Diary of a Saasy Girl

As part of one of my talks at Inspire East I was asked to host a panel in the afternoon, titled: How not to screw up your next Salesforce project. I was joined by 4 other people; a great representation from the ecosystem to participate on the panel and together I think we had around 40 years of Salesforce experience between us. Seriously, we should write a book... When I was asked to host the panel I first put together questions that we could work through, then ran them past my panelists for their input. I'm going to share with you the questions we came up with and some of the keys outputs from the conversation they generated.  1. What is considered a project? Funnily enough, I hadn't thought of this for a starter question. Having worked in a project environment for many years my mindset is already switched onto this way of working. But, for our audience, this could be new to them. So, let's start here.  A project is a defined package of work that has been identi...

Yesterday saw the return of Inspire East, a conference based in Cambridge targeting a Salesforce audience from the eastern region of the UK, who don't usually get the opportunity to travel into London for events. Its a cosier event, compared to some other offerings, but this more select audience does make the day feel more intimate and the speakers more approachable to attendees. Hosted in an amazing learning environment, the Moller Centre, how could we not come away inspired from a cracking line up of speakers, some whom had traveled from all over the world for this event.  We cannot forget a nod to the sponsors, without whom these events cannot happen. It is only through their support that we can come together to share, learn and network. The day kicked off with an opening keynote from Stephanie Herrera, Computer Futures VP and Salesforce MVP. She had been known to me for some time, I had seen her Trailblazer Video  that gave a quick summary of her story but Stephan...

A while ago a post went out on Twitter asking for advice on change management processes when it comes to enhancement requests. I pinged back to say I would write a few lines for them. Their response to my work was; "wow, have you written this as a blog?" I hadn't, so I thought I would, with a few tweaks. Here it is.   You’re now live in a Salesforce Org and now need to manage enhancements and change requests from many stakeholders in the business. Each stakeholder who raises a request will consider theirs to be the most important. As a Delivery team you may start to feel squeezed and pressured to deliver everything for everyone at the same time. Guess what, it's impossible. You’ll end up disappointing everyone and burning yourself out. You need structure before this gets really messy. Here’s a way to do this: Create a sense of product ownership within the business What this means is i dentify key stakeholders, Department Product Owne...

As a kid at school I would get regular reports and I remember one that said “Amanda is a lovely girl, loves to chat”. My dad read this and thought, well that’s nice, my daughter is stupid. My father aspired for me to be a Secretary when I grew up and then adjusted this to be a Bilingual Secretary when he realised I had a flair for languages.  As for me, I didn’t really have a ‘calling’. I did well in my GCSE’s so did my A Levels. I got the results from them which meant I could go to University, the first in my family to do so. I studied Business as I thought I would be more useful for a career.  Fast forward many years and I entered into the job market and had a few roles in Sales, Marketing and PR. Don’t get me wrong, I was good at these roles but I just got a bit tired of the forever shifting values on targets. It was time for a career change.  I moved into a Business Development role to help build a team and processes when my Director said we needed a ...