The Yellow Brick Road to Data Migration Success. 10 Tips & Tricks to Optimize Your Process

Transcription

1 The Yellow Brick Road to Data Migration Success 10 Tips & Tricks to Optimize Your Process

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS 2 Introduction: Weathering the Storm 3 Good Data vs Bad Data 4 Have a Plan 4 Save Backup Copies of Data 5 Identify Mission-Critical Data 6 Clean House 7 Mind Your Metadata 8 Pay Attention to Custom Objects 8 Save Your Legacy 9 Check, Please! 9 Involve Key End Users 9 Consider a Partner in Crime 10 Conclusion /01

3 INTRODUCTION: Weathering the Storm Data, Data, and Even MORE Data! Chances are, if you re new to Salesforce you ll have data from a legacy system that you ll need to bring onto the cloud platform. Even if you ve been using Salesforce for a few years, it s likely that you ll face this same challenge at some point as you look to improve your user adoption and increase your return on investment. Please do not take this lightly. Data is key to almost everything at an organization that relies primarily on sales and service to keep its current customers happy as well as to grow its customer base. Bad Practices are like a Tornado to your Database Don t let your data become a mess. Here are 10 Tips to data management, because there is no place like a clean database! /02

4 GOOD DATA vs BAD DATA When I think about types of data, I m reminded of the Wizard of Oz. There s the Wicked Witch of the East, who gets killed when Dorothy s house lands on her; she could be represented by all the outdated processes from your legacy system that get decommissioned with your Salesforce implementation. There s the Wicked Witch of the West, who came to claim the ruby red slippers off the feet of her sister, the Wicked Witch of the East. But she arrived a moment too late and discovered that Glinda the Good Witch just placed the magical slippers on Dorothy s feet, and so the Wicked Witch of the West vows to get revenge on Dorothy. The Wicked Witch of the West could be represented by the people in your company who are reluctant to change and stand in the way of a great implementation and adoption of Salesforce. And finally, there s Glinda, the Good Witch who, as an agent of change, already handed over the magic slippers to Dorothy (the Salesforce Admin) and holds the keys to a successful implementation, increased ROI and great user adoption. Success is in the palm of your hands or in sticking with the current metaphor, the soles of your feet! What can you do to keep the Wicked Witches away? Adopt these 10 steps and you ll be following the yellow brick road to data migration success! /01/03

5 10 Tips & Tricks to Optimize Your Process 1. HAVE A PLAN! Dorothy didn t know she was being whisked away to Oz when the tornado struck Kansas, so she couldn t make a plan. But you ve got the luxury of knowing where you are today, and where you need to be tomorrow. It may sound simple, but knowing who, what, when, where and why before you start this project will go a long way to making a successful data migration. As Stephen R. Covey says in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind. By that, he means that for everything you do each task, each project, each day you need to have a clear vision of your desired outcome and direction, and then keep adjusting what you do and how you are working towards those goals until you achieve them. It s the same for data migration. Keep in mind that data migration is not typically a one-way trip. You need to understand where the data is coming from, where it will be going, and what purpose and processes it will support in its new location. 2. SAVE BACKUP COPIES OF DATA No matter how well prepared, no matter how many times you have done a migration, no matter how well you have tested a process, you do NOT want to risk 100% complete and total failure without a safety net! Save a copy of your data (and metadata) BEFORE you start your migration process. Think of your backup data as your insurance policy: it s that thing that we all should have, that most of us don t like to pay for, and most of us rarely need to use it. However, on that occasion when things do go awry, everyone is glad to have the backup data, so they can retrace the steps, learn from the experience and then move on to bigger and better things. Begin with the end in mind. - Stephen R. Covey, Author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People /04

6 3. IDENTIFY MISSION- CRITICAL DATA, BUT DON T STOP THERE, TRANSFORM. Before you do any migration, make sure you know what data is absolutely critical to the survival of the business and its processes. Don t stop there, though. The preferred terminology for data migration is ETL Extract, Transform, and Load, with the key element being Transform. There s a very good reason why organizations move from one system to another: to improve an aspect of the business, whether it s to increase revenue, decrease costs, increase efficiency, decrease errors, or all of the above. All of these things have the power to transform the organization into something better than it is today. Transformation it s a powerful thing. Newly appointed Salesforce COO, Keith Block recently stated, These are CEO-level conversations, we re in the board room, presenting to the board. In the last three weeks I ve had more conversations with CEOs around transformation than in my entire career over 30 years. Transformation is top of mind in the C-Suite, across all IT departments, and it should be part of your data migration. While it is important to note that transformation can, and often does, start with Senior Management, most of us do not deal directly with members of the C-suite. We spend our time in the trenches with system administrators, business analysts and project managers. Our challenge then becomes making sure the expected value from the migration is realized, and paramount to that realization is the understanding of exactly what data is needed to support future decision making. Going back to Oz, this process is a lot like what happened when Dorothy and Toto reached the Emerald City with the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Man. The Wizard pointed out they had already transformed throughout their journey, finding courage, a brain, and a heart along the way. It is more than achieving an end goal, what are you doing along the way to set you up to better accomplish new goals. /05

7 3. CLEAN HOUSE TOP DATA CLEANING APPEXCHANGE APPS De-duplicate as much as possible before the migration. It simply makes sense to eliminate duplication before you migrate. According to a study by Experian Data Quality, 75% of organizations believe that inaccurate data is undermining their ability to provide excellent customer service, and 65% wait until there are specific issues with their data until they address and fix them (November 2015). Be Proactive Why wait until there is an issue and why perpetuate a problem when you can eliminate it? You don t have to manually remove duplicates through a long and tedious process using Excel, there are several apps on the Salesforce AppExchange that can help you by quickly identifying duplicate records. /06

8 MIND YOUR META-DATA According to the Indiana University Knowledgebase post, What is Metadata?, metadata is data about data. It is descriptive information about a particular data set, object or resource, including how it is formatted. Be cognizant of meta-data. Ensure that all meta-data for the objects you re migrating match up. For example, if you re migrating records with picklist data, be sure the values on the picklist fields match exactly. Why is it so important to pay attention to data and metadata quality? Poor data quality leads to wasted sales efforts on useless information, which can lead to decreased user adoption of your CRM system. Poor data quality can lead to wasted sales efforts, longer customer support wait times, and increased customer churn. Poor data quality leads to longer wait times for customer support while reps are forced to piece together information in order to respond to a customer, which can lead to decreased customer satisfaction and increased customer churn. /07

9 6. PAY ATTENTION TO CUSTOM OBJECTS Make sure all custom fields that you need to migrate data from exist in your migrate to data structure, and that they are built as exact replicas of your migrate from data, otherwise your migration will fail. This is critical. Your importing data needs a place to go, and if that place isn t correctly defined, [spoiler alert] it won t arrive where it is supposed to. It would be like Dorothy ending up in Kentucky instead of back home in Kansas. It might work out, but the outcome would certainly be very messy, nothing like what was expected, and cause extra effort to clean up. Validating your migrate to data structures gives you one more opportunity to make enhancements to your data structure and ultimately your business processes by adding new objects at this pivotal time. 7. SAVE YOUR LEGACY Don t think that simply because you are on a new system, your need for data from the old system will go away, because as soon as you have that mindset, Murphy s Law will rear its ugly head and you ll be scrambling to find a connection between the new and the old. Make the migration easier by importing the legacy system record IDs to a custom field. /08

10 8. CHECK, PLEASE! Quality Assurance checks should include not only fieldlevel validation, but also validation of record counts and data integrity. And don t forget to start by playing in the sand! Test your migration plans in a sandbox org first; this could help you discover something you ve overlooked. After you re satisfied with your sandbox testing, consider a production test of a small number of records to make sure your data is importing correctly. Send data to each field to make sure everything is mapped correctly, and make sure that small batch has a variety of data to help make it easier to identify errors. (Source: Things to Consider When Importing Data Into Salesforce by Lindsey Barlow, March 3, 2015) 9. INVOLVE KEY END USERS No one knows the data better than the end user. Be sure to tap into that valuable resource and involve them in the quality assurance process. This will accomplish two main goals. First: Buy-in Your users will be more accepting of the change, no matter what it is, if they are involved in not only the decision-making process, but also the entire process. Second: Data Validity Who better to check that data is valid, than your users? They use the data all the time, chances are, they might have even created some of the data, and you need their expertise when making certain that everything is as it should be. This could prevent future problems that could take an even larger effort to fix. 10. CONSIDER A PARTNER IN CRIME There are a lot of tools out there that can help with data migration. Don t go it alone. There s safety in numbers and two heads are better than one! Using X-Author by Apttus for data migration can help reduce the time needed to accomplish your migration by as much as 80% while limiting errors and allowing you to migrate an unlimited number of objects simultaneously. /09 /01

11 CONCLUSION Just like Dorothy, who luckily made it back home to her family, you too can survive the tornado of data migration and come out unscathed on the other side. If you have a solid plan involving your end users and stakeholders, backup your data, test and execute your plan flawlessly, and keep focused on the goal without losing sight of the past, you won t need the man behind the curtain to succeed! About X-Author For Excel X-Author for Excel transforms Microsoft Excel from a standalone desktop tool into a UI for Salesforce and increases Salesforce productivity across all industry verticals and functions. Implementation of X-Author for Excel integrates the collaboration, controls, permissions, and routing of Salesforce with the well-known and easy-touse user experience of Excel. X-Author makes Microsoft Office a powerful and secure user interface for Salesforce. From X-Author for Excel to X- Author Chatter, the technology allows your organization to make vital data visible between Office and Salesforce, fostering collaboration, enhancing productivity, increasing Salesforce user adoption, and improving data security and control across the enterprise. About Apttus Apttus, the category-defining Quote-to-Cash software company, drives the vital business process between the buyer s interest in a purchase and the realization of revenue. Utilizing a patented combination of SaaS-based applications, the Apttus Intelligent Cloud maximizes the entire revenue operation by driving behavior and providing prescriptive data to company decision-makers. Apttus offers enhanced Configure Price Quote (CPQ), E-Commerce, Contract Management, Renewals and Revenue Management solutions on the world s most trusted cloud platforms, including Salesforce and Microsoft Azure. Apttus is based in San Mateo, California, with additional offices located across the globe. For more information visit: apttus.com. /10