Are you ready to migrate from Salesforce Classic to Lightning but aren’t sure of where to start? In this video, Allison Arthur provides best practices for transitioning to Lightning.
Video Transcript
Hello everyone, I’m Allison Arthur with Soliant Consulting.
My team and I have been exploring the best ways to transition from Salesforce Classic to Lightning, as we help our clients through the process. Through these experiences, we have developed a list of Best Practices, and today I’d like to share those with you.
Step One: Set Transition Goals
First, as attractive as Lightning is, some organizations are either just not ready for the change operationally, or they don’t need the new functionality enough to invest in a transition for their entire team.
However, if a switch to Lightning will enhance your business offerings, empower your team, or drive efficiency in your operations, either now or in the future, it’s time to outline your strategy.
First, you need to determine what you need Salesforce to do that Classic can’t handle for you. What do you want to accomplish with Lightning? Work with your business leaders and team members to outline your goals and prioritize features in Lightning.
Step Two: Map Workflows
Next, to get a good return on investment in Lightning, your internal processes have to mirror your tools. So, if you move forward with a Lightning transition, you have to adjust your business operations too. Otherwise, you risk setting up roadblocks between your tools and your teams.
To avoid these roadblocks, work with your team to outline all existing and proposed processes before moving on to development. If someone expresses hesitation or concern over how things will work in Lightning, don’t move forward without coming to some sort of resolution. Don’t forget, everyone uses Salesforce differently. Include as many people as possible in this discussion to ensure a flawless transition.
Step Three: Development Guide
Once you have a roadmap for what you would like to do with Lightning, you’re ready to move on to a plan on how to make it all happen. This step is crucial to the process. A clear guide for your development team reduces risks and hiccups in the transition before you even start.
Start with your prioritized Lightning functionality. Then, rank features from there. Consider how everything ties together. Do specific developers and admins need to tackle pieces together or separately? Outline their schedules to avoid overlaps in needs and consequent roadblocks.
Don’t forget about design in your ultimate user experience. You want layouts that your users can easily navigate and easily understand. Otherwise, the transition will confuse your team members instead of empowering them.
If you’re planning on integrating Lightning with outside systems, pause to consider how this will affect the platform and your team’s needs. Integrations are great and takes Salesforce to the next level. But they often throw wrenches into your plans. Take some time to explore what your development team needs. Then add capabilities to your implementation through integrations.
Step Four: Readiness Check
Your next step is quick and easy. You just run a Lightning readiness check. It can uncover unforeseen bugs or org incompatibilities you may have missed. It’s a great extra review to keep things from falling through the cracks.
Step Five: Work in a Sandbox
Now, it’s time to get started. Use the sandbox to isolate and test your changes without affecting other developers’ work. This sandbox testing environment also helps key stakeholders and super users test out new functionality and provide critical feedback before your official launch. This helps you eliminate more bugs before going live.
Step Six: Test Goals
Okay, now it’s time to take quick pause and double back with all of your key stakeholders. Will the new Lightning features you’ve built accomplish the goals you’ve outlined in Step One? If they don’t, take a step back and evaluate where you’ve veered off path. Correct your course now, not after launch. Rinse and repeat this process until you feel confident that your functionality matches your organization’s goals.
Step Seven: Roll Out to Power Users
Now it’s time to see how your power users feel about your new Lightning layouts. Salesforce makes this easy. You can roll out the new functionality to specific accounts, one by one. Gather feedback from these power users. Then, make changes as needed, and release updated functionality again. Get as many kinks ironed out before rolling out to your entire organization. Once someone learns something the wrong way, or makes a first impression decision on how a feature will work, there’s no going back.
Step Eight: Write Documentation
Once everything feels ready to go, you need to write up a reference document to ensure the new functionality release goes smoothly. Don’t let adoption come to a screeching halt just because users can’t figure out how to do something. Build a comprehensive documentation guide based on the outline of workflows and processes, use cases, and goals you wrote up in Step One. This helps developers, admins and even users understand how to edit, update, and use your Lightning functionality as intended.
Step Nine: Introductions & Training
Using the documentation you created in the previous step, train your users on the new Lightning functionality before rolling out the changes as live. Your power users can train other users on how to leverage the new functionality properly and find the information they need. Once admins learn the new system, they can make tweaks on their own. This promotes independent management of your org and opens up opportunities for adoptions of new Lightning features in the future.
Okay, it’s time to go live.
Step Ten: Launch Lightning!
Keep a core team of developers available for the week or two following launch, just in case. Then, it’s time for your trained administrators to take over.
If you’re looking for guidance through this process, or have questions about a specific step, feel free to reach out to our team at info@soliantconsulting.com
Thank you for watching our video on Best Practices to transition from Classic to Lightning. Don’t forget to check out our website for more tips on customizing and leveraging Lightning.
