Salesforce Agile Accelerator - Part 1

Hands on with Salesforce Agile Accelerator

Product Tags

Systematically arrange your work by classifying them into catalog/categories using Product Tags. Take an example that as a business analyst you are working on a project that impacts multiple departments like Sales, Support, Tele business, Marketing etc. Team members will be divided to work on each areas. To differentiate your work and help the team to identify the work from the product backlog you can use unique product tags for each category. 

Create your Product Tags:

 While creating Teams you can directly type Product tag. Once you type the name and save the Teams form it will automatically save the name under “Product Tags” Tab.

I tried assigning a new product tag for an existing team which already has a product tag assigned. I received following error which means that Salesforce Agile Accelerator does not allow members outside the team to make any changes to the team once the team has an existing active product tag.

  

Click on the Product Tag to explore more options

Assignment Rule for Product Tags:

Assignment Rule will automate the work assignment for the teams based on the product tag. This may sound familiar like creating assignment rules for Leads in salesforce, the concept is very similar although creating assignment rules for Product tags is different and much easier in Salesforce Agile Accelerator.

Navigation:

Go to Product Tags tab-> click on the product tag-> click on the <<  and this should open a new window. If you would like to create a new Assignment rule then click on “Create New Button”

Please Note: Create New Button will not be visible for you, if you donot belong to a team that has the product tag assigned. For example I am logged in as SFDC Beginner.  I don’t see “Create New” option for product tags “1-2-3 Marketing Team” because I am not part of either the team assigned to the product tag. 

“Create New” button  is visible for “Tele business” product tag, because I am part of this team. 

For example, in 1-2-3 sfdc all the Production P1/High Priority issues should be assigned to a senior member of the team “Rico Penguin”.  

Assignment Rule:

Click on create new assignment rule, and fill the user names for assignee, product owner, followers etc..

Required fields to save the assignment rule are product owner and assignee. Once you hit save then you can customize the assignment rule with more options. 

Click edit on the assignment rule and observe the page. To make the work assignment more manageable, Salesforce has added more options to the assignment rule like who will be the assignee if the severity of the ticket/ user story is 1, 2 ,3 etc.

 

Salesforce Agile accelerator will prompt you to choose the team if you belong to more than one team.

Assignment rule concept is very similar to few ticket management applications, for example ‘Service Now”. In this application if an Incident is submitted with P1 Category the ticket is automatically assigned to the department and a notification is sent to higher management. Similarly in Salesforce Agile Accelerator when a work that belongs to this product tag will have severity 1 it will automatically assign it to the defined assignee and will send real time updates to the followers.

In the next post we will learn how to create Sprints in Salesforce Agile Accelerator.

Thank you once again for visiting my blog.

Hands on with Salesforce Agile Accelerator

Accelerate your Teams growth with Salesforce Agile Accelerator. Multiple teams and departments including business users and stakeholders can use this tool to make the work visible across the organization. Salesforce Agile Accelerator provides instant visibility and real time updates of your teams’ work on web/Salesforce and mobile/Salesforce1. Facilitate collaboration using chatter, get real time status of the team’s work with reports and dashboard and forecast the future using burn down charts.

And this is just the beginning….take a deep dive in to this impressive tool and find out on your own how this tool can help you better manage your work.

Pre Requisite: Install Salesforce Agile Accelerator in your sandbox. Please refer my previous blog " Saleforce Agile Accelerator Installation " to know the installation steps. 

Teams

What is Team?

A Team consists of the workforce that gets the work done. Agile practices speaks about having a self-sufficient team that has team members with all the roles and skills required to deliver the output/ get the work done. Which means ideally a team should have enough resources that during the sprint they don’t have to be dependent on other teams for their work to get done. Take an example of an IT company 1-2-3 SFDC a Scrum team consist of a Development team – Product Owner, Scrum Master, Business Owner, Program Manager, And the Development Team- Business Analyst, QA, Programmers/ Developers, Other etc.

You can add up to 33 roles as your team in Salesforce Agile Accelerator. 

Users:

Note: Make sure that your team members exist in the Salesforce environment. If not then create your team members in the Salesforce. Go to Setup -> Administer ->Manage Users-> Users.  If users don’t exist in salesforce you cannot save or add that team member.  

Once the users are in Salesforce you are good to create your team in Salesforce Agile Accelerator.

How to create a Team in Salesforce Agile Accelerator

Click on the Teams Tab from the tab section

Next click on the “All Teams link” and then “New Team”

Once the team members are added you can start adding the names for the team. You will also notice that the field will prompt their names automatically since you just added them in Salesforce. 

The form will ask you all the basic information about your Team. Team Name, Tag, Department, Domain, Team Members etc. Team allocation is important for any team to know the availability of the team members for that Sprint.

Team members and their roles varies from team to team. You can have stakeholders, business owners, other team members, managers, end users etc. in your team. They can play an important role in your team of providing inputs, requirements, assisting in taking decisions etc. but are not responsible to deliver work.  

These members may or may not be required to record their work. So for these team members the allocation would be 0% and for the core team it would be 100%.

Now take an example that one of the developers from your core team will be out for 2 days this Sprint cycle.

Total number of working days this Sprint = 10 days

No of Days taking Holiday = 2

No of days available = Total working days – no of days not available % 100= 10-2 = 80%

So the allocation % for the developer would be 80% for this Sprint. 

Post in Progress.......

How to Install Salesforce Agile Accelerator

Salesforce Agile accelerator is here!! Great tool with some unique features like integrating data with Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, bar chart, chatter posts, Epic, Kanban, Reports, Dashboards and many more. We started using this app while it was in the beta mode and we simply love it. This tool has amazing flexibility and ability to accommodate customization… and why not!! It is launched by Salesforce. I would recommend this tool for anyone or everyone who want to manage and get work done. 

Refer my article on Salesforce Agile Accelerator to know more details about this tool. 

Let us learn how to install Salesforce Agile Accelerator from appexchange:

Salesforce Agile accelerator Installation Steps

Step 1: Go to Salesforce app exchange

Step 2: Click on Get it Now

Step 3: App Exchange will prompt you to log in to your Salesforce org

Step 4: Next select your target org - Sandbox or Production

Step 5: Read the terms and conditions and click install

I am installing Salesforce Agile Accelerator in the developer org and so I have selected Production as my org. You can view the components from the “View Components” section which can be found in the bottom section additional details section. 

Step 6: When you install a package, package related components are installed in your org like- tabs, workflow, code, apex trigger, fields, objects, pages, permission sets, tabs, resources etc. and these can be reviewed under view components section. 

The package will provide you with three options to choose your target audience for the installation -admins, all users and for specific profiles. Once the installation is complete Salesforce sends you a confirmation email, you can refer Salesforce Agile Accelerator release notes for more information under version number setcion as shown in the screen shot.

Step 7: Once you click on done,you will be routed to the installed package section of your Salesforce org or you can go to Setup -> Build->Installed Package. 

Step 8: Package has been successfully installed in your org. You will find “Agile Accelerator” App under the App section on the top right corner of your salesforce landing page. 

Click on the agile accelerator app and observe your landing page. You will be thrilled to see so many new tabs, objects, reports and dashboard, epic, Kanban and many more...

Explore each section of Salesforce Agile Accelerator and enjoy your new tool. 

Salesforce Chatter Feed Tracking

We are going to learn Feed Tracking in this Post!

What is Feed Tracking anyways?

Feed Tracking allows users to see updates for objects and records that they follow in their chatter feed.

Example?

A Sales user at 1-2-3 SFDC is interested in enabling Chatter on the opportunity and contacts. User is also interested in receiving field updates on his chatter post if certain fields change on the records that he follows on the contacts and opportunities.  

How can I enable Feed tracking? 

Go to Setup ->Chatter->Feed Tracking

Section 1: On the Left pane you will find the list of objects available for feed tracking. The tracked column shows the number of fields currently being tracked under that object.

Section2: Check the box of “Enable Feed Tracking” (As shown in Section 2)  

Section3: Once you check mark this box all the fields available under this object becomes available for the field tracking. You can select up to 20 fields on an object for field tracking. (As shown in section 3)

You can also enable feed for all the related objects. You will find this option available at the bottom of every field tracking page.

What Objects can I enable Feed Tracking for?

Feed Tracking can be enabled for the following:

Standard Objects: accounts, article types, assets, campaigns, cases, contacts, contracts, dashboards, events, leads, opportunities, products, reports, solutions, and tasks.

Users, Chatter groups, topics, custom objects, external objects

How does Feed Tracking work?

Take an example of contacts. Feed Tracking has been enabled by your admin for contacts. You are a sales user and following few records that you do not own, and you would like to be notified on chatter regarding the changes made by other users on certain fields like phone, address, name etc. 

What Fields you can’t track?

·        Rollup summary fields

·        Auto-number

·        Formula Fields

·        Expected Revenue field on opportunities

·        Solution Title and Solution Details fields on solutions

Feed Tracking Challenges:

If your organizations Community Site users/ Partner Portal users have access to the objects that have been enabled for Feed Tracking they would be able to see the updates on their chatter feeds. This is tricky because if you are inactivating a contact and posting internal notes, these would be visible on the community sites.

Workaround?

You can only enable chatter for these objects and uncheck all the fields from the field tracking. Go to Setup-> Feed Tracking->  enable feed tracking for the object and un check all the fields.

In such exceptional cases there is another way you can do field tracking. Enable Chatter for objects you want to track the field level changes. Of course you will have to train users to post comments while making changes on any record in the chatter post. This way you can track the changes made on any records. Chatter provides you with two options for a post

1)      Internal Users only

a.      Chatter Post for all Internal Users

2)      All with Access

a.      Chatter Post for all users including community members who have access to this record or who are currently following this record.

Conclusion: Chatter Feed is a great feature to track and post field level changes on the records.Depending on the sharing rules and field level security users can see changes in the chatter feed. 

Agile Methodology at Salesforce

Agile development is believed to be one of the top many reasons why salesforce.com is so successful. This method encourages continuous collaboration among stakeholders and frequent delivery of useful functionality. One fine day, I was talking to one of my friends who works at salesforce.com. We were discussing work culture, projects, teams, Agile, releases, enhancements etc. I was very excited to know that both of us are working in Scrum environment. It became more interesting when he started telling me this new methodology that salesforce.com has adopted – “ADM” also known as Adaptive Delivery Methodology.

ADM is a flavor of popular agile methodologies and framework which mainly focuses on short cycles, iteration, learning, team improvement. While the main technique that salesforce.com follows is Scrum  Lean management principles govern the Decision making and product development strategy. One of the main principles that they follow is optimizing the value stream for the whole organization and not just teams. These teams consist of all the roles required for the smooth functioning of the product delivery at the end of each sprints without being dependent on any other teams. Salesforce.com promotes scrum master certifications within the organization.

Highlights of Adaptive Delivery Methodology-

• Self Sufficient Teams
• Prioritized work
• Shorter Sprints with Time Boxed Work
• Daily Stand up meetings
• Effective Communication between Team Members
• Visualize the ongoing work
• Transparency between Team, Team Members and Management

The 7 lean principles that salesforce.com follows are 

1. Eliminate Waste

Waste also known as Muda is something that does not create any value for the customer. Half done work, task swaps, defects, unnecessary transportation of resources are all examples of waste.

2. Build Quality In

A satisfied customer whose requirements are fulfilled with a simple system, less clicks

And which gets the job done correctly

3. Create Knowledge

Learning is critical for any successful organization. To keep up with the everyday challenges at work employees have to keep themselves updated. Also if the work is stored in the repository, these can be referred by the team members who solve similar issues.

4. Defer Commitment

Postpone the decision for the changes that cannot be reverted back. By postponing such decisions we are actually keeping all our options open. Keep balance between late but not too late. Gather enough information and then take decisions which does not affect the team and timeline but is also a safe game to play.

5. Deliver Fast

Long delivery will increase the change in requirements. Fast delivery makes sure customer is satisfied by receiving frequent delivery of useful output. Build your product fast and release it in the market let customers use it and then improve it in small increments based on the real customer feedback.

6. Respect People

Everyone should be treated same irrespective of their knowledge, diversity, position, background.Recognize and appreciate the work, let individuals take their own decisions about their work. Respond to your team members immediately, listen to their questions and concerns. Make efforts to let them feel that they are valued in the organization.

7. Optimize the Whole

Make efforts to make the entire system effective and not just one or two teams. All the teams should have sufficient workers with all the roles necessary to deliver output or a product as a standalone group and not dependent on other teams for work.

Source: Agile Methodology at Salesforce, an Inside Look

What are electronic and digital signatures?

How many of us have received this email? “Please sign the attached document and send us the scanned copy” and how many times we have felt this unnecessary task to print out a document just for a small signature and then scan it back to send it via email, right? Neither you nor your customer would prefer to stick with the traditional time consuming process of scanning documents for signature. The cycle time for sending the document and receiving the customer’s signature traditionally takes minimum a week. It is very important for any business to be lean “remove waste”. Most important of all is to improve the process where cycle time is more. If you can save time you eventually save money…after all we all know the fact “Time is Money”. 

Electronic signatures have brought the revolution in the industry by offering quick and secure method for signatures.  It is a boom for industry to get online applications signed using android and IOS devices, smart phone, laptop and computers. With millions and millions of documents getting signed everyday more and more companies are adopting the eSignature services and closing major deals.

What is the difference between Electronic Signature and Digital Signature?

Electronic Signature is any type of electronic approval sound, symbol or process which is adopted by the person who is willing to sign a document

Digital Signature have hidden data in them which is not visible to human eyes. Contracts always run with the risk of changing the terms and conditions without getting noticed. This is when the digital signatures come in to place. If any data or terms and conditions have been changed in the contract the digital signature changes. These changes can be encoded in the computer and the contract becomes void. This helps in authentication of contracts

How does eSignature Service work?

The best part about E-signature applications is they are affordable and easy to implement and that any size companies can transition themselves from the traditional way of scanning to the automated digital signature process. There are ton of companies offering the E- signature services with great customer support, if you are a salesforce user you can implement the trail version and feel the actual user experience by using it and sending documents. I have worked with many eSignature services but my favorite ones are DocuSign and EchoSign. For installation visit the company website and download the trail version. You can either use them as a standalone tool or integrate with any CRM application. Take an example of salesforce – If I were to explain you DocuSign in few simple steps I would say- download DocuSign-> Configure it-> Place the “Send Contracts” button on whichever object you wish to send the contracts-> Bingo you’re done. It is that simple.

In case you didn't know:

• Electronic signatures are legally valid in most of the countries around the world as per ELECTRONIC SIGNATURES IN GLOBAL AND NATIONAL COMMERCE ACT
  
• More than 60 countries are using E- Signature services
• From legal perspective electronic signature and digital Signature are two different terms
• Multiple people can sign one document
• You can store all the E-Signature data and archive it in the cloud
• Signers can be verified using phone authentication
• You can customize your own signature, it takes less than 45 seconds to sign a document electronically and return back to the sender.

User Story Mapping

I love working with agile! We work in scrum environment and follow biweekly sprints to get our work done. Work is in the form of user stories further broken down into tasks staged in to the product backlog. A user story is a brief description of a feature desired by the customer from his or her perspective. The typical format of a user story is – As a Sales Manager (customer), I want to send contracts electronically (goal) so that I can save time from manually sending the contracts (reason). It is the job of a business analyst to work with the customers to understand how they imagine a feature for the product. The business analyst structures the information collected in the form of a user story which is then staged on product backlog.

Each sprint, I see more work that gets done, while Scrum focuses on prioritizing the product backlog, we still miss the big picture view.I recently came across a new concept of breaking down big stories as you tell them called “Story Map”. The story map concept is about telling the entire story of your project, it begins with documenting the thinking on sticky notes which means document while the stakeholder is talking. Now create a visualization to support the project discussion. Place or stick the cards on a wall where everyone can see it. Arranged cards should answer some basic questions of what are we building? Why are we building it? What are the desired outcomes of the actions? Who will be using it and how will it be benefiting the user?What are the types of activities people would use the product for?

The cards are then organized based on which work is to be done now, that is “critical user stories for the project” and which ones are nice to have, “the not so important ones” can be pushed to the end. The concept of mapping the stories while the user is talking helps to identify the holes in the thinking. By brainstorming and continuous mapping we realize that many times we reach dead end walls that initially are realized as requirement but eventually end up as nice to have requirements . This is when the story mapping comes into the picture when you visually show the user by layering the sticky notes into various categories of identifying the critical requirements and pulling all the other related requirements to take the project till the finish line.

One important aspect of story mapping is to cover from the beginning till the end and not get lost into too much details the point is to cover the broader perspective of the project/user stories. By documenting the high level stuff on cards you eventually get the big things now these can be broken up into details. One of the greatest outcomes from the story mapping is, when you have too much to build it gives an idea to the stakeholders to minimize the product requirements and compress it to something feasible to fit in the timeline and budget.

Product backlog contains the entire list of the work needed to achieve a project. This is further prioritized based on the importance of the work – High, Medium and Low. Product backlog prioritization helps to understand what will be achieved next but it does not provide an overview of the big picture.

User Story Mapping helps to understand the entire functionality of the system and  the team to stay focused on the user requirements. Once the user story mapping is done the team clearly understands what they are building and why?. This helps to have better communication within themselves and the customers about the project from beginning till the end. The concept is very similar to a map, before we go for trekking by looking at a map we get an idea of the trail and what kind of journey we are expecting so there are no surprises, similarly with user story map you get a high level idea of the project and when your are actually working on a user story you would know at which location you are on the map. With this information you can get a fair idea of who is the end user involved, secondary users getting impacted, and stakeholders to be communicated.

Story mapping benefits:

• Provides broader view (big picture) of the backlog
• Helps to groom the product backlog in more efficient way
• Perfect for brainstorming and generating customer oriented user stories
• Graphical representation of the project
• Can be used to discuss the scope of the project
• Helps to visualize project progress and do reality check for the feasibility of the project
• Helps to do better project planning

Salesforce.com Advanced Administrator Sample Questions - Part 4

1. 1-2-3 SFDC org would like to disable territory management from salesforce, however they want to keep the options open to re-enable territory management in the future. As a salesforce admin which amongst the following would you recommend? Select 3

          

           A.   Territory Management cannot be disabled 

           B.   Configuration and sharing records can be used as a backup for future to re-enable territory 

                management. 

           C.   Once Territory Management is disabled you have to rebuild it from scratch 

           D.   Sharing records and role hierarchy can be used as a backup for future to re-enable territory 

                management. 

2. How can you clean up all of the Territory Management feature's configuration and associated sharing records?

            

           A.   Deleting Role Hierarchy

           B.   By Disabling Territory Management

           C.   Deleting the territories

           D.   Using Data Loader

3. Which amongst the following is applicable for collaborative forecast. Select any 2

            A.   Predict and plan the sales cycle from pipeline to closed sales 

            B.   Manage sales expectations throughout the organization with Collaborative Forecasts.

            C.   Prior to migrating to collaborative Forecasts, consider exporting opportunity pipeline data.

            D.   Customizable Forecasts must be disabled before enabling collaborative forecast

            E.   Manage leads and opportunity throughout the organization with Collaborative Forecasts.

4. How can you move metadata between a local directory and a Salesforce organization?

           A.   The Force.com Migration Tool

           B.   SOQL

           C.   Data Loader

           D.   Apex coding

5. Which amongst the following can be tracked using setup audit trail?

           

           A.   Company information, default settings such as language or locale, and company message 

                changes

           B.   Database operations, system processes, and errors

           C.   Domain name changes

           D.   Page layout, action layout, and search layout changes

           E.   Transactions that are triggered by lead conversion

6. In 1-2-3 SFDC org org users are complaining that when converting a Lead: they are receiving this error- "Unable to convert lead that is in use by workflow"? How would you trouble shoot this issue? 

Select 2

            A.   There is a time-based workflow action pending that is related to the Lead.

            B.   The Lead that you are trying to convert is currently in an Approval Process

            C.   User does not have permissions to convert lead

            D.   Lead Mapping is incorrectly set for accounts

            E.   There is a validation rule restricting the lead conversion

7. In 1-2-3 SFDC org org users are complaining that when converting a Lead: they are receiving this error- "Unable to convert lead that is in use by workflow"? How would you trouble shoot this issue?  

  Select 2 

            A.   Lead Mapping issue

            B.   Time-Based Workflow is pending

            C.   Profile access issue

            D.   Permission Set issue

I am purposely not posting the answers to the questions. I recommend you all to search the answers on your own on Salesforce help. Please post your comments below in case you are unsure about any question or the answer. Thank you for visiting my blog, I wish you all best of luck! 

More Advanced Admin Questions-

Salesforce.com Advanced Administrator Sample Questions - Part 1

Salesforce.com Advanced Administrator Sample Questions - Part 2

Salesforce.com Advanced Administrator Sample Questions - Part 3