Step Three: Making The Switch
Now that you’ve carefully done your research and planning, it’s time to make the big step towards actually migrating your users to Lightning. Before hitting the switch and going live, remember to review your contingency plan in case any issues come up. Will you be dedicating extra resources to power through the problems, and is there a point where you reverse the rollout altogether in order to go back to testing? It is important for both you and leadership to know these thresholds so everyone is on the same page. Once everything is reviewed and ready to go, it’s time to start the migration:
- Using the phased approach
- Working with the teams
- Finding and fixing bugs
- Helping users adapt
- Ongoing tasks and support
The Phased Approach to Lightning Migration
If you’ve taken our advice from step two and decided to go with a phased approach, it’s time to get started! You can migrate a group of predetermined users by adding the Lightning Experience user permission to the user profiles in the first group:
- Go to the Salesforce homepage
- Click Setup from the dropdown menu in the top right corner
- Click Lightning Experience
- Click Permission Sets under the Administration Setup section
- Create a new permission set and enter “Lightning Experience User” as the label
- Click System Permissions under the System section and then Edit
- Select the Lightning Experience User checkbox and Save
- Click Manage Assignments and then Add Assignments
- Add the correct users from your first group and click Assign
- Get in touch with your users to verify that they are now on the Lightning platform
Again, a phased approach is recommended because you can deal with any consequential issues on a small scale. Any fixes to these issues can then be implemented in the following phases, allowing you to improve your migration practices as you roll out! This also gives you a chance to personalize every team’s migration so all of their needs are met!
Working With Each Team on Their Lightning Migration
After migrating a team of users over to Lightning, it is important to work closely with these users. Make sure you help them with their dashboards, as all reports will have to be recreated, and help them with any third-party applications they may be using. Before moving on to the next group of users, you want to make sure that all previous users have everything they need so you can continue moving forward. Testing workflows, processes, and everything you can think of while maintaining a continuous flow of feedback will allow you to respond quickly to each group’s individual needs. Ideally, you will have hosted trainings with these users before the rollout, but if additional training and documentation are necessary, now is the time to do it. By working closely with each group and ensuring that everything is working perfectly before moving to the next group, you will find that all subsequent rollouts become easier and easier.
Failing Fast to Improve the Lightning Experience
During each mini-migration phase, it is important to emphasize to your users that you actually want them to fail. You want them to break the system so you can cover all of your bases when you end up fixing the issues. The sooner bugs and problems are discovered the fixed, the less overall impact they will have on your entire user base. Not only will testing enable you to experience smoother phases later in your rollout, but they will also help your users get acquainted with Lightning faster.
Helping Users Adapt to Lightning
While there are sure to be some hiccups during the phased rollout, you will soon build a rhythm and the momentum will carry you until the whole company is on Lightning! But this doesn’t mean that your work is over! Any big change will always be met with some resistance, and it’s up to you to keep user adoption rates high for the success of your migration. You can do this by soliciting feedback and tracking usage statistics.
Hearing direct feedback from your users allows you to glimpse into the mind of your company. It’s important to know if their expectations have been met, if they are having difficulties, and what their overall experience is like. You can ask for feedback through a form-based survey or even focus groups or one-on-one interviews. Only your users can tell you the truth when it comes to migration reaction.
A quantitative approach to evaluating adoption is to look at usage metrics. Numbers such as usage rates and logins can help you determine who you need to reach out to for feedback. Bottlenecks can be identified quickly with some data, and you can start fixing the issues you find as soon as possible.
Ongoing Tasks and Support
Over time, you want to evaluate your original goals, perfect your training materials and support strategy, and create an open feedback loop for continuous process improvement.
In step 2, you defined goals using the SMART framework, and now is the time to evaluate them. If you accomplished a goal, identify why that occurred so you can repeat it next time. If you failed to meet an expectation, isolate the factors involved and come up with a plan to avoid that in the future.
Having a “war room” and “all hands on deck” approach in the first few days after the migration can be exciting, but it is not sustainable in the long term. Consider creating a company portal or wiki where you can house all of the relevant Lightning documentation. Publish and distribute your training materials, and keep all documentation up-to-date when changes occur to the platform.
While you may not receive as much feedback a few months down the line as you did in the days immediately following the migration, it is still a good idea to have an intake process for feedback. Continuous growth and development are vital to a successful project, and it is useful to keep channels open. This is especially the case since you will be completing maintenance and upgrades on an ongoing basis, and processes can always be improved and tuned.
Seeking Professional Migration Assistance
If all of this seems like a lot to think about, you can always get in touch with a professional Salesforce migration consultant. Ntegro would be happy to assist with consultations or even running your project if you need the support. Contact us online to let us know how we can help you! We can be as involved as you’d like, and our first consultation is free when you get in touch with us!
Have you successfully implemented a Lightning migration at your firm? What tricks worked for you and what didn’t work? Leave a comment below to share your story!
