Get Started with a Salesforce CoE

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Start a Salesforce Center of Excellence.
  
• Assemble the people you need to create a CoE.
  
• Define your CoE’s mission, scope, and capabilities.
  
• Determine how your CoE interacts with the rest of your organization.
  
• Create metrics that prove your CoE’s successes and highlight areas of improvement.
  

So you’re convinced that your organization needs a Salesforce CoE and you’re ready to put one together. But where do you start? With the long list of responsibilities we covered in the previous unit, assembling a CoE can seem like a pretty big endeavor. But don’t worry; we have a proven seven-step approach to getting your CoE off the ground.

1. Identify executive sponsorship and stakeholders.
   
2. Define the mission and scope.
   
3. Assemble the core team and resources.
   
4. Select the CoE model.
   
5. Determine the CoE’s capabilities.
   
6. Define the structure and governance rhythm.
   
7. Measure and iterate.
   

The Golden Rule

Before we launch into those seven steps, there’s one important thing to remember that applies to all of these steps: Start small, then scale quickly. You don’t need to start with a team of 20 or a massive budget, nor do you need to have everything planned out before you get started. Just start with something, even if it’s only a handful of people and steps, and build on top of that. This growth includes changing or backtracking things that were previously decided, such as redefining your scope.

Identify Executive Sponsorship and Stakeholders

Without ongoing support from the highest level of your organization, a CoE lacks the authority to make changes and enforce standards. Likewise, without support from team managers and tech leaders within your organization, a CoE lacks a solid foundation to build upon.

Choose someone in a leadership position, such as a CIO, CTO, or VP of Sales, to be your executive sponsor and liaison to the organization’s executives. Make sure you choose someone who believes in the strategic value of Salesforce and who can champion the goals and needs of the CoE.

For stakeholders, you don’t always want ardent supporters and champions. You need people who are deeply embedded with your users, who know your users’ processes and their needs, priorities, and expectations. You also need people who know your organization’s tech infrastructure to ensure that your Salesforce development plays nicely with their current setup and future plans.

The good news is: Your stakeholders don’t need to put in any time just yet. At this stage, ask for their commitment to assist the CoE with future initiatives or projects that relate to them and to communicate the CoE’s vision and expectations to their users.

Define the Mission and Scope

Work together with your sponsor and stakeholders to define the primary missions of the CoE. It’s better to have a larger number of specific, measurable goals than it is to have a smaller number of broad goals. For example, “Manage 100% of our partner interactions through a Salesforce portal,” “Accelerate our agentic transformation,” “Manage the interactions between all of our subsidiaries’ Salesforce orgs,” and “Reduce operating costs by 30% over the next 2 years” are better mission definitions than “Maintain our Salesforce orgs and their products.”

After declaring your missions, you must define the extent and limitations of the CoE’s scope: what the CoE can and can’t do. What Salesforce products will the CoE support? What areas of the business will the CoE support and work with? If your organization has more than one Salesforce org, which orgs will the CoE support? How much flexibility should the CoE have in its scope and its budget and authority? (Don’t worry about defining the CoE’s budget and authority just yet; you define those in later steps.)

Because getting a CoE off the ground can be a daunting task, don’t forget that you can start small. Start with one mission for a specific capability and give it a narrow scope. Then use the success of that mission to make the rest of the organization aware of the CoE and its progress. This visibility establishes the CoE as a critical resource for the whole organization, providing justification for bigger missions and a greater scope.

Assemble the Core Team and Resources

You don’t need to hire people to run your CoE. Use existing team members to fill core roles, and other stakeholders as needed for specific project roles.

A typical CoE core team includes these roles.

In addition to the core team, the CoE often works as needed with an extended team of stakeholders and subject matter experts. These extended team members may include data analysts, product owners, end user management, and architects from various disciplines (for example, data, integration, security, and enterprise architects).

Even though you don’t have to hire anyone to run a CoE, your organization still needs to fund it. The CoE has direct needs, such as training costs and tools for the Salesforce team. Indirectly, the CoE also takes other people’s time, and their hours are officially funded by their own departments. And while many of the CoE members are probably Salesforce team members, their efforts and the costs of maintaining Salesforce directly benefit other areas of the organization. So where does that funding come from? Does it come from the same place your Salesforce budget comes from? Does it charge back to the departments that benefit from the CoE and from Salesforce? There’s not a specific right answer, but your organization must answer these funding questions or risk getting on the bad side of your finance department and the rest of the business. Nobody likes to be surprised by sudden budget impacts.

Select the CoE Model

Every organization’s CoE is different. Depending on your organization’s needs, the CoE’s size and operations can differ. The CoE’s core team must decide which CoE model to follow, based on the complexity of your Salesforce environment, your development strategy, and the size of your organization.

• Centralized: One CoE controls everything Salesforce-related. They have the power to veto poor technical designs and troublesome processes, not just make recommendations. This model works well for Salesforce environments with a single org and organizations that focus on Salesforce development one process at a time.
  
• Federated: For Salesforce environments with multiple orgs or organizations that have to implement Salesforce across multiple geographical markets (such as EMEA and AMER), this model gives more control to each independent unit. Meanwhile, the CoE acts as a centralized advisor to all groups.
  
• Hybrid: The CoE provides analysis and sets standards centrally, but allows individual groups to enforce them. This model works for both single-org and multi-org environments. But it’s most effective when the organization has groups with very different needs, such as B2B versus B2C, or varying lines of business such as healthcare services and travel insurance.
  

Work with your executive sponsor to validate your model, and communicate to stakeholders that you have your leadership’s backing and the long-term benefits for the organization.

Determine the CoE’s Capabilities

Every CoE needs a list of its capabilities so its members know their responsibilities and jurisdiction. Some capabilities, such as solution delivery, implementation of best practices, and demand prioritization, are very common. But every organization is unique and has different needs. For example, a Centralized CoE has the capability “Ensure best practices are followed during implementation,” whereas a Federated CoE instead has “Recommend best practices for each group’s implementation processes.”

Use the list of core capabilities from the previous unit to determine which capabilities are best for your CoE. It’s natural for a CoE’s capabilities to grow over time, so start with a small list and a roadmap for growing more capabilities in the future.

Define the Structure and Governance Rhythm

You created a core CoE team, but a CoE usually has subteams to support its efforts. Consider which of these subteams you should form to report to the CoE, or create your own for your own purposes. Some individuals can end up on multiple subteams.

• Design Authority: This team is usually the first subteam to be formed, and has a long list of responsibilities. They ensure Salesforce designs and builds meet best practices, while maintaining org health and security, data access, compliance with regulations and company policy, and alignment with the rest of the organization’s architecture.
  Forming a DA can be especially daunting, as it’s both the first and most complex subteam. Focus first on your CoE’s guidelines: standardize your processes, tools, and coding practices, and establish your dev methodologies (such as Agile or Scrum). Then give the DA a foothold to start governing Salesforce work by bringing them in on a Salesforce project that’s in progress. When the project is complete, use the momentum of success to transition the DA into a permanent CoE fixture.
  
• Demand Intake: This subteam is responsible for working with the rest of the organization to make sure that their voices are heard. They establish and monitor request channels and turn those requests into actionable backlog items so they can be considered for the roadmap.
  
• Delivery and QA: This subteam implements the design changes in Salesforce, whether it’s through clicks, code, or both. Also known as the Salesforce team, it combines architects, admins, developers, and QA staff into one superteam. This team is also responsible for documentation, whether they write it themselves or find someone else in the organization that’s available to do it.
  
• Vendor Liaison: This subteam decides which third-party vendors and partners to work with, then works with them to get their services up and running. The Vendor Liaison team is especially valuable when hiring an implementation partner, as they function as the critical point-of-contact that partners need to be successful.
  

Also, decide how often the core CoE team and each of the subteams should meet. Make sure each team has agreed upon a regular meeting cadence. Try following a weekly schedule for operational and technical topics, and a monthly schedule for strategy discussions and roadmap planning.

Measure and Iterate

Your CoE setup is almost done, but you need to prove the CoE’s value to justify its funding, protect its authority, and identify processes that need improvement. Define key performance indicators (KPIs) that measure the effectiveness of the CoE’s work.

Here are some KPI ideas to get you started.

For each metric you establish, define its rules upfront. What’s their criteria? How often are they measured? What’s the baseline for “good”? What potential obstacles could get in the way of measuring these KPIs? How can you work around those obstacles?

KPIs can also be valuable windows into what might be going wrong. Create a process for the CoE to follow if a KPI goes below “good,” where specific members assemble, review the KPI’s supporting data, and discuss ways to address the problem.