At Cosimo we believe the most successful Salesforce solutions require a combination of:
- Consistent product development, ensuring stability and incremental value
- Larger-scale projects to accelerate major advancements
Executing larger-scale implementations achieves significant benefits within a short timeframe.
By leveraging industry best practices as well as our structured framework, we empower organisations to realise rapid transformation while maintaining stability and continuity.
Our approach consists of six key phases: Discovery, Design, Development, Deployment, Testing and Hypercare.
From the outset and seamlessly integrated throughout our projects, we prioritise governance, business readiness, change management, data migration strategies, and go-live planning.
Let’s take a deeper look at our methodology!
1. Discovery: Foundation For Success
The Discovery phase is essential to understanding your organisation’s needs and setting a strategic direction for the project. During this phase, we work closely with your team to explore key business goals, challenges, and success metrics, which will guide every decision throughout the project.
Key activities and deliverables:
- Business Goals and Challenges: Identifying and understanding your primary objectives, challenges, and desired outcomes.
- Technology and Process Analysis: Analysing your existing technology landscape and business processes to define how Salesforce can best support your operations.
- Salesforce Architecture and Integration: Outlining the high-level architecture and integration requirements for Salesforce within your ecosystem.
- Project Scope and Delivery Plan: Defining the scope, deliverables, and overall project timeline, setting clear expectations.
- Team Definition: Identifying key stakeholders and project team members, ensuring the right expertise is in place.
By the end of the Discovery phase, we provide a comprehensive plan that defines the project scope, governance structure, and key resources, ensuring alignment for the next phase.
2. Design: Translating Requirements into a Clear Solution
Building on the insights from Discovery, the Design phase is where we translate business requirements into a detailed Salesforce solution that aligns with your strategic goals.
Key activities and deliverables:
- Stakeholder Workshops: Conducting detailed workshops to gather and refine business requirements, data migration approach and change management strategies.
- Solution Design: Creating a detailed design that follows industry and Salesforce best practices to ensure scalability and future-proofing.
- User Stories with Acceptance Criteria: Documenting business requirements as user stories, complete with clear acceptance criteria.
- Effort and Scope: Finalising the scope of the project and refining development estimates.
The output of this phase is a comprehensive user story backlog, a detailed solution design document, and a clear project plan, all ensuring a smooth transition to development.
3. Development: Building a Robust, Scalable Solution
In the Development phase, we begin bringing the Salesforce solution to life, focusing on building a scalable and robust system that meets your business needs. We work in Agile sprints to ensure iterative progress and flexibility.
Key activities and deliverables:
- Agile Development Sprints: We break the development into sprints to ensure continuous improvement and feedback.
- Daily Stand-Ups and Sprint Planning: Regular check-ins and sprint planning sessions to ensure continued alignment.
- Show & Tells: Conducting show-and-tell sessions to gather stakeholder feedback and make adjustments early in the process.
- Collaboration with Business Users: Ensuring close collaboration between development teams and business users, maintaining a focus on the end-user experience.
By the end of this phase, we will have a functional Salesforce solution ready for comprehensive testing and user acceptance.
4. Testing: Ensuring Quality and User Satisfaction (QA & UAT)
Testing is a crucial step to verify that the solution works as expected and meets the requirements defined during the Design phase. This includes both quality assurance (QA) testing to ensure the solution’s functionality and user acceptance testing (UAT) to ensure it aligns with business needs.
Key activities and deliverables:
- End-to-End Testing: Running comprehensive tests to ensure that all features and integrations function as expected across the entire system.
- User Acceptance Testing (UAT): Engaging business users to test the solution in real-world scenarios to validate whether it meets their needs.
- Bug Fixes and Enhancements: Addressing any issues or areas for improvement discovered during testing.
The goal is to ensure the solution is fully tested, stable, and ready for deployment.
5. Deployment: Transitioning to Business as Usual
The Deployment phase marks the official go-live of your Salesforce solution. During this phase, we transition the solution from the development environment to production and ensure that the business is ready to adopt the new system.
Key activities and deliverables:
- Data Migration and System Integrations: Moving your data into the Salesforce platform and ensuring proper integration with other systems.
- User Training and Change Management: Providing comprehensive training to end users and supporting them through the change management process.
- Production Deployment: Deploying the solution to the production environment, making it accessible for daily business operations.
At the end of the Deployment phase, the solution is fully live, and users are equipped to begin leveraging the system for their day-to-day activities.
6. Hypercare: Ensuring Continued Success Post-Launch
The Hypercare phase ensures that your team has the support they need as they transition to using the solution in their daily operations. This phase is designed to address any issues that arise after deployment and provide ongoing support as needed.
Key activities and deliverables:
- Post-Go-Live Support: Providing immediate support to address any issues that arise after the solution goes live.
- Monitoring and Optimisation: Closely monitoring system performance and making adjustments as needed to ensure optimal performance.
- Knowledge Transfer and Documentation: Providing training and documentation to help your team manage and optimise the solution moving forward.
Hypercare is a critical phase to ensure that the solution continues to meet business needs and is optimized for long-term success.
Wait there’s more!
Project governance
Our strong governance framework ensures that we maintain clear communication, quality control, and risk management.
We track progress against milestones, keep stakeholders informed, and make adjustments as needed to ensure the project stays on track, within scope, and aligned with your business goals.
By following this structured approach, we help ensure a smooth, successful Salesforce implementation that drives business value and supports long-term growth.
Change Management
Change Management is a dedicated work stream within our Salesforce implementation approach, focusing on ensuring that your organisation successfully adopts the new solution and transitions smoothly to its everyday use.
This work stream focuses on minimising disruption, fostering engagement, and building confidence in the new system, ensuring that your team fully embraces the Salesforce solution and drives its ongoing success.
Customers expect richer engagement, personalisation, and seamless service while employees demand more from their tools.
Today, it’s not enough to simply implement a Salesforce solution – you need a strategic vision and a diverse skill set to manage, maintain, and evolve your platforms.
This is essential for maximising return on investment, staying competitive and driving innovation.
As a result, organisations are seeking more flexible, adaptive, and long-term strategies to optimise their technology platforms.
At Cosimo, we are excited to offer a fresh approach to Salesforce consulting through our Product Management Service.
What is Product Management and Why Does It Matter?
Traditional project approaches often end at delivery and focus on delivering a fixed scope within a set timeline. While this methodology has its place, relying solely on it may limit your ability to keep pace with the rapid changes modern businesses require.
Product Management is all about long-term partnership. It facilitates a consistent and sustainable process involving strategic visioning, iterative development cycles, continuous feedback loops, and a focus on change management to ensure smooth feature transition into business as usual.
The framework makes it possible to adjust and optimise your Salesforce platform over time, ensuring that the technology is moving forward with the business.
This model delivers higher ROI, less risk and disruption to operations, faster time to market, and ultimately better results for your employees and customers.
We believe you need a combination of the two. Consistent product development ensures stability and incremental value, while one-off projects embedded within your product management framework accelerate major advancements.
Cosimo’s Product Management Service
Our mission at Cosimo is to be a true strategic partner for our customers, becoming an extension of your internal teams empowering you to own your solution.
We start by understanding your business, goals, and challenges through collaboration with key stakeholders. This phase includes analysing your technology landscape, identifying optimisation opportunities, and defining value propositions. From there, we develop a tailored roadmap with clear milestones, priorities, and timelines.
Based on your roadmap, we determine the skill sets you need and their commitment on a monthly basis. From Architects, Developers, Consultants, Business Analysts and Change Management experts we provide the skilled professionals you need at the capacity required.
Using Agile methodologies, we deliver features in increments for faster releases and early feedback. Each sprint focuses on high-priority items.
Through our defined governance framework your dedicated Product Owner collaborates with your internal technical and operational teams to continually update your Salesforce roadmap and plan your resourcing requirements ensuring alignment with your business objectives and budget.
For major developments we assemble a team, who become embedded into the Product Management framework, to deliver a standalone project. See our Implementation approach.
If you’re ready to experience the benefits of continuous, agile product development with Salesforce, get in touch with us today to learn more about how our Product Management service can help you achieve your goals.
At Cosimo Consulting, we know that successful Salesforce transformations require more than just technical expertise, they require strategy, teamwork, efficiency, quality and consistency.
These are the very values that drive our consulting approach, inspired by our founder, Jessica Oliver’s, double world record breaking Atlantic and Pacific Ocean Rows.
On January 26th 2022 Team Wild Waves made up of Jessica Oliver and Charlotte Harris set a new World Record for the fastest female pair to row 3,000-miles across the Atlantic Ocean in 45 days.
On June 8th 2024 the team set off from Monterey Bay, California to row 2800 miles across the mid Pacific Ocean. 37 days later they arrived in Hawaii having won the female class and breaking both the Men and Women World Records by 2 and 9 days respectively.
Wild Waves are the first team in history to complete both Worlds Toughtest Ocean Rows. Across the challenges they raised £130,000 for Shelter and Women’s Aid.
Cosimo Consulting is named after the teams Ocean Rowing Boat ….. Cosimo!
There are so many parallels between what makes a successful endurance challenge and a successful salesforce transformation.
Cosimo first a foremost means Teamwork. it’s about people coming together with a common purpose.
We work as partners with our customers, sharing knowledge, expertise and being an extension of each other teams.
Cosimo represents Strategy, having clear goals and mission statements. Reminding yourself of the why to keep you focused on your outcomes.
Our approach is to break down programs of work into a structured roadmap to deliver Consistent incremental value. Thats when you exceed expectations long term.
You can be more Efficient, you can focus on Quality, you can be more adaptable and importantly celebrate the wins along the way.
We are a people first consultancy. Our guiding principles of teamwork, quality, efficiency and consistency shapes everything we do for our customers and how we have developed our service offerings.
This mindset fuels our approach to customer success and sets us apart from the rest.
Cosimo means embracing challenges, pushing boundaries, and achieving the impossible.