How to Milk Salesforce Classic for as Long as Possible (and Why You Shouldn’t Do That)

Your position? It’s simply a problem you’ll have to solve sometime in the future.

Certainly, procrastination can’t hurt. It’s true that a complex migration might need a lot of runway for the change. Dell reported that their migration took 18 months. You’re sure to make all of the right decisions when Salesforce drops the hammer and tells you you’re out of time.

Or, you could create your own features instead of using the new ones offered in Lightning. Technical debt is just a number, right?

If you grit your teeth, you’ll hardly notice the slowdowns caused by broken processes or workaround. There’s no need to revisit or optimize workflows if you don’t change. Sure, your competitors are making progress at — forgive the pun — lightning speed. But hey, staying on Classic isn’t costing you anything!

Waiting Won’t Make the Migration to Salesforce Lightning Easier

All joking aside, waiting to move from Classic to Lightning isn’t going to make the move easier, cleaner, or better. And, truth be told, it could make it much worse.

Instead, it’s time to commit to Lightning Experience. Making this commitment requires having the right information so that you can create an effective battle plan.

Start by assessing your current situation. The Salesforce Lightning Readiness Report can be a great tool in helping you get a snapshot view of what you’re looking at.

The Readiness Report is a starting point, however. For instance, it won’t point to your external integrations and processes or at your project risks. Now is the time to assess your organization and honestly understand what’s keeping you from migrating to Lightning. What’s holding your company back? Who is impacted by the shift off of Classic?

The biggest challenge to overcome is the fear of what’s unknown or undefined. If you don’t know what needs to be done, you can’t understand the risks or how to mitigate them. You won’t know how long the migration will take or what the downstream consequences will be. And you’ll miss opportunities for improving your processes, your security, even your customer experience.

Make a Plan

With a clearer picture of your migration's size and shape, you can start to form a solid plan forward.

As a business application and one that likely touches a multitude of orgs in your business, many people and processes will be at the center of your plan and your risk. Begin with defining who will be impacted by the migration and the priorities. Understand the dependencies and relationships of users and applications as they relate to Salesforce and the systems connected to it. There is the potential need to balance competing interests, and the time to do that is well before you’re knee-deep in a migration.

Don’t forget to include the upstream and downstream issues that may be caused by the move.

Your Readiness Report, review of external touchpoints, and your processes will help you clearly understand what will be involved in the project. Use that to define the migration’s effort, duration, and required resources. Who will complete the technical tasks, and what components are needed?

Level of effort in hand, you can start on a schedule. Which elements are priorities, which can be done in parallel, and what are the co-dependencies involved? Set up your rollout sequence and work out from there.

A project like a platform migration will require a budget, and there are several considerations.

• Can you piggyback on other projects, or will this need its standalone funding?
• Should you consider only internal resources?
• What is the cost of outsourcing the project?

A plan, a timeline, and a budget will help you choose a path forward. Now’s the time for buy-in from the business. Be clear and upfront about the advantages and disadvantages of your chosen path so that you can sell the benefits of it.

Be ready to answer questions about other options. Including:

• What’s the impact if you don’t migrate?
• What if you complete the project in-house instead of outsourcing?
• What gets postponed, and what are the risks?

The end of this planning effort will bring you on the threshold of getting the work done. Commit the resource for the work, the user training, and the functional and acceptance testing. Then get it done.

Conclusion

Here’s a riddle you probably are already familiar with: When is the best time to plant a shade tree? 20 years ago. When’s the second-best time? Now.

The migration to Salesforce Lightning from Classic is a lot like that riddle. You haven’t done it yet, so now is the time to start. Starting today will give you the runway needed to get your customized implementations and updated processes in place for a seamless move.

When you’re done, you’ll be in a position to modernize your organization and digitize new areas of your business to respond better to needs, market and internal pressure, and compete like never before.