If you’re getting ready to undergo a Lightning Migration and are worried about what you have gotten yourself into, join us for a look at the best practices for a smooth Lightning Migration. Lets get a basic shared understanding of what a Lightning Migration is. For our purposes we are going to define a Lightning Migration as the transistion of a user base from performing their tasks in Salesforce from predominantly Classic experience to predominantly Lightning Experience. Now we’re not saying it wouldn’t be nice to be able to just flip the switch and turn it on, but following the steps below can help make things run a bit smoother and truly help unlock the capabilities in Lightning. 

Step 1: Commit to performing a Lightning Migration

It may seem silly but the very first step to making sure your Lightning Migration goes smoothly: committing to having one. When it comes down to it your users will need support to fully leverage Lightning and before you send them over it helps to commit to actually performing a migration.

So you’re company has said yes we are going to do the Lightning Migration and we’re magically done right? It’s never quite worked that way for me. Here’s the thing, you’re not just asking your company to commit to moving to Lightning you’ll want them to commit to:

• The goal of the Lightning Migration
• Who will act as resources for your users
• What the minimum viable product is
• What opportunities will become available once your users have migrated

It’s tempting at this time to also try and get committment on a timeline. While a goal for a timeline is helpful, committing to a date is dangerous. You have your goals for the migration – but not the defined scope of work which we will talk about soon.

Step 2: Start Building Your Scope

Once you have an idea of the goals of your Lightning Migration its time to start making the work more manageable. To help make the break up of work a bit easier below consider dividing the migrations by your users managers, profiles, and or primary objects they use. As you start dividing the work you can start leveraging your resources and giving them specific pieces to work on so more can get done without a bottleneck. 

Step 3: Start Opening the Lines of Communication

Leadership and Team Leaders

This channel should include a way to track goals for each of the groups and should be updated by the team leaders and work is done.

Make sure the communication channels established are organized enough to scale. You might not end up needing such an elaborate system, but being without one when you need it is a nightmare. These channels might not be just one media. For example you may wish to use Salesforce Cases to get feedback from your users but send them project updates via email. Your technology team may then wish to use something like Jira. While leadership is looking for updates in excel report format. This can all work just fine – as long as you know how to contact who and when to loop them in. 

Finally, and most importantly, breathe. A Lightning Migration may be nerve wracking at the beginning, but should be fun by  the end. So get ready, we can do this.