New clients often ask us what they should be doing to ensure the success of their project implementation. For our inaugural blog post, we'd like to share our Top 5 things that clients can do to help ensure a successful, lower-stress implementation:

Two internal champions are better than one

Change is hard; an executive champion must act as the project sponsor, drive internal alignment, and make critical decisions. However, you also need a working champion to be your superuser on the ground. The systems we implement are rich with functionality and can be a bit overwhelming to new users, especially those who are new to Salesforce. Your Working Champion will become your super user, answer other users' first-level support questions, and be the conduit between your team and technical support. Choose someone who is good with technology and eager to learn. Give them the time during the implementation to 'take extra reps' and become familiar with how the system works in more detail than your average users. Pretty soon, they'll be worth their weight in gold!

Know when to customize, and know when to run

Over the years, we've built countless customizations and add-ons for our clients. Often, these are absolutely required and well worth both the cost to implement and the ongoing cost to maintain, but sometimes they're not. Be willing to ask yourself, "Why do we need this?" and be open to changing internal processes to match best practices whenever possible. If your honest answer to the question, "Why do we need this?" is "Well, we've just always done it that way, " you probably need to re-think.

Fast, Cheap, Good: Choose two

In our experience, the old adage "Fast, Cheap, Good: Choose two" absolutely applies to system implementations. Going faster requires more resources and will incur more costs, but remember that your team also has a day job, so there's a speed limit to how fast they can realistically execute. If you want a quality implementation, you need to spend the time and resources thinking about how the system will function and consider your edge cases. Finally, you need adequate time to test.

Burn the boats

If you're going to implement a new system, you need to cut over and use it. This sounds obvious, but people can be very resistant to change, so a hard "cutover" date is most often required to ensure system adoption. Trying to keep your old system running after going live and doing dual data entry is frequently not a recipe for success. It's also expensive to license and support two systems!

Test like a boss

Your role when testing is to 'own it.' There will be bugs, missed configurations, and unforeseen edge cases despite even the most careful implementation. The good news is that these issues are often easily addressed when found during testing. Complete the test cases provided by your implementation partner as a first step, but then take the time to go off script and perform all of your standard business processes in the new system. Be especially mindful of critical business processes you don't perform frequently, and test these, too. Try to 'break it' during testing because it's much better to find issues now than after go-live!

No two implementations are ever precisely the same, but in our experience, clients who adhere to the steps outlined in this post are far more likely to have a successful, lower-stress implementation.