The 3 Major Phases of Your Lightning Rollout

We know that you are excited to use the Lightning Experience, and you probably have excited users as well. But we also know that it can feel like launching a rollout project will be a huge undertaking. To help you get started, we think the easiest way for you to approach your Lightning rollout is to break it down into phases.

Migrating to Lightning doesn’t have to be all or nothing. The high-level phases of your rollout can be broken down into three easy steps: Learn, Prepare and Engage. Watch our webinar with Sr. Admin Evangelist LeeAnne Templeman and Director of Product Management, Jean-Baptiste Minchelli for the full step by step guide.

1. Learn About Lightning

As an Admin, it’s important for you to learn as much as you can about Lightning so you can be your company’s Lightning expert. Your expertise in Lightning will be invaluable as more executives and end-users start asking about it.

There are many different resources for you to learn about Lightning. The best place to start is Trailhead. Here are the different trails you can explore:

Migrate to Lightning Experience

Get Started with Lightning Experience

Also, be sure to review the release notes. Each release, brand new Lightning features become available and classic features are updated in Lightning.

2. Prepare Using the Migration Assistant

Assess just how ready your org is to move to Lightning by doing the Lightning Readiness Check. You can find the Readiness Check on the Migration Assistant page in Setup. For a step-by-step explanation of how to get the report read this post. Or follow the steps in this GIF:

The report will show you what features you have enabled that will work perfectly in Lightning and which features will be available soon and when. The report is also helpful because it lists out all your custom objects, fields, and integrations in one place.

Once you’ve done the readiness check, you can ‘preview’ Lightning within your org. This is a great opportunity to see how your org looks without enabling it.

3. Engage with Your Users

Start by enabling Lightning for yourself

Once you’ve done the Readiness Check and evaluated the state of your org, you should enable Lightning for yourself.

Enable Lightning for yourself using Permission Sets or Profiles:

• Evaluate your permission sets and who (if anybody) has Lightning permissions
• Create a new permission set and call it “Lightning Experience”. Scroll down the picklist and find “Lightning Experience User” and check it. Hit next, and save
• Next, check your user under the add assignments panel

Here’s a great video from our Admin #LightningChallenge that will show you step by step how to set up a permission set and assign it to yourself.

Create a pilot group

Once you have Lightning enabled for yourself, and you’re feeling comfortable using it, it’s time to share the experience! Select a group of end users and run a pilot of Lightning Experience.

Here are our top 5 tips for rolling out a pilot:

1. Pick your Lightning Champion: Find a superuser, that is generally engaged with and knowledgeable about the Salesforce platform and happy to test out new features. To ensure success, we suggest taking a look at what Lightning Experience features you think will be most beneficial for your company and picking a champion who will use those specifically. For example, Lightning includes many enhancements for Sales Users like Kanban, Sales Path, and Lightning Email features, so a pilot with your Sales super users is a great place to start!
2. Have them do their job in Lightning: Meet with this super user and enable Lightning just for them using a permission set. Do this during or right before the meeting so you can walk them through the new features in person and get them comfortable. Ask them to do their job in Lightning for one week and take notes along the way.
3. Ask for feedback: This is an essential part of the rollout process. The more feedback you get from your users, the more you can do to ensure a smooth rollout for the entire company. Instead of spending weeks analyzing what could be various issues, have your user do testing and give you a list of what is not working for him or her. This is the best way to prioritize your next steps.
4. Expand to a few more people from the same department: Once you have gathered feedback from your super users and made changes or done training where needed, you can begin rolling out Lighting to more users from that department. With more users using Lightning, create a chatter group for them to provide feedback and ask questions. This creates a feedback loop which you can use to inform upcoming pilots and customizations.
5. Rollout and repeat: Continue this process until you have your company on Lightning! Rollout by department and job function in this manner until all of your users are in Lightning.

During this process, before you bring on the different departments, make sure to evaluate the different record types and page layouts, remove clutter on your pages: unused fields, workflows, and assignments. This will drive adoption and increase productivity as well.

Lastly, manage group / department rollouts

For most companies, turning on Lightning isn’t just a flip of the switch. It’s more of a dimmer (get it – light dimmers? ?), moving first super users, then super teams, then departments, one by one over to Lightning when they are ready.

Keeping track of your phased rollout is key. Download the Enablement Pack to get project management templates, resources and guides for managing your rollout. And, to track the progress in user adoption, you can download the Lightning Adoption Tracker from the AppExchange.

This three-step plan for your rollout is explained in detail in our webinar: Your Lightning Game Plan in 3 Steps.