For part 3 of the “Day in the life” series Talent Hub spoke with Martin Gessner, an experienced Senior Salesforce Functional Consultant. Martin has provided us with some valuable insights into a day in the life of a Salesforce Functional Consultant and also provides readers with some information on his own blog which we recommend reading.
Over to Martin:
I’ve had a number of different roles working in Salesforce projects, from Project Manager, Scrum Master, Business Analyst and now Functional Consultant and Solution Designer. What is the role of a Solution Designer? It is to understand the business and technical requirements and come up with a technical solution. It may be just within Salesforce or it could also mean how Salesforce works as a component in a larger overall solution. These days, Salesforce is not just a standalone system, it is increasingly one part a complex system landscape, and ensuring that Salesforce is integrated and works in harmony with other applications and as part of a wider solution is becoming important. So, back to a day in the life of…
6:30
Wake up, get ready and head for the bus stop. With the heavy traffic in Sydney, getting going early saves sitting in traffic and wasting time. Use the time on the bus to catch up on email and read articles to stay up to date with what is going on in the Salesforce world and tech in general.
8:00
Get to North Sydney. Leaving early means I don’t usually have time to eat, so stop into my regular cafe near work for some coffee and breakfast. Working in North Sydney is a nice change from the CBD, it’s a little less busy and still has the fantastic views of the harbour from the other side!
8:30
Open email and check the calendar to see what meetings are planned for the day. A typical day with 3 or more meetings. Start replying to emails and doing any preparation for meetings.
9:00
Standup Time for the main project I am working on. The standup often becomes a sit down as we need to get through 10 people and it’s easy to delve into details. The project team is growing as we get closer to implementation. As well as the Salesforce specialists and business reps we have people working on integration with other systems and recently a number of testers have joined the team.
9:30
Answer questions from the Testers. As the testers have recently joined the team, they are trying to understand the functionality to write test scripts and test Jiras that have been completed.
10:00
Meeting with a vendor to discuss changes we have requested to a managed package that is used as part of the project solution. I proposed a couple of options and was keen to get feedback on the possibility of getting the changes done. The vendor did some high level analysis and presented a rough estimate for the work. They needed a few more days to go into more detail and give us a more accurate estimate. Seems that it may be a problem fitting the work into our timeline – everyone is busy!
11:00
Meeting with the team to talk through getting a new environment ready. We have been using a development sandbox refreshed from production a while ago and now it is out of date as other projects have gone live in the meantime, meaning we are missing those changes. We decide to create a new environment so that it has the latest changes. The technical lead suggests to use the force.com migration tool instead of change sets to be able to make the deployment process more efficient and give us some experience of what we will run into when deploying into the UAT and Production environments later on. Deploying changes through environments gets much more complicated when there are multiple streams working on different timelines deploying into production!
14:00 – 15:00
Working on Jiras assigned to me on the project. Approvers need to be set depending on their approval limits and type of record. Investigated how Process Builder and Flows could be used to meet this requirement, but unfortunately it cannot in this case and code will be needed.
15:00
Meeting with some representatives from the business to discuss how one of the approval processes will work. A combination of system demo and whiteboarding the process helps their understanding. There is concern that the solution is not flexible enough, so I will investigate what options there are to deal with these concerns.
16:00
Roadmap presentation from a vendor. While the application is a separate system to Salesforce, as part of our project, we have integrated it in via web services and also in the UI using a widget and iframe and so I was interested to hear what new developments there are for the product and how it may affect the project and longer term use.
17:00
Check emails, send a few replies and back to finishing off a couple of Jiras that need to be completed for the current sprint, and assign to the Testers.
17:30
Back on the bus to head home. After dinner spend some time with the kids, before they have to go to bed. Now I have some time to work on my blog, www.focusonforce.com. I started it a couple of years ago, as a way to record learnings from projects I was involved in, and it grew from there. Now I try to include a variety of topics, from what’s going on the Salesforce world (what is Salesforce’s latest acquisition…) to functional and technical topics, certification information and resources and interviewing other Salesforce professionals from around the world. Salesforce is ever changing, and keeping up is a challenge, but it’s also great to be part of an ecosystem that is pushing technology and cloud solutions forward all the time!
22:30
Finished for another day and off to bed!