Center of Excellence models and delivery maturity
Why governance speeds delivery, how to start a Center of Excellence and pick the Centralized, Federated or Hybrid model, who sits on the core team, and how to match delivery maturity and DORA metrics to what a customer can sustain.
Given the project risk and customer requirements, explain how to assess the benefits and risks of the different development methodologies and recommend the appropriate governance strategies based on the customer maturity.
~8 min read · 15 practice questions ·
What the exam expects
- Explain to executives why governance speeds delivery, and why starting late beats never starting.
- Start a Center of Excellence (CoE) small and choose the Centralized, Federated or Hybrid model from the org landscape and who must enforce standards.
- Assign core team roles, including the release manager, and name the subteams.
- Replace reactive request handling with demand intake, ROI prioritization and a published release schedule that keeps an emergency path.
- Match a delivery maturity profile to the team, state its trade-off, and report progress with the five ALM phases and DORA metrics.
- Tailor DevOps communication to executives, business owners and users.
Key terms: governance (the framework of people, processes and tools for the Salesforce environment); CoE (the governing team that creates, enforces and changes standards); governance debt (the accumulated effects of having no governance); DORA metrics (delivery measures grouped into throughput and instability); progressive exposure (releasing a change gradually on top of the pipeline).
Key facts
- Detail
- Best from the start; better late than never
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- Start small, then scale quickly
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- Only the Centralized model can veto designs
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- Oversees the pipeline; keeps simultaneous projects from interfering
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- Example: monthly major changes, weekly small tweaks, emergency fixes still allowed
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- By ROI and strategic value, with maintenance time in the schedule
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- Every commit builds and tests in a fresh environment; protected main branch
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- Deployment frequency, lead time for changes, failed deployment recovery time
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- Plan, build, test, deploy, monitor
Sources for this section (6)
- Learn About Salesforce Governancetrailhead.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- Get Started with a Salesforce CoEtrailhead.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- Implement Your Salesforce CoE's Core Capabilitiestrailhead.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- Define Your Salesforce CoEtrailhead.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- Operational Excellencearchitect.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- Learn About Salesforce Application Lifecycle Managementtrailhead.salesforce.com (opens in a new tab)
- Why does a published release schedule help the Salesforce team itself, not just users?
- When should a new CoE form its Design Authority, and how does it gain a foothold?
- Which CoE role runs Design Authority meetings?
- Why does the Lean delivery profile stop working as a team grows?
The questions are free to read. Answers with their sources and self-grading are included with the pack.
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