CommunityDevOps ExchangePartners
Articles
12/20/2022
10 minutes

Why Empowering Your Salesforce CoE is Essential for Maximizing ROI

Written by
Halie Vining
Table of contents

As the impact of digital continues to grow, companies are forced to move beyond the traditional IT model. IT leaders must be in lock-step with business leaders to create and execute effective technology roadmaps. Companies are simultaneously adopting new technologies and evolving their processes to meet the changing needs of employees and customers. And simply, businesses are facing more change than ever before.

To manage this level of change, leaders must rethink the old “command and control” structure of traditional IT. Instead, an emerging CoE culture is taking hold that brings together top talent from across an organization to contribute to leadership decisions and develop a comprehensive vision for the company’s technology. CoE culture values stakeholders over shareholders as the key decision-makers to ensure that new features are delivered efficiently and effectively. 

The CoE isn’t just a trend. Salesforce teams who empower CoEs to drive and manage change are seeing real results. A recent study from 10K Advisors found that 91 percent of companies who report “Very High” Salesforce ROI also have a CoE. And 82 percent of companies that give their Salesforce adoption an “A” grade also have a CoE in place. But despite evidence of CoE impact, only about 40 percent of Salesforce customers have a CoE.

How an Empowered CoE Drives Change

“Command and control” leadership can stagnate change throughout your organization, but an empowered CoE drives innovation through effective collaboration and informed decision-making.

By bringing key change-makers within your company into one team, you break down silos and merge ideas and resources in service of a shared vision. An empowered CoE stands at the center of any effective governance model, bringing together business and IT teams and managing change with both people and systems. 

Change is easier for people to face with strong communications in place. An empowered Salesforce CoE is an important resource for identifying and communicating how new deployments will affect existing implementations and current users. This can make everyone on your teams more comfortable with change and more amenable to innovation.

The CoE also takes the lead in DevOps value stream management, ensuring that new features move seamlessly through testing and production. Cross-team collaboration results in a steady flow of value, translating to more satisfied customers and an overall higher Salesforce ROI. 

The CoE’s impact on Salesforce value

The primary role of a CoE is to develop a cross-department framework for operating and making decisions. 12x certified Salesforce Architect, Karen Kramer wrote,

“Without having a framework and vision in place to guide these decisions, your Salesforce instance can quickly fall into a state of disorder with disparate configurations and low user adoption."

In Salesforce Governance: A Little Goes A Long Way, Kramer explains that view companies have a consistent vision for Salesforce. She stresses that the first job of the CoE is to answer “why do we use Salesforce?” The answer to this needs to be consistent and persistent across the entire organization. A clearly outlined and shared vision goes a long way in achieving true buy-in and tying technology to business goals.

The vision should be concise and measurable in order to make it easy to evaluate success. A clear vision also becomes a guidepost for prioritizing which features should be implemented immediately and which should be held in a backlog. The CoE can regularly review and modify the vision as your organization’s overall priorities shift. 

Ultimately, the impact of the CoE is tied to value delivery. When teams are aligned on goals, processes and priorities, they’re more likely to release features that drive business productivity, increasing Salesforce ROI. Here’s where CoEs add value.

Prioritize Across Teams

With the clearly defined vision as a guide, the CoE helps set the priorities for Salesforce implementation across your organization’s disparate teams. When you have limited resources for running projects simultaneously, the CoE helps your business determine how to prioritize projects based on timelines and availability. CoEs can resolve conflicts, streamline resourcing and define next steps, ensuring that projects continue to move forward and create value for your business.

Streamline Processes

The CoE brings together many different teams, all of whom likely have their own individual processes despite a shared vision. By identifying and promoting best practices with a comprehensive view of every team, the CoE helps team leaders learn from one another and reduce inefficiencies. This collaboration and mutual learning helps drive change forward and foster a culture of continuous improvement. 

Reduce Risk

Coordinated change management processes also mitigates risk by ensuring that features are tested thoroughly before they move to production. Through effective use of developer sandboxes and consistent oversight of releases, you avoid errors, overwriting, and breaking things in production—which in turn avoids user frustration and eroded confidence in your Salesforce implementation. 

Plan for Growth

The new era of IT is rooted in an organization's ability to continually change. The role of the CoE isn’t to get an organization from point A to point B and then be done. Rather, A CoE provides a centralized place to plan and manage change as your teams pivot to meet the changing demands of customers and employees. Simply, a CoE gives you the consistency, collaboration, and effective communication you need to scale Salesforce and accelerate time to value. 

Learn More About Empowering CoE with Copado

Data is power. And your CoE can drive more impact when they have visibility into workstreams and throughput across your organization. Copado Value Stream Maps provide real-time visibility into your delivery pipelines, so you can identify bottlenecks and continually improve delivery. 

 

 

Book a demo

About The Author

Sr Director, Integrated Marketing Communications and Field Marketing

Halie is digital product and marketing strategist, with experience launching products and digital campaigns for B2B brands like Rackspace, Salesforce, Intel and HP. Her passion sits at the intersection of data and storytelling—and she's never met a pattern she didn't want to decipher.

Copado Launches Copado Explorer to Simplify and Streamline Testing on Salesforce
Exploring Top Cloud Automation Testing Tools
Master Salesforce DevOps with Copado Robotic Testing
Exploratory Testing vs. Automated Testing: Finding the Right Balance
A Guide to Salesforce Source Control
A Guide to DevOps Branching Strategies
Family Time vs. Mobile App Release Days: Can Test Automation Help Us Have Both?
How to Resolve Salesforce Merge Conflicts: A Guide
Copado Expands Beta Access to CopadoGPT for All Customers, Revolutionizing SaaS DevOps with AI
Is Mobile Test Automation Unnecessarily Hard? A Guide to Simplify Mobile Test Automation
From Silos to Streamlined Development: Tarun’s Tale of DevOps Success
Simplified Scaling: 10 Ways to Grow Your Salesforce Development Practice
What is Salesforce Incident Management?
What Is Automated Salesforce Testing? Choosing the Right Automation Tool for Salesforce
Copado Appoints Seasoned Sales Executive Bob Grewal to Chief Revenue Officer
Business Benefits of DevOps: A Guide
Copado Brings Generative AI to Its DevOps Platform to Improve Software Development for Enterprise SaaS
Celebrating 10 Years of Copado: A Decade of DevOps Evolution and Growth
Copado Celebrates 10 Years of DevOps for Enterprise SaaS Solutions
5 Reasons Why Copado = Less Divorces for Developers
What is DevOps? Build a Successful DevOps Ecosystem with Copado’s Best Practices
Scaling App Development While Meeting Security Standards
5 Data Deploy Features You Don’t Want to Miss
Top 5 Reasons I Choose Copado for Salesforce Development
How to Elevate Customer Experiences with Automated Testing
Getting Started With Value Stream Maps
Copado and nCino Partner to Provide Proven DevOps Tools for Financial Institutions
Unlocking Success with Copado: Mission-Critical Tools for Developers
How Automated Testing Enables DevOps Efficiency
How to Keep Salesforce Sandboxes in Sync
How to Switch from Manual to Automated Testing with Robotic Testing
Best Practices to Prevent Merge Conflicts with Copado 1 Platform
Software Bugs: The Three Causes of Programming Errors
How Does Copado Solve Release Readiness Roadblocks?
Why I Choose Copado Robotic Testing for my Test Automation
How to schedule a Function and Job Template in DevOps: A Step-by-Step Guide
Delivering Quality nCino Experiences with Automated Deployments and Testing
Best Practices Matter for Accelerated Salesforce Release Management
Maximize Your Code Quality, Security and performance with Copado Salesforce Code Analyzer
Upgrade Your Test Automation Game: The Benefits of Switching from Selenium to a More Advanced Platform
Three Takeaways From Copa Community Day
Cloud Native Applications: 5 Characteristics to Look for in the Right Tools
Using Salesforce nCino Architecture for Best Testing Results
How To Develop A Salesforce Testing Strategy For Your Enterprise
What Is Multi Cloud: Key Use Cases and Benefits for Enterprise Settings
5 Steps to Building a Salesforce Center of Excellence for Government Agencies
Salesforce UI testing: Benefits to Staying on Top of Updates
Benefits of UI Test Automation and Why You Should Care
Types of Salesforce Testing and When To Use Them
Copado + DataColada: Enabling CI/CD for Developers Across APAC
What is Salesforce API Testing and It Why Should Be Automated
Machine Learning Models: Adapting Data Patterns With Copado For AI Test Automation
Automated Testing Benefits: The Case For As Little Manual Testing As Possible
Beyond Selenium: Low Code Testing To Maximize Speed and Quality
UI Testing Best Practices: From Implementation to Automation
How Agile Test Automation Helps You Develop Better and Faster
Salesforce Test Cases: Knowing When to Test
DevOps Quality Assurance: Major Pitfalls and Challenges
11 Characteristics of Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) That Set Them Apart
7 Key Compliance Regulations Relating to Data Storage
7 Ways Digital Transformation Consulting Revolutionizes Your Business
6 Top Cloud Security Trends
API Management Best Practices
Applying a Zero Trust Infrastructure in Kubernetes
Building a Data Pipeline Architecture Based on Best Practices Brings the Biggest Rewards
CI/CD Methodology vs. CI/CD Mentality: How to Meet Your Workflow Goals
DevOps to DevSecOps: How to Build Security into the Development Lifecycle
DevSecOps vs Agile: It’s Not Either/Or
How to Create a Digital Transformation Roadmap to Success
Infrastructure As Code: Overcome the Barriers to Effective Network Automation
Leveraging Compliance Automation Tools to Mitigate Risk
Moving Forward with These CI/CD Best Practices
Top 3 Data Compliance Challenges of Tomorrow and the Solutions You Need Today
Top 6 Cloud Security Management Policies and Procedures to Protect Your Business
What are the Benefits of Principle of Least Privilege (POLP) for My Organization?
You Can’t Measure What You Can’t See: Getting to know the 4 Metrics of Software Delivery Performance
How the Public Sector Can Continue to Accelerate Modernization
Building an Automated Test Framework to Streamline Deployments
How To Implement a Compliance Testing Methodology To Exceed Your Objectives
Cloud Security: Advantages and Disadvantages to Accessibility
Copado Collaborates with IBM to Accelerate Digital Transformation Projects on the Salesforce Platform
Continuous Quality: The missing link to DevOps maturity
Why Empowering Your Salesforce CoE is Essential for Maximizing ROI
Value Stream Management: The Future of DevOps at Scale is Here
Is Salesforce Development ‘One Size Fits All?’
The 3 Pillars of DevOps Value Stream Management
Gartner Recommends Companies Adopt Value Stream Delivery Platforms To Scale DevOps
The Admin's Quick Glossary for Understanding Salesforce DevOps
Top 10 Copado Features for #AwesomeAdmins
10 Secrets Management Tools to Facilitate Stronger Security Practices
5 Cloud Security Compliance Basics to Prevent Data Breaches
5 Data Security Management Fundamentals
Cloud Agnostic vs Cloud Native: Developing a Hybrid Approach
Making DIE Model Security vs. the CIA Security Triad Complementary, Not Competitive
The CI/CD Pipeline: Why Testing Is Required at Every Stage
DevSecOps Roadmap: From Architecture to Automation
Pets vs. Cattle: More Than an Analogy for Modern Infrastructures
Data Compliance Solutions Provide Greater Control Over Enterprise Data
Copado Cares: Free Training, Collaboration and Product Access for Global Response to COVID-19
12 Types of Social Engineering Attacks to Look Out For
Go back to resources
There is no previous posts
Go back to resources
There is no next posts
Ready to Transform Your Software Delivery Process?

Explore more about

Security & Governance
Simplified Scaling: 10 Ways to Grow Your Salesforce Development Practice
Articles
10/5/2023
Simplified Scaling: 10 Ways to Grow Your Salesforce Development Practice
Continuous Quality: The missing link to DevOps maturity
Articles
10/5/2023
Continuous Quality: The missing link to DevOps maturity
Data Security for Banks: Standards for Success
Articles
10/5/2023
Data Security for Banks: Standards for Success
Managing 3rd Party Cyber Risk In A Rapidly Evolving Landscape
Articles
10/5/2023
Managing 3rd Party Cyber Risk In A Rapidly Evolving Landscape