The client is an organization helping students from low-income backgrounds to get into college, get their degrees, and land a job. Their programs provide students with one-on-one support and mentoring, which creates genuine partnerships that they believe are significant to a student's success.
The client onboarded Application House, together with other partners, to accomplish the list of overdue technical debt they have accumulated by the end of 2021.
Application House deployed a Salesforce Developer committed to a part-time for the project. After a month of working on the project, the client’s Manager of Data and Systems left.
While the manager was more on the business side, he also handled every Salesforce requirement and Salesforce support for the client, making his role like that of a Salesforce Admin.
He worked on admin-related activities for their Salesforce, so his absence left the operational management of the platform unattended.
The client’s Chief Technology and Data Officer notified the Salesforce Developer from Application House of the Manager of Data and Systems’ departure by the first week of January 2022. As such, they have decided to delegate all the admin and support work to him, tasks that are from the tickets on the service desk covering the following areas below:
user activation or deactivation;
weekly backups;
investigating & troubleshooting issues; and,
routine data updates like caseload reassignment, creating tasks for programs, & freezing program data into student progressions (occurring in March)
Since the Chief Technology and Data Officer was on leave, she requested the assistance of a colleague to support Application House’s Salesforce Developer with prioritizing program-related tasks as they come in and have a weekly or bi-weekly call to get accustomed to working together.
A Salesforce Admin knows how to make Salesforce work to the best of an organization’s goals. Their responsibilities are:
Maintaining the platform;
Simplifying the use of the platform for users at any technical level;
Being up to date with new tools, capabilities & releases for the platform.
The role of a Salesforce Admin can be simple or complex, depending on the size and structure of the organization. Regardless, the absence of one means no one to ensure the platform is running smoothly and is being used to its fullest potential.
That is why Application House’s Salesforce Developer was assigned to the role: to keep the light on by providing support services, including day-to-day operational support to the business single-handedly.
Application House's part-time Salesforce Developer provided support service that matched the workload of full-time resources.
The vacancy of the Salesforce Admin role impacted almost everyone on the program side of the organization, including advisors, managers, and program leaders.
To alleviate this, Application House’s Salesforce Developer supported admin-related activities and worked on the service desk tickets, including data-related tasks. He worked on critical issues or minor changes in the platform to cater to the user's needs.
One of the tasks Application House’s Salesforce Developer continued was on Student Recruitment, which was around 75% complete at the time.
He learned to use FormAssembly, an enterprise form platform the client uses for student applications, to make New Year Admission changes before the applications started on 01 February 2022.
He completed the setup of SSO in Salesforce, an authentication method that allowed users to access several applications using a single login and one set of credentials.
While working on the tasks, he found areas where automation is necessary. He automated some of the work and created tickets in the backlog for the other areas to be automated, so this can be addressed in the future.
Having taken up this role, Application House’s Salesforce Developer learned about the organization and their needs, especially on data, to properly support them.
In that way, the developer was able to maintain the client’s Salesforce, ensuring that advisors, managers, program leaders, and students use it to its potential.
Application House’s Salesforce Developer was able to support the continuity of the organization’s operations, therefore keeping the light on.
As of today, Application House’s Salesforce Developer is still working on the admin tasks listed above but now also working on new functionalities while checking off items on the technical debt list.
The Application House team has also since then helped the client out with other projects such as cleaning out old fields and completing important documentation work to help the organization handle the maintenance of their system in the long run.
Application House is committed to becoming your long-term partner. Our dedication to understanding your story, learning how you work, and what you need to help you work reflects that.
That means you can rely on us for every task that will complete the bigger picture of your Salesforce running at optimum power.
We bring you along the process, keeping you informed and on pace so you can manage your system, go beyond surviving, and thrive.
And we know how uncertain things are, so to help you level it out we're offering the pro bono program.
By helping your causes as a nonprofit, we do our part to better the world and bring more good to people.
Application House gets to the core of an issue. By doing so, we can provide the most appropriate solutions that give you the results that underpin your success. Yet you, as nonprofits, continue to do good and serve people. Our part in helping make the world better is by offering our pro bono program, which will give you the first month of our service free of charge.
At Application House, our customer's success defines our success. We make sure that all engagements are carried out with end-to-end support from our consultants.
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