proving the value of your organization’s Salesforce investments.
Defined Requirements
The CoE determines what’s required to submit user and stakeholder requests, and creates a fair process that determines a priority order for those requests.
Digital Foundation Enablement
This capability focuses on the rules and processes that protect the long-term integrity of your Salesforce data and architecture. Think of it as the “how” capability, creating guidelines that enable speedier deployment and a reliable Salesforce environment.
Business Standards
To eliminate rogue processes and prevent teams from reinventing the wheel, the CoE assesses the use cases and processes used across the Salesforce environment and standardizes those processes where possible. As part of this process, the CoE also identifies linguistic inconsistencies across departments, working with department stakeholders to make those terms consistent.
Architecture
The CoE is the guardian of your Salesforce architecture, creating your environment’s foundational data model while making sure the model aligns with the rest of the organization’s architecture and strategy. Focus on larger-scale ideas rather than getting bogged down in every minor technical detail. The CoE also prevents short-term solutions that will eventually become long-term tech debt, and instead advocates for sustainable solutions that meet CoE-defined standards. If there isn't a CoE-defined standard that applies, the Salesforce team should search for best practices vetted by the Salesforce community.
Design Authority
This CoE subgroup has a number of important responsibilities.
- The Design Authority (DA) creates architectural guidelines for when to use various features, such as flows versus Apex code or custom solutions versus third-party apps.
- The DA reviews the technical construction of each request, looking for duplicate data structures, unexpected automation and integration interactions, and other potential gotchas.
- The DA works with data security and compliance personnel to define who has access to what data. Strict data access policies aren’t required for all organizations, but consider adopting the Principle of Least Privilege (also known as Least Privilege Access) as a North Star when determining access. You should also consider data compliance laws such as GDPR and CCPA when determining which personally identifiable information (PII) to store and where to store it.
- The DA manages and approves the rare circumstances where previously established architectural guidelines need to be loosened or ignored.
Vendors and Licenses
The CoE considers opportunities for outside help to accomplish its goals, working with the Salesforce team to decide whether to build custom solutions or purchase third-party applications.
Internal Training and Team Support
The CoE oversees the makeup of the Salesforce team, identifying when additional team members are needed and what their roles should be. The CoE also advocates for the needs of the current team, providing resources, training, and personal development opportunities.
Project Delivery and Platform Optimization
This capability covers the building, testing, scaling, and delivery of your Salesforce environment.
Development and QA
The CoE ensures that everyone who develops on the Salesforce Platform follows standard procedures during development. These procedures apply when writing code or creating declarative automation such as flows. The Salesforce team must perform quality assurance testing on anything they develop.
Environment and Release Management
When changes are ready to be developed or deployed, everyone on the technical team should follow the same processes. The CoE defines those processes and governs the DevOps path from sandbox to production and everywhere in between.
The CoE establishes a regular schedule for Salesforce updates, such as monthly for major changes and once a week for smaller tweaks. This reliable schedule allows everyone to anticipate when changes are coming, reducing friction and anxiety and alleviating the Salesforce team’s “close requests quickly and move to the next thing” mindset. This buffer gives the Salesforce team time to perform necessary maintenance and eliminate tech debt. However, don’t adhere to this schedule too rigidly; emergency needs can still require emergency fixes.
Innovation
The CoE allots time for the Salesforce team to actively explore new features, products, and trends that keep the organization competitive. The Salesforce team should also monitor the official Salesforce release notes and inform the CoE if any additional work is needed to accommodate changes or implement new Salesforce Platform features.
During development, the Salesforce team should also make sure that their work is as reusable as possible, taking advantage of modular design and avoiding one-off solutions that are difficult to repeat or support. The DA tracks this library of reusable assets and pushes the Salesforce team to take advantage of them.
Data Migration and Quality
As new teams and processes are brought into Salesforce, their existing data must be brought in too. The CoE manages these migrations, including data and metadata. While the Design Authority subgroup reviews the migration’s planned metadata before the construction phase, other parts of the CoE establish data models and guidelines to check for duplicates, unexpected interactions, and other data risks. It’s crucial to catch these problems before they reach production!
The CoE also oversees all things related to data backup, including backup and restore plans, regular backup operations, and emergency readiness. They also work with IT to maintain archives of those backups. Start by creating a plan for how frequently backups are taken, where they’re stored, and the age at which older archives are cleansed.
Integration
The CoE works with IT and other project teams to establish processes, patterns, and tools for integrating Salesforce with the organization’s other systems. They collectively determine standards and guidelines for issues such as publishing the catalog, API governance, error handling, retry policies, updates, and other specifications. Above all, work together as a team to keep all integrations running smoothly across the whole environment.
Adoption, Run, Operations, and Agentic
This capability focuses on empowering your organization’s people, including your users and your Salesforce team. Think of it as the “who” capability, where responsibilities focus on improving the outcomes and ROI of your Salesforce environment by improving the lives of the people who use and support it.
Administration
The CoE ensures that the Salesforce team has enough time to perform daily platform upkeep. The CoE also advocates for an intuitive and easy-to-use Salesforce user experience that is visually consistent throughout the environment.
End User Training, Adoption, and Communications
The CoE ensures that Salesforce users are properly alerted and prepared for upcoming releases, working with other departments as needed. Depending on the scale of a release, they might arrange for a prerelease communication campaign, using Slack posts, newsletters, videos, physical posters, or release notes to let people know that changes are coming. Identify power users, or champions, within your organization that you can train early and employ as onboarding assistants, subject matter experts, and adoption drivers for their fellow team members. For large updates, users might require dedicated group training sessions to show them how to use the new version, and managers might need one-on-one training sessions to learn how to use their side of things.
Support Model
The CoE creates a support model and helpdesk infrastructure where users can ask for help or request features and enhancements. The Salesforce team also uses this system to log bugs and technical debt, creating a comprehensive repository of all the Salesforce work that needs to be done. Institute time limits, or service-level agreements (SLAs) to build trust in the Salesforce team, and deploy agentic AI tools to automatically resolve routine requests and escalate emergencies.
Documentation
The CoE confirms that documentation is a planned part of development, for new projects and for updates to existing features. This documentation doesn’t have to be comprehensive, but it’s an essential resource that guides users through processes and prevents basic support requests. The CoE also protects the technical team’s ability to create docs by factoring documentation time in their delivery estimates.
In the next unit, you learn how to start a Center of Excellence and grow it over time.