Learn About Salesforce Governance and Why It Matters

Learning Objectives

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

• Define Salesforce governance and its role in leveraging the platform and maintaining healthy orgs.
  
• Explain how governance is critical for managing complexity as a Salesforce environment scales.
  
• Describe the risks and costs associated with poor governance.
  

When a Salesforce org is new, life seems simple. You have a few users, some profiles and permission sets, a handful of custom objects and fields, and maybe one or two flows for automation. But as your organization’s needs grow and change, so does your Salesforce footprint.

Suddenly, you’re managing multiple clouds, complex integrations, a backlog of requests from every department, and possibly multiple Salesforce orgs that form a larger Salesforce environment. Without a vision for your Salesforce environment, your orgs can quickly spin out of control. Admins become reactive, shifting into a “checking the boxes” mode with heads down and blinders on. Technical debt accumulates as the Salesforce team focuses on answering requests and damage control. Data becomes unreliable as users grow frustrated and evade best practices. Innovation grinds to a halt because admins, users, and management are all focused solely on what’s in front of them. Leaders start to ask questions, like “How can we get more value from our Salesforce org?” and “How can we deliver Salesforce initiatives more efficiently?” The Salesforce team becomes increasingly desperate to deliver quick wins and to find better ways to manage the increasing complexity as the org scales up or splits into multiple orgs. This is where governance comes in.

What Is Salesforce Governance?

Salesforce governance is the framework of people, processes, and tools that work together to ensure the current and future success of your Salesforce environment. The word “governance” may make you think of ponderous things like slowed work, red tape, and heavy-handed control, but the right governance actually speeds up development and improves results. Think of governance like gardening: Though it’s easy to see shears as dangerous blades and trellises as restrictive fences, they’re important tools. Shears clear away dead growth and allow new growth to flourish faster, and trellises provide necessary support structure, protect against unwanted elements, and make harvesting easier.

With the structure of Salesforce governance, you can answer critical questions that should be addressed before growing and scaling your Salesforce environment.

• Who decides which features are built, which ones are built first, and why?
  
• What standards must admins, developers, and architects follow?
  
• How are changes designed and deployed so that existing functionality isn’t negatively impacted?
  
• What resources and skillsets are needed to support the Salesforce environment?
  
• Which skills and career paths should your Salesforce team develop in-house?
  

At its heart, governance is about bringing the organization and its technology teams together as two sides of the same coin, complementing each other no matter how large the coin gets.

The More You Scale, the More You Need Governance

As your Salesforce environment grows with time, its complexity grows exponentially. Permissions, sharing rules, validation rules, flows, Apex, Lightning pages, agents, Salesforce products, AppExchange apps, and more all interact with each other. And the more you have, the harder they are to manage. When multiple admins work in the same Salesforce orgs, it’s impossible for anyone to keep track of it all!

Governance provides a common foundation for multiple people, whether they’re admins, executives, or department stakeholders, to work together to build your Salesforce environment and keep it running smoothly. It’s best to have governance from the start, but if you already have Salesforce up and running, it’s better to implement governance late than never.

With governance, you get:

• Alignment between the Salesforce team and the organization’s stakeholders. Governance ensures that your Salesforce team is delivering features that actually move the needle for their users. For tech personnel, it can be tempting to implement the latest and greatest Salesforce technologies. But adding features nobody asked for, instead of the things that users need, only increases frustration and decreases adoption. Governance bridges the gap between what the organization wants and what the Salesforce team delivers, while staying true to leadership’s vision and keeping costs low.
  
• Shared knowledge. When multiple team members contribute to the overall Salesforce environment and other connected tools, it’s easy for critical information to go unshared. Governance provides structure to your Salesforce team through standardized documentation and reporting practices, allowing team leaders to identify cross-functionality issues before they arise.
  
• Agility and speed. Just as the fastest vehicles in the world are guided by rails, Salesforce development is faster when there are clear rules around it. When shared knowledge is combined with clear architectural standards and a consistent process for development, testing, and release, your Salesforce team can add and refine functionality with confidence. That confidence means less hesitation and overanalysis, speeding up your overall development.
  A well-defined roadmap also sets expectations that keep stakeholders from distracting the team; when a department head asking for a new tool has a good idea of when that tool is coming, they’re less likely to take up time by asking for updates or requesting emergency stopgap measures.
  
• Security and compliance. With strict compliance and data privacy laws such as SOX compliance, GDPR, and CCPA, governance ensures that your data is handled correctly. It creates a security-first/compliance-first development strategy that defines who has access to what and which processes must be followed.
  
• A plan for ongoing support. Governance defines roles, timelines, and action plans for onboarding and ongoing support. Training and communications are easy to overlook, but a user-enablement process ensures that every release gets what it needs for a smooth rollout and high adoption.
  
• A more skilled Salesforce team. Your Salesforce environment is only as good as your people; their skills, experience, and motivation ultimately determine your success. With governance, you can identify people with the greatest knowledge or experience, and then design upskilling career paths to make them even stronger. You can also identify skill gaps that will hinder future growth, and create a roadmap to fill those gaps.
  

The Risks of Poor Governance

Governance might not feel like it’s worth the effort. It can be a challenge to establish, and it’s easy to treat as an afterthought when you’re focused on getting Salesforce project work done. But the problems that come when there is no governance start building up on day one. Users need support, incidents need urgent resolutions, and the never-ending cycle of continuous improvement takes hold. Without governance, all of these demands build up “governance debt”—the accumulation of negative ongoing effects caused by a lack of governance. Any one of these effects is bad enough, especially at scale, but when combined they can be devastating.

• Technical debt: Ungoverned Salesforce teams tend to be reactive, shifting from project to project and never setting aside time for maintenance. As a result, ungoverned Salesforce environments accumulate an ever-increasing pile of hastily completed work and temporary fixes over time. This accumulation makes the whole environment fragile and difficult to upgrade or change, especially if you have any partners doing admin or developer work in your Salesforce orgs.
  
• Data inconsistency and inaccessibility: Without the data discipline and whole-organization alignment brought by governance, your org’s data integrity is in danger. Duplicate records, inconsistent data formatting, and rogue data-storage such as spreadsheets result in unreliable information and workflows. Dependable reporting and automation become impossible.
  
• User frustration: When a Salesforce team isn’t using governance to coordinate with stakeholders, their orgs can build up a number of difficult user experiences: cluttered UI, broken processes, excessive steps, and repeatedly deferred requests. The resulting frustration leads to low adoption and “shadow IT” (when users or managers find alternative solutions outside of Salesforce).
  
• Increased cost: Correcting any of these issues, or even just fixing bugs that have already been deployed to production, is significantly more expensive than catching them during governed design and testing phases. Correction uses up more person-hours, soaking up your Salesforce team’s time and increasing the risk of the above issues getting worse. Some issues can require additional cost in the form of contractors or third-party tools.
  
• Staff turnover: The difficulties of an ungoverned Salesforce environment weigh on your team too. It’s frustrating to deal with mounting workloads, data issues, unhappy users, and constrained budgets, and your talented Salesforce team members may decide to leave for greener (and less stressful) pastures.
  

Governance is a critical foundation that all successful Salesforce implementations are built upon, turning a collection of tools into a strategic enterprise pillar. In the next unit, you learn about the primary vehicle for delivering this governance: the Center of Excellence, or CoE.