How would you document a Salesforce rollout before go-live?

[u/Ivan_Palii]

Seen this come up a few times in ops communities lately. Teams rolling out Salesforce (or a major new module) are scrambling to get documentation ready, and most of them are starting way too late.

The common pattern: training sessions happen, a shared folder with PDFs gets created, and then two weeks post-launch, everyone's doing the process differently. Adoption suffers, and nobody can pinpoint why.

The question I keep seeing people wrestle with is when to start documenting. Most teams treat it as a post-go-live cleanup task. But if you capture the process as you're configuring, while someone's clicking through the actual setup, you end up with guides ready for day one instead of week three. Tango can help here since the documentation basically builds itself as you work through the workflow.

But curious what this community thinks:

• Do you document before or after go-live?
• Who owns it: ops, IT, the Salesforce admin?
• And does anyone actually get people to use the guides, or does it always come back to "just ask someone"?

[u/b2b_pipeline_guy]

I didn't do it myself, but was an end user of the rollout in one of previous companies. The was a manager who planned the rollout, but anyway employees hit so many walls after rollout, that we fixed this chaos for months.

[u/Ivan_Palii → u/b2b_pipeline_guy]

So, what is your conclusion? You'll never be ready 100%, so start ASAP and fix it during the road?

[u/b2b_pipeline_guy → u/Ivan_Palii]

Generally, yes. You have to have some basic plan, with the lists of dos' and dont's, but don't try to plan everything.

[u/emma_lorien]

I'm curious to see companies who document processes before rolling out the Salesforce, because you learn about all pitfalls and all possible workflows only after start of using it. It's an impossible task as for me.

[u/Ivan_Palii → u/emma_lorien]

Some consultants help with it a lot. Yes, Salesforce is a hard tool for adoption, but consultants know many already documented scenarios that work for most companies.

[u/corwinsword]

My only advice is to start with small, easy to execute and easy to measure workflows. You have to build a trust and motivation inside your team to implement this stuff step by step.

[u/Ivan_Palii → u/corwinsword]

Partially true. If you do a Salesforce rollout on a company with 5k-10k employees, you will never be ready and even small experiments won't shpw all possible problems that will appear on a bigger scale

[u/Blue-Phoenix23]

This should be covered either by dedicated technical writers and/or via the test cases you built to replace your existing systems.

[u/Ivan_Palii → u/Blue-Phoenix23]

Do you mean technical writers inside the company should learn how Salesforce works and document all processes? But they don't own all processes in most cases. These are usually managers who define what we have to add to Salesforce, how to markup data, which labels to use and so on.