The Eye of the Tiger

Successful companies are often guided by a board of directors/advisors. As a consultant, it’s hard to justify a board in the traditional sense. However, it’s still important to have objective opinions on the direction of your business. The key it to be open, honest, and above all not hide things or try to manipulate the outcome when working with the board. If you do, the board can’t function properly and you’ll derive little benefit or success.

I have several friends who are small business owners and we meet regularly to review each other’s businesses and offer advice. We create presentations and meet at a local coffee shop to advise each other. We try to do this once a quarter, though there is no set schedule. At the last review, I presented two options to my board. The first option was to keep working several consultant contracts and try to find more and the second option was to accept a six-month contract position.

If I took the contract position, the board felt I would lose the ‘eye of the tiger’. Basically, all my marketing activities, blog entries, certification prep, etc., would taper off. I would become complacent and enjoy my life. It appears that they were correct. While I am learning a lot, I have not focused on the other activities. While some of the activities are not critical, the blog and certification prep are things that will always be of benefit.

I have started to get back into things and will begin sharing the what I am learning as a junior administrator for a 600+ Enterprise Edition Org. I understand now why people ask how many users during the interview process. Being certified, having a bunch of trailhead badges, and working with small orgs did not prepare me for the challenges of a large organization.

Witer '17 Release Exam

I passed the Winter '17 release exam. There's a lot of material out there and a lot of updates. I found this link and the actual release notes to be the most helpful for preparation. I download the .pdf and used the search tool to check my answers (it's open book). Salesforce.study has a lot of material and they are always worth a look (that's how I found the links).

Now it's back to studying for the Certified Platform App Builder exam and my 2016 taxes (business and personal)...

New Year - New Certification

I have started studying for the Platform App Builder Certification exam. I chose this exam for two reasons:

1) Mike Wheeler just released his certification preparation course (link here)
2) Salesforce.study has a course on this as well. (link here)

I took a look back at what I did to pass the Administrator Certification exam and the biggest contributors to my success were Mike Wheeler's course and the materials on Salesforce.study. While I'll likely explore other materials, the effectiveness of these two sources drove my decision to study for the Platform App Builder Certification exam. Also, while I enjoy being an administrator, I think long term being a developer is where it is at.

I am also going to study a little differently. First I am using a time tracker (link here) to track how much time I spend studying. Secondly, while I am going to create a study notes document, I am not going to publish it all at once. I am going to post sections on the blog weekly.

The purpose of the blog is to showcase what I am doing to develop my Salesforce skills. I think multiple entries will be easier to digest for people as compared to a whole document. Plus it gives me content. While I am doing a lot, most of it is proprietary to my clients. I can't take screenshots of their data, so I'd have to recreate things in my developer account. I have some tools on that and I may start doing videos of it; time will tell.

Regarding my study process, the first thing I am going to do is watch the Wheeler videos. Then I am going to re-watch them and create my notes. After that, I'll tackle the Salesforce.study materials and finally take the exam. In between, I'll likely look for more materials to beef up my knowledge and I'll post those as well.

Happy New Year!!!

Upserting Data

I’ve been doing a lot of admin stuff this week and enjoying it! The most interesting thing I did was upsert data to a field that I created. To facilitate reporting for my client I created a picklist so that the Inside Sales Rep working on a Lead/Account/Opportunity can be associated with the record. The Field Sales Rep will be the owner of the record but Management still needs to know which records and which rep worked on it. There were over 2,000 records that had to be corrected.

To accomplish this I created a report with the relevant data, exported it, updated it in Excel, and then upserted it modify the records. The key was to use the Salesforce ID so that I could properly amend the correct record. Not a big deal and the solution is all over the web. But the key factor is that now I too can say that I did this.

The intent of the blog is to showcase what I’ve done and this is something that I did. It’s also something I can write about.

The Website is Up!!!

So my DIY website is up and running. It needs more work and I already found a few typos but it's a start.  I'll still post here for the blog, which links to the website (click here)

They’re Impressed by my Experience?

Over the past few weeks, I have gotten a lot of calls about potential positions based on my Linked In profile. I’ll be the first to admit that my profile is short on details about what I do. This is partly because I am too busy doing whatever it is I do to update it and partly a result of wanting to be able to include some meaning full accomplishments. Certainly, a few passwords resets a month is not that impressive.

On the off chance they are reading the blog, I have included a pie chart of the breakdown of my duties below. My main task it working in improving utilization (process improvements such as optimizing the mobile version, tracking data better, etc.) and providing insight into the sales process (reports, dashboards, marketing ROI, etc.). I have been providing training for new and existing users, both on-site and remotely. I also am assisting with an ERP integration by cleaning up page layouts and fields as well as general administrator duties, such as password resets, custom reports, etc. For completeness, I am working with ~35 users on an Enterprise Edition organization.

Gemba, It’s Not A Monster Sent to Destroy Tokyo

Gemba is Japanese for "the real place." It is where the work is and often where the problems are. In my engineering practice, I need to see how a product or process is performed and speak with the operators directly. I try to avoid the managers since they often don’t know the real story. I try to practice this as a Salesforce Administrator as well. In my current role, most of the sales force is remote which makes it challenging. Conversely, I have looked at roles where I might be remote, making the practice of Gemba difficult as well.

The issues I struggle with is how to do the “Gemba Walk” remotely. There are several tools which make it easier as compared to monitoring a process. The first is the ability login in as a user. Using this access, I can at least see what the users are seeing.

One thing that has not worked has been relying on emails and phone conversations alone. I use the language of Salesforce and often the users don’t have the same lexicon as me, which leads to confusion on my part. It also results in me solving the wrong problem.

I am learning that I need to have them walk me through the steps that they follow while I am in my instance of Salesforce so that I can see what they are doing. I do this as a System Administrator so that I can determine if it is an access issue or a something else. If I can see it and they can’t it is usually a permissions problem. If I can’t see it, then I need to dig in a little more.

So while I can’t always be at Gemba, I can get a sense of the real action going on…