Strategy
Before your next Salesforce investment, review the foundations
Questions to ask before a new programme adds more demands to your existing platform.
A major Salesforce programme introduces decisions about scope, architecture, cost, and delivery. Those decisions are easier to assess when you understand the platform they will build on.
An independent review before committing to a programme gives the organisation a chance to examine its assumptions and identify work that belongs in the plan.
What does the current platform already do?
Over time, an org can accumulate several ways of solving similar problems. A proposed capability may overlap with existing functionality or depend on an earlier implementation that nobody has reviewed recently.
Establish the relevant business processes, systems, and ownership before settling the solution. The aim is to understand what should be retained, changed, or retired.
What constraints will the programme inherit?
Existing integrations, data quality, security requirements, and release practices can shape the delivery plan. Treating them as discoveries for later can leave a programme working around constraints that should have informed its design.
Ask which dependencies have been verified and which are still assumptions. Make investigation work visible in the plan rather than hiding it inside an implementation estimate.
Can the team own the result?
A solution needs to be maintainable by the people who will operate it. Consider the skills available, the documentation needed, and how architectural decisions will be explained and recorded.
This is also a question of capacity. If the internal team already struggles to maintain the platform, agree how the programme will support ongoing ownership alongside delivery.
Which improvements belong in the roadmap?
Some legacy issues need attention before new work begins. Others can be addressed during the programme, or scheduled afterwards. The distinction depends on the dependencies and the business priorities.
A roadmap should show that sequence and explain the trade-offs. It should give decision-makers enough information to challenge the scope and understand what the investment is expected to achieve.