What’s Involved in a Discovery & Design Project?

If your company has already decided on Salesforce, chosen a consulting partner and signed an SOW, what comes next is

3 min. read

If your company has already decided on Salesforce, chosen a consulting partner and signed an SOW, what comes next is the discovery process — the initial stage of a project when your implementation team conducts an investigation to learn as much about your company as they possibly can. Their goal? To understand your people, processes and technologies and find out what’s been working well and what hasn’t. From there, they’ll create a set of recommendations to guide your business to an ideal technology solution (this last part is known as the design stage).

As you can imagine, beginning a Salesforce implementation without a thorough discovery and design process would be something like building a house without a blueprint — the likeliest outcome being an expensive mess. And just as any builder would want the chance to review and approve a blueprint before agreeing to the time, cost and effort of any actual construction, many businesses want a way to assess the results of a discovery and design before signing on for an actual Salesforce implementation. Which is why Torrent Consulting offers standalone discovery and design projects as part of our core advisory services. They were created to deliver actionable insights, no matter where your organization is on the path to transformation.

In this blog, we’ll cover the core differences between our two offerings, helping you decide which might better suit your company’s needs.

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Discovery & Design Offering #1: Providing a Strategic Roadmap

The first of our discovery and design offerings is tailor-made for businesses who, when it comes to a large-scale technology transformation, aren’t sure what they need or where to begin. They’re aware something probably needs to change, but what does that look like? As a result, they’re seeking high-level guidance — and we’ve crafted the following deliverables to meet that need:

  • Company vision: Our vision for what your business could look like with the right technologies and processes, delivered point-by-point.
  • Salesforce solution overview: A deep dive into how your company’s chosen Salesforce solutions (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Pardot, etc.) could be used to solve key business challenges.
  • Business process assessment: A high-level comparison of your company’s current business processes and our recommended, future-state versions.
  • Integration considerations: Our recommended best practices for integrating Salesforce with your other technologies.
  • Technology landscape assessment: A side-by-side comparison of your company’s current technologies and our recommended options.
  • Transformation roadmap: A detailed, phase-by-phase overview of your journey to a successful Salesforce implementation.

Together, these components — each one customized — will give you everything you need to make informed decisions about what’s best for your business.

Discovery & Design Offering #2: Crafting a Detailed Solution Design

For those organizations with a better handle on what they’re looking for — a revamped service process with email-to-case functionality, for example — we offer a more robust discovery and design with a modified list of deliverables. These projects swap technology landscape assessments and transformation roadmaps for the following:

  • Solution architecture diagrams: Visualizations of proposed technology solutions, including how they’ll be integrated and function together.
  • Process flows: Diagrams charting recommended changes to your core business processes.

These detailed deliverables are designed to give you more than something to think about — they’ll prepare you to move forward with an implementation project. If you’d like, we’ll even include information about pricing and scheduling so you truly have all the information you need to move forward.

When it comes to deciding what kind of discovery and design project is right for your organization, your best bet is to ask yourself: Do we know what we’re trying to do yet? If the answer is no, option #1 will help you arrive at an idea. And if the answer is yes, option #2 will give you the tools you need to execute. Don’t hesitate to get in touch to learn more.

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Danielle Sutton