Change Management for Transitioning to Lightning Experience

Unless you haven’t been on Trailhead or the Power of Us Hub in a while, you’ve heard about Salesforce Lightning Experience. For organizations that haven’t moved to Lightning Experience yet (maybe you’ve been shrugging it off, or convinced yourself that it’s not a priority)… we’re here to tell you there’s no more time to waste! It’s time to advance your organization into the Salesforce future and make the transition to Lightning Experience. And we’re here to help.

Change is hard, but the rewards are great as long as you approach it with care and a positive attitude. Organizations that have already transitioned to Lightning Experience successfully have all focused on three phases: Discover, Roll Out, Optimize. Let’s learn about how to manage change in each of these phases!

The Lightning Experience Transition Assistant is a tool available to you right from your setup menu. It walks you through the three phases: Discover, Roll out, Optimize.

Discover

In the Discover phase, you’ll want to focus on learning, evaluating, and aligning your transition approach. If you’re a Salesforce Admin, or if you’re a change leader in your organization, you’ll want to learn how Lightning Experience can help your organization accomplish great things. Lucky for you there are a number of ways you can start learning through Trailhead, Webinars, Release Notes, Accelerators, Community Groups, Events, and the community in the Power of Us Hub! You can use one or all of these resources to better understand everything you should consider.

Once you’ve learned about Lightning Experience, you’ll want to evaluate the benefits and the readiness of your organization. Your first stop should be the Lightning Experience Readiness Check. This is one-click tool will help you understand what you need to complete for a successful Lightning Experience Rollout. The report that is generated is custom for your organization and will be emailed to you once complete. Make sure to read through your report completely before jumping to any conclusions. Some of the most concerning things you might find in the report are likely remedied with a little bit of work, or use of an app, like the Javascript Button Converter, or Magic Mover. This is a great time to leverage a recently refreshed sandbox to turn on the Lightning Experience for you or you and a group of power users to perform hands on evaluation of the new and existing features. Nervous about clicking the button to turn on Lightning Experience? Don’t worry – you’re not disturbing any users since you’ll be in a sandbox. Most importantly, Lightning Experience does not affect any of your data.

Change is best served with a side of Executive Sponsorship. Meet to align with your executives and major stakeholders in your organization; this may be one, five, or many people, but the key takeaway is that you shouldn’t be pushing a transition to Lightning Experience alone. Once you have a team of people who are as excited as you are about transitioning to Lightning Experience you’ll be well on your way to a big win. This team can help you plan out an effective strategy and communication plan for your rollout.

No matter the size of your organization or transition team, you should create a project plan that includes a focus on enabling and guiding users through the successful changes. You can leverage some wonderful pre-built templates in the Lightning Experience Enablement Pack. Remember, Lightning Experience is not an all-or-nothing transition: you can roll out to a pilot group of users and then roll out for additional groups on a predetermined timeline. Work with this team to determine the best path forward for your end users and begin drafting your plan from there.

Roll Out

That leads us into our Roll Out Phase. In this phase, finalize your project plan, create new Lightning pages and page layouts (if you want), hold user trainings, build excitement, and go live on Lightning Experience.

Even if you’ve determined that you are going to roll out Lightning to groups of users at a time, you need to communicate your plan to transition to Lightning to all your users. You can do this in several ways:

• Create a Chatter Group for your organization to move to Lightning Experience
• Provide helpful learning links
• Create a drip email program to all end users with helpful tips and a countdown
• Hold lunch and learn sessions prior to formal trainings to show users Lightning Experience

All of these are great ways to engage your end users prior to turning on Lightning Experience. The more engaged and prepared your end users are, the better adoption and success you’ll have with your transition.

While your users are getting excited about all the new reports and dashboards they are going to create on their customized home screens, you or your Administrator will want to ensure a few key house-cleaning items are completed. To make the most of the Lightning Experience, you will want to:

• Enable My Domain
• Replace any mission actions and buttons on page layouts
• Convert JavaScript buttons
• Prepare Visualforce pages
• Convert attachments and classic notes.

There are helpful apps and step-by-step instructions for you all laid out in the Lightning Experience Transition Assistant under Adjust Existing Customizations.

Next, adjust user permissions and turn on the Lightning Experience!

Optimize

The transition to Lightning is a journey. Start by iterating and measure in the first phase of transition: Optimize. If you’re rolling out Lightning Experience to users in waves, the first phase is where you gather feedback, make changes, and on-board new users. Use your Lightning Experience Chatter group to source feedback from users, join the Lightning Experience Group in the Power of Us Hub. You can learn what other organizations are doing in Lightning Experience, make changes in a sandbox, and share with users for feedback.

Last but not least, celebrate success! Don’t forget to highlight the achievement of transitioning to a new and better CRM and thank all those involved; throw a launch party, make a fun video, do something that celebrates success and makes your users smile.

Some useful resources to bookmark are:

• Trailhead: Get Started With Lightning Experience
• Power of Us Hub: Lightning Experience Chatter Group
• Use these recommended steps and templates to manage the human aspect of change as you move through the phases of your transition.