Software Governance: The importance of a Governance Team

As your CRM matures, it is important to have a solid Software Governance process in place to align organizational strategies, provide focus, and manage resources efficiently.

An integral part of this Governance Process is a Steering Committee or Governance Team. This is a group of people who own the vision of Salesforce for the company or those appointed by them to make decisions. People on this team may include Executive Sponsors, the Program Manager, Business Management, and a Technology/ Architecture Lead. We also recommend including Power Users who can support change management, test enhancements and provide end-user feedback.

This group should meet on a regular basis to review the direction the CRM is heading. They also work together in a variety of ways to provide consistency and create a polished CRM experience.

The Governance Team works to align strategies from different areas of the business, such as Sales, Marketing, or Accounting. As there are members from IT and the business on the team, they can also work together to align their related strategies.  If IT has an initiative to rationalize applications, the business focused individuals can determine which applications may be a good fit to incorporate into the CRM.

The Governance Team can provide focus to the project through prioritizing feature requests and requirements. When prioritized and scheduled, feature releases can have enhanced change management so end users are not faced with any surprises when they open their CRM.

With all team members working on common deliverables, Investments can be focused on areas with the biggest impact, solutions can work across multiple processes and you can have better management over internal timelines. Through all this organization, resources can be managed much more effectively!

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