PolishDreamin – I won an award!

The community conferences poping-up around the world, PolishDreamin in Wroclav and Wir Sind Ohana in Berlin are one of them in Europe. I had the privilige to present at the former one and already looking forward to attend the later one.

Poland, country which is right next to Czechia and where I basically haven’t been yet. Yes, a few business trips to Warszawa, a few team buildings, but it is still a white area for me, so when I found about this conference I was all in. Luckily my session called „Things you didn’t know you can use in your Salesforce“ has been selected and I had a valid reason to go there.

The trip was smooth with the few final kilometers which has been blocked my farmers. Not sure why, but we had similar strike at Prague a while ago, so nothing surprising and with a half an hour delay we made it to the city center.

First impressions – Wroclav is nice city, the center is really small, river around, I immediately liked it.

Dinner for speakers with great food and chats with other people I haven’t seen in a while or ever. Drinks, music and final photo.

Morning run with Johann and then taxi to the airport, as the venue was next to it. A big hall with prepared breakfast, three rooms for presentations, one room of sponsors, roughly 400 attendees, all decorated in Salesforce styles with all the characters and a bit of „forrest“ feeling.

Sharp start and full day of interesting sessions. I had the honor to sit on a CTA pannel with Johann, Ilona, Jakub, and Chetan where we shared what it takes to pass the board and how much our lives changed since then.

My own session has been scheduled at the end of the day, exhausted people fall back into their seats and almost fall asleep. Surprisingly I’ve been able to wake them up and somehow my session has been selected as the best session of the day!

See the presentation below, suprisingly all the text has been lost when uploading to Slideshare but the images are more important anyway.

Ending words, star gala where they’ve been honoring the achievements within the Polish Salesforce ecosystem. As a Czech delegation we – sadly – agreed, that we cannot name so many different people in our bubble, somehow the Czech community is probably not that active or people are hidden without others knowing them. A bit sad.

Party, pizzas, Czech beer – it was a long night to finish this great conference. Definitely one where I want to return!

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Salesforce v Česku s Ness

Logo Ness

Jsem se s podcastem rozjel, přelétl celou republiku, vzpomněl si na mládí a doletěl až do Košic, kde sedí Daniel Ban, Head of Salesforce Practice Europe ve společnosti Ness. Zavzpomínali jsme na CassaCloud, povídali o městě, ve kterém jsem nikdy nebyl, zmínili spoustu dalších lidí, kterým muselo zvonit v uších. 50 minut uběhlo jako nic, tak snad na tom budeš stejně.

Zápisky:

  • Ness je globální firma vlastněná private equity firmou s přibližně 80 členým Salesforce týmem rozprostřeným po celém světě, Dan má na starosti jeho evropskou část;
  • není historicky vnímaná ve spojení se Salesforce, konzultingem nebo cloudovými řešeními obecně, ale je čas to změnit – cca 4 roky nazpět koupil první Salesforce partnera a od té doby v této technologii jede, byznys konzulting se také rozvíjí, celá firma prochází transformací už pár let – spojení technologických znalostí a byznysu jim funguje hezky. Confluent, AI, UX design nemohou chybět;
  • Košice jsou takový IT hub na Slovensku, technická univerzita dodává talenty;
  • CassaCloud měla silný tým a současně přerod pod křídla Ness byl dostatečně pomalý, takže v podstatě všichni zůstali, což se třeba v Americe nepovedlo;
  • otevírání dveří v salesu jim asi úplně nejde, takže to možná zpomaluje celý růst – „do kelu, jak může Enehano tak rychle růst?“ aneb co vnímá Dan negativně;
  • proč prodávat Salesforce když na jiných platformách stejný projekt prodám dráž? Trochu jsme diskutovali proč to tak je – bojíme se říct si o peníze, nedokážeme si představit dostatečně velký projekt, zbytečně moc iterujeme takže každá etapa je relativně malá, není to klíčový systém pro zákazníka;
  • ideální zákazník? Přestože mají hodně malých zákazníků, ideální jsou střední firmy, které už mají peníze na větší projekty;
  • media/enterteinment (ahoj Media Cloud) a education (primárně sportovní kluby), manufacturing a transportation, financial services, technology a ISVs jsou čtyři hlavní vertikály;
  • koupili před časem MVP Factory v Německu, která se zákazníky pracuje na vizích, přípravě MVP a pak se tam rozjede plný projekt;
  • co to přinese, když vice president potenciálně ví víc detailů než technický tým? A když začne školit tým?
  • skvělí lidé přitahují další skvělé lidi;
  • jedna věc, kterou by chtěli v Salesforce dělat? AI!
  • nacházení typů lidí, kteří už jako junioři mají potenciál, je těžký, ale vyplácí se. Změny kariér je velké téma, zvláště lidé z konkrétního odvětví jsou pecka primárně pro konzultanty, u developerů ty změny takové nejsou;
  • distribuovaný tým je velká výhoda, protože může hledat správné lidi na více místech. Na druhou stranu jeho motivace, vzdělávání, propojení je těžké;
  • začínají zjišťovat zda mají lidi, kteří mají co sdílet s okolím – Maroš a Karol nastartovali user group v Košicích, nyní přemýšlejí zda by přestali na konference chodit se jenom učit, ale začali i mluvit;
  • Košická komunita roste, město je to krásné, někdy tam opravdu musím zajet!
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Good to Great, Jim Collins

Good to Great, Jim Collins

I had this book on my to-read list for too long, obviously when I spot it in our book shelf I grabbed it and read over the vacation. Now just digest what I read because it looks too simple. It is also probably the first book where I feel it is enough to read just the summaries at the end of the chapter AND at the same time doesn’t feel it negatively – it just shows how perfect the summary is, reading the whole chapter was still beneficial to me.

  1. Leadership
  2. who not what
  3. hedgehog concept
  4. discipline
  5. technology (really?)
  6. flywheel
  7. build to last

And that’s the point – the book is actually not „how to do things“ but rather a study what they found in companies who made the leap from good to great. Out of Fortune 500 companies (actually 1435) only 11 qualified. The book lists, in the chapters above, what they found as differencies to all the other companies. It isn’t how to achieve it but what might be the difference and you can just wonder whether you can make it.

Level 5 Leaders

First crucial part for real success. At the same time, while you certainly can change, it probably has to be in you.

Enduring greatess through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.

While the „levels“ below push and demand, this one somehow let it go, trusting people and that it’ll be good. Seriously, that’s enough? „I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job“ or „The number one factor was luck“ are another great quotes from the book, while the people were obviously qualified, demanding, with clear vision, they don’t really sell it like that in the book.

They want to see the company even more successful in the next generation, not to be the biggest dog in the room.

Level 5 leaders look out the window to apportion credit to factors outside themselves when things go well (and if they cannot find a specific person or event to give credit to, they credit good luck), at the same time, they look in the mirror to apportion responsibility, never blaming bad luck when things go poorly.

Who not what

They care about who they will work with not on what. Happy to figure out later on what will they do, but they need to have the right people on the bus (and the wrong off).

With the right people you don’t need to care about motivation or how to manage them. They are flexible enough.

The important part is not about the people as that’s pretty obvious, but the fact that you START with them.

The right people will do the right things and deliver the best results they’re capable of, regardles of the incentive system.

When in doubt don’t hire, keep looking. Put your best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems. Expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time, the right people are self-motivated. Intense dialogs, heated „scientific“ debate with people engaged in a search for the best answers.

Hedgehog concept

Three circles – what you can be the best in the world at, what drives your economic engine, and what you are deeply passionate about -> the intersection of those is where your business should be. Once you find it and stick with it you will rock, but don’t change it!

Exactly the part what I try to find at Actum and don’t have answer yet. On one handside we want to get work and our aim is pretty general ranging from the „core“ platform implementation to „extensions“ like Marketing Cloud (when we have marketing agency in the house it makes sense), with Field Service being our strongest area but at the same time don’t see that much demand on the market. As Actum we can do anything from CMS, over CRM to ERP and general supply chain consultation to IT security. Great that we can cover almost any IT topic in any company, at the same time aren’t we too broad?

If you feel you aren’t the best in anything, keep looking. Interestingly when the company found that, it was rather recognition of a fact rather than some ground breaking idea.

Discipline

Avoid bureaucracy and hierarchy and instead create a culture of discipline. With the right people on the bus that must be easy to achieve, I would add.

Set your objectives for the year and record them in the concrete. You can change the plans through the year, but you never change what you measure yourself against.

Exactly how we do it here at Actum. I was so surprised by the fact, especially as I joined mid year to struggling team. How dare you compare me the whole team to some plan I didn’t put together? Definitely not the best feeling, but reading about it that makes some sense.

Technology

Well, this one is hard when your living is implementation of technology. But they found out than none of those great companies attribute it any major impact. CIOs who had nothing with technology but came rather from the business side. They understood the needs and didn’t worry that much about what is possible.

It was rather „the second wind“ of their transformations and acted as an accelerating factor. Which is actually a great statement and put me back into ease that I can be in the right field.

Similarly they didn’t care much about their competitors or competetive strategy. Cared about performance, winning, being best, but never in reactive terms.

Flywheel

This can be shortened to the „overnight success doesn’t exist“, but I really like the example about enormous heavy wheel they try to turn around. A lot of energy for nothing but over the time it starts to fly and be quicker and quicker. Don’t try to break it from the beginning, be persistent.

What did they call what they were doing? Interestingly nothing, they just have been doing it. No name for some breaking change, something which will „boom and be there“, constant slow change which was there. Motivation not needed again, because it has to be in the people, you cannot motivate them over long period of time.

So don’t jump right into action, run around, lurch back and forth, implement big programs, skip buildup and jump right to breakthrough, spend a lot of energy trying to align and motivate people, sell the future. You know it all, right? Totally wrong!

Build to Last

Do you want to be just quicker than you were last time or is it important how many people you will take over? Slightly changed perspective, which might have a big impact. Which actually went through the whole book, maybe you can change your KPIs to better align with your philosophy and that will make a big impact.

Now what?

The book brought a lot of food for thought. And I have some tasks – the three circles are probably good start as I’m crossing the Level 5 Leadership of my radar – either I’m one of them or I cannot really achieve it. Happy with whom I have and fully trusting their discipline, not just start the flywheel which takes a bit longer than I would wish for but after 8 months with Actum I can see some light and success in building, crossing my fingers.

You can get it on Amazon or probably everywhere else as well.

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Spring ’24 Release Notes

Spring '24 logo

Spring is here, which I witnessed (sadly) at mountains as it was pretty light on snow. But spring hit our Salesforce instances as well and there are some great things.

Not sure whether monthly release notes are one of them (three times a year is enough for me), but I didn’t really get the point anyway as „Features included in the January ’24 monthly release become available when Spring ’24 rolls out to your instance.“ – so will something change on monthly basis or I need to wait anyway?

  • no more downtime during release time – on Hyperforce even those 5 minutes of downtime are removed!
  • Salesforce setup is on separate domain now, ask your network admins to allow access to *.salesforce-setup.com if they block some sites;
  • Scheduler supports concurency mode – you can have a meeting with several customers at once, which might be nice in some usecases;
  • I’ve been confused what Search Manager can do a while ago, now you can add additional criterias for your users there, which will limit the search for them further down;
  • more dashboard filters – I’m sorry for all those people who are getting ready for their certifications as they will be confused by the number change (from 3 to 5, still useless in the same way);
  • change fields in report filters – minor change with huge impact, no more need to remove the field and add a new one, when you just need to change it for different field;
  • summary filters in reports looks amazing!
  • CRM Analytics dashboard in LWR sites – I wonder whether it is free of charge or I need to buy some license;
  • a new reason to migrate into Dynamic Forms – you can add fields from related objects, no more need for formula fields to achieve that!
  • Salesforce Ant reached end of life;
  • LWC – internal DOM structure will be changed – I still remember the one project, where the dev didn’t use the prepared components and rather everything coded, they will be potentially surprised (including the client);
  • LWC components to scan documents on mobile or to interact with NFC tags;
  • Null Coalescing Operator in APEX – I got used to ? and now should learn when ?? makes sense. Like it;
  • UUID generator – don’t have any usecase for it, but probably is important for others;
  • Change History pannel in Experience Builder showing who did what change and when, amazing;
  • build in support for authentication via Twitter (X) is being removed – small but important impact into the CTA board as it is very often in the scenarios;
  • plus the Twitter connector for Pardot (Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) has been retired as well;
  • Document Builder for Field Service looks cool, I wonder why for quotes we still have the old and really limited PDF generator when there were so many improvements in other products. Why they don’t push it into the core?
  • Field Service Asset Attribute now takes just 0,25KB (previously the standard 2KB), which is still weird as Assets themselves doesn’t take any;
  • Pay Now and Field Service plays nicely together – and looks like Pay Now is supported in Europe, which sounds really nice;
  • looks like there is a new product called Salesforce Pricing (or Revenue Lifecycle Management) which „provide your users with a comprehensive and reliable pricing solution. Create customized price adjustment schedules, and define discounts and obtain accurate prices for your entire product portfolio. Calculate your product’s final net price by using inbuilt pricing elements in pricing procedures, and customize how you want to view your pricing data“ – that looks interesting. Is it just a new name for CPQ or as it is Generally Available it is something new?
  • Product Configurator is the same as above;
  • Seller Home – not sure I like it but as it will replace the default Home Page (if you didn’t customize it) you should at least be aware of it;
  • Salesforce Maps Lite for Unlimited edition for free but only if you aren’t on European Hyperforce 🙁
  • Lead, Account and Contact Intelligence View – I’m still not sure why it doesn’t use SLDS but there is probably a strong reason;
  • Enablement Lite – if you don’t want to pay for the full version you get this for free;
  • repeater in flow – more dynamicity into the screens;
  • Sum or Count Items in Collections More Easily with the Transform Element (Beta);
  • Migrate to a Multiple-Configuration SAML Framework looks like something important as well, time to check with customers;
  • Help Agents Predict Customer Escalations – seriously we need this feature? So agent pays more attention to these cases?
  • Enjoy a Richer Email Composer Experience & Transition to the Lightning Editor for Email Composers in Email-to-Case – enable it in setup;
  • Larger Files in Apple Messages for Business (up to 100MB), I wonder why Email-to-Case has those 20MB limit in such case;
  • Social Customer Service Starter Pack Is Being Retired in November – that’s probably the app I have installed for years and cannot find it anywhere anymore.

Not bad. I mean 644 pages, about the usual amount, but a few years back they were all dedicated to core, now they cover all the industry clouds as well. But still some progress being done, definitely something you want to read on your own and pick what is important to you. Check it out!

What others wrote:

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S Pavlem o projektových manažerech

Můj výlet po rolích, které se podílejí na dodávce (nejen) Salesforce projektů, se dostal k projektovému manažerovi. Musí mít znalosti technologie, oboru zákazníka, co vlastně dělá celé dny kromě toho, že sedí na schůzkách, pije kafe, posílá emaily a dělá zápisy? Tentokrát jsem si povídal s Pavlem Humpolcem a shoda jména není v tomto případě náhodná, ta podoba je až fascinující, co? 😉

Zápisky:

  • je od toho aby doručil změnu – jestli papíruješ, děláš rozpočty nebo řídíš lidi závisí na firmě i tobě;
  • jak se jím stát? V dnešní době nedostatku projekťáků je to asi hodně jednoduché;
  • co dělá? Komunikuje a stará se o to, aby se nezapomnělo na ten „big picture“, plánuje aby na sebe věci sedly, synchronizuje se všemi okolo, snaží se předvídat, aby případné škody byly co nejmenší;
  • stačí na projektu jeden projekťák nebo jich musí být víc? Tolik kolik jich je třeba, chceš mít na každé straně alespoň jednoho, aby tam byl single point of contact a nemusel komunikovat se všemi;
  • projekťák by měl být na projektu co nejdřív – když se podepsala smlouva, tak už je tam nějaký rozsah, kterou měl projekťák konzultovat, musí tam být už když to začíná vypadat reálně;
  • hybridní přístup se bere z obou světů (agilní a waterfall) ty lepší výmluvy, což zní cynicky ale často to tak je. Správná metodika by měla být vybraná podle projektu, nikoliv podle firmy;
  • agilní kouč by měl pomáhat a šířit agilitu ve firmě;
  • historicky se u projekťáků cenily hard skills (jaký dokument kdy vytvořit), nyní se cení ty měkké dovednosti – komunikace, koučování;
  • scrum master primárně dohlíží na to, aby se scrum dělal správně;
  • product owner (nebo produktový manažer?) řeší kvalitu produktu, vymazluje ho, stará se aby měl vše co je třeba. Projekťák řeší aby se v daný čas dodalo něco rozumného;
  • projekťák často chce být všude, ale zdaleka nemusí, stačí mu výstupy. Být všude se hodí protože dokáže spojovat věci, poslouchat informace mezi řádky, vracet komunikaci na správnou úroveň, takže pokud na to má čas tak skvělé;
  • 10 – 20 % z celkových odpracovaných hodin by mělo být vyhrazeno na projekťáka;
  • úspěšný projekt? Přijde na to, nejspíše to že si ho zákazník objedná znovu a lidé s ním chtějí pracovat. Splnění ceny, času a kvality ještě nemusí znamenat že je projekt úspěšný, protože zákazník ve finále mohl chtít něco jiného nebo se rozpadl tým;
  • máte všechno specifikované a přesně zadané? Tak proč to chce dodávat agilně, když víte co chcete?
  • kratší nebo delší sprinty? Je to jedno, u delšího sprintu stejně strávíte víc času plánováním, poměrově to vypadá podobně. Kratší sprinty když je hodně nejistoty, když potřebuje člověk udržovat tempo týmu;
  • musí znát něco z dané oblasti nebo technologie? Nemusí, ale pokud zná tak tomu víc rozumí, lépe cítí problémy, ale současně do toho nesmí kecat a vnucovat svoji myšlenky;
  • junior versus senior? Junior zná názvosloví, je pečlivý, umí komunikovat. Senior má rozhled, prošel si různými projekty a firmami, nejede vše podle jedné šablony. A ten se pozná podle toho jak vejde do místnosti, sedne si, na co se zeptá;
  • change management je možná moderní tím, že se dřív moc nedělal – tady je nová verze, dokumentace, sbohem. Dneska lidé chtějí aby se s nimi víc mluvilo, když se správně komunikuje tak se zkracuje doba kdy toho moc neumí, zrychluje se doba, kdy jim novinka začne být užitečná. Nutně to nedělá projektový manažer;
  • certifikace? Studie od PMI říká, že kdo má certifikaci tak má větší plat. K tomu studium na certifikaci člověka vytrhne z rutiny a ukáže šíři projektového řízení. A konečně se tím člověk dostane přes první kolo HR a může se začít bavit už s tím hiring manažerem. Některé z nich jsou dokonce zadarmo;
  • velká firma (s PMO) nebo malá? V těch velkých stejně dost možná nebudete mít šanci se rozvinout nebo vyzkoušet různé věci, takže se nebojte čas od času zastavit, ohlédnout a zapřemýšlet, zda získáváte dost – ať už jsi v korporátu nebo malé firmě tak se můžeš rozvíjet a pokud ne, tak jdi jinam!
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