Ideally, every change you make to your tech stack is part of a scheduled release management process . Making changes on the fly increases risk. Ops teams can take a cue from DevOps and use release management protocols to make the process of change more systematic. With this approach, every new release is a change project. And every new release should be guided by change management.
It will take time to set up your change management processes, but they'll pay off in the long run. You'll spend less time putting out fires and more time monitoring the impacts of your changes and planning your next strategy.
Change management processes require that you outline your goals for your project upfront. This forces you to ask yourself why you're making each change, whether it aligns with your objectives, and how you'll measure its success. If clear goals aren't in place, you run the risk of making unnecessary changes that waste your time and disrupt users.
Failing to outline your goals also makes it more difficult to show the value of the work you're doing. Ops teams have the potential to play an important role in strategy and planning. Teams that can demonstrate the impact of their expertise will help encourage leaders to see the true potential of ops.
Change can be uncomfortable. In any organization, you'll encounter users who are married to the way things have always been done. And you'll find others who aren't necessarily resistant to change but just aren't engaged with how it impacts their day-to-day lives. Whether you're performing a major Salesforce data migration or rolling out new features, it's important to put yourself in the users' shoes. While you may take the benefits of change for granted, they need an incentive to get on board. Salesforce may be a critical part of their jobs, but it's not the only part.
From the user's perspective, the tech stack is supposed to make things easier and more seamless. Adopting change can feel like an unnecessary inconvenience. It's up to ops teams, as the drivers of change, to help users see the benefits and give them the training they need to successfully adapt.
It's not uncommon for change projects to lead to errors that call for you to put out fires and implement a whole new set of change projects. These unintended errors are caused by a lack of Change Intelligence. They're both the worst nightmare and the most common risk involved in change projects. Anything can go wrong, from lost data to broken automations, and even lost revenue. They also make user adoption much more difficult.
Change management tools like Arovy give you insight into the impact of change before you make it. By being able to see the dependencies of your data within Salesforce, you can avoid the potential landmines that come with making change.
The most important aspect of effective change management is commitment. As a team, ops has to commit to establishing and following your change management process. When your communication, deployment, and training are delivered clearly and consistently, user adoption will reflect that.
To get everyone on the same page you need a plan for delivering effective change management. Every change management process should follow clear steps: