Governance frameworks and Design Authority decisions
What a Center of Excellence governs and who decides: the Design Authority's guidelines, design reviews and exceptions; business, integration and documentation standards; reuse and migrations; build versus buy with AgentExchange (formerly AppExchange); operational readiness reviews; governed automation; and configuration kept in source with decision records and drift checks.
Given a customer scenario, analyze and recommend the appropriate governance framework.
~7 min read · 10 practice questions ·
What the exam expects
- Route a decision to the right governance body: the Design Authority for guidelines, design review and exceptions; other Center of Excellence (CoE) capabilities for standards, vendors, documentation and migrations.
- Recommend CoE standards for business processes and terms, integrations, documentation and reusable assets.
- Recommend build versus buy, including AgentExchange (formerly AppExchange) apps, through a joint CoE evaluation.
- Recommend launch and automation governance: an operational readiness review that gates launch, and versioned event contracts with controlled enablement where proof is required.
- Govern configuration: source control, documented rationale and scheduled drift comparison.
Key terms: Center of Excellence (the group that sets and governs Salesforce standards across the organization); Design Authority (the CoE subgroup that owns architectural guidelines, design review and exceptions); operational readiness review (a pre-launch check of monitoring, runbooks, rollback, performance, security and dependencies); configuration drift (production settings diverging from what version control says); event contract (the agreed schema between event publishers and subscribers).
Key facts
- Detail
- When to use features, such as flows versus Apex or custom versus third-party apps
- Detail
- The DA approves the rare cases where guidelines are loosened or ignored
- Detail
- DA reviews planned metadata before the construction phase
- Detail
- Planned work, time in estimates, not necessarily comprehensive
- Detail
- Run with the permissions you grant; you own security after Security Review
- Detail
- Test in a sandbox or Developer Edition org before production
- Detail
- Gate production launch on completion; time it neither too early nor too late
- Detail
- Automated comparison with version control, scheduled quarterly
- Why does a guideline exception go to the Design Authority rather than the requesting team?
- When should the Design Authority review a migration's metadata?
- Which CoE capability sets catalog, error-handling and retry standards for integrations?
- Why should production configuration be compared with version control on a schedule?
The questions are free to read. Answers with their sources and self-grading are included with the pack.
Keep reading with the Platform Development Lifecycle and Deployment Architect pack
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The pack includes:
- All 26 lessons of the Platform Development Lifecycle and Deployment Architect guide, with reading progress
- Interactive decision walks and step-by-step sequence steppers
- Inline practice questions and one-click topic practice (10 questions for this lesson)
- An official source cited for every claim
- An AI tutor that answers from the guide
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