Build Your Admin Skills: Project Management, Business Analysis, and Product Management

Prefer to read instead of watch? Here’s a breakdown of the episode.

Project Management

Project Management is about planning and overseeing Salesforce projects to ensure they’re completed on time and within budget. But it's more than that—there's also the day-to-day side of things, whereby we, as admins, act as the primary point of contact for all operational aspects of Salesforce, including any projects that involve Salesforce. Let's keep in mind that projects come in many different shapes and sizes—big, small, multi-team, long-term, and short-term. So, building strong stakeholder relationships and being able to adapt and be flexible in the face of change is super important if we are to deliver results.

Emma Keeling, a real-life #AwesomeAdmin, shares her top three project management tips.

1. Always think about how to communicate the impact that your project will have on the organization. For example, is the project going to improve the end-user experience? Will it result in increased sales or increased impact? Will it help meet the organization’s goals? Knowing the direct impact of the project will help others see the value of your work.
2. Ensure that anyone who has an interest in your project is considered a stakeholder. Anyone who will interact with your Salesforce instance is a stakeholder, from top-level executives to customers and internal users. It's important to know who you're working with and what their goals for the project are to ensure it's a success.
3. Stick to the schedule! Setting milestones and deadline dates, and ensuring they’re achievable, is crucial. You don't want to deliver a project for a seasonal fundraising campaign 4 weeks after it's passed!

Business Analysis

Business Analysis is all about improving the efficiency of business operations by proactively undertaking regular process analysis and documentation. Now, to do this, building strong relationships with your users is key. This is because in order to identify opportunities for improvement or provide data-driven recommendations, we need to first understand their needs. When you combine these strong relationships with your deep understanding of Salesforce products, processes, and best practices, you are well and truly on your way to achieving success.

Toni V. Martin has built her career using business analysis and has some great advice for developing your business analysis skills.

1. Get comfortable with process mapping. This is the technique of using diagrams to show a business process from start to end. It’s a way to quickly and clearly communicate the who, what, and how of processes at your company.
2. After creating a process map, you may discover areas of inefficiency which can be reduced or eliminated using your Salesforce knowledge. Identifying what your business users want to improve is called eliciting requirements.
3. You can translate the requirements you uncover to actionable units of work with a tool called user stories. User stories document who the improvement will benefit, describe the functionality needed, and share how that functionality provides value to the business in one succinct statement.

Product Management

Product Management is all about managing the end-to-end implementation of Salesforce, including the overall strategy and day-to-day activities involved in administering Salesforce. At it's very core, it's about ensuring the business gets the most value and ROI out of Salesforce products, and that they’re used to help users and customers. It's therefore crucial that all admins are able to demonstrate their knowledge of multiple products across the Salesforce Platform.

Joshua Birk, a product management expert, shares his advice on how to improve your product management skills.

1. It's really important to stay up to date with new Salesforce products and features! I encourage you to partner with stakeholders to evaluate, implement, and deploy any updates and changes into production.
2. Position yourself as the Salesforce subject matter expert and day-to-day point of contact for users, executives, vendors, and development teams. Perhaps you can get involved in setting up a cross-functional Center of Excellence (CoE) to assist with the evaluation of new features and adoption.
3. Remember to communicate all the amazing value you bring. As an admin, you've got the knowledge and know-how to build amazing solutions that have a real impact on the business. Be sure your users and execuives understand the innovative ways you're using Salesforce to help the business.

To learn more about these skills, check out the Salesforce Admin Skills Kit.

Tune in for new episodes of "Skills for Success" every Wednesday!

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