NatWest Bring it 2020 has provided £500 of match funding
The Architech Club
London, England, United Kingdom
Aim
Create a home for exceptional Salesforce professionals to focus on giving brilliant advice and assurance - reducing red projects!
The Architech Club is a Salesforce consultancy specialising in advice and assurance. We work on sales, customer relationship management (CRM), customer portal, social and contact centre transformations that include Salesforce technology. Salesforce is the number 1 CRM technology platform in the world and an increasingly central feature of companies' digital transformation strategy.
Why the Salesforce ecosystem needs the Architech Club
Companies are implementing Salesforce without a clear strategy and plan for scale. The results are technical debt and rework which ultimately results in higher costs and a much longer time to value. Great for an implementation partner, who can sell more hours, but what about the customer?
With so many companies undergoing digital transformation projects and choosing Salesforce for their sales, portal, marketing, social and service needs, I believe we have a responsibility to help them make informed decisions with confidence. They also deserve to have well-designed solutions that are built to last. So I want to build The Architech Club to advise and help them consider the wider impact of their decisions.
I also want to help Salesforce professionals use their delivery experience well and grow their careers further. With Salesforce looking to create 4m jobs in the next few years, senior professionals play a significant role in reaching this goal.
Why's this idea so different?
No one else is offering advice and assurance alone. I'm planning to offer a subscription-style consulting service, where the cost is fixed, nothing's out of scope and we can offer the expertise of the most talented professionals in the sector. We won't be configuring or coding on Salesforce.
Founded by a Salesforce Champion
I love working with the Salesforce platform. I'm what we would call a Salesforce architect. I have sixteen Salesforce certifications and am actively working towards the notoriously tough Mother of All Salesforce Certs, the Certified Technical Architect. Architects are delivery leaders. They make technical and project decisions by weighing up pros, cons and considerations. I've spent the last 5 years encouraging people to think beyond their focused implementation of Salesforce features and to consider scalability, growth plans, culture, data, governance and wider technology landscape.
In 2017, following a life-affirming experience with breast cancer, I decided to expand my credentials. I didn't want to study alone, so I founded a small group, which grew into a global movement called Ladies Be Architects. It's led by women, but creates content for everyone, focusing on active study. The initiative has accelerated the careers of over 4,000 people around the world by preparing them for certification. It's also made the Architect job role very popular, forcing Salesforce to respond by creating events and programmes to support the worldwide demand. I've since been rewarded with Salesforce MVP status and the BIMA100, TechWomen100 and Women in IT Excellence awards for my efforts in this sector.
Despite doing my hobby as a job, however, my motivation took a hit many times when I saw that I couldn't often offer the quality of approach I wanted to. I wasn't involved until after a project had been sold, so I had to work with whatever scope, budget and people constraints I'd been handed. I also had targets on my back - utilisation being the main one. In many firms, if your util isn't high enough, it restricts your career prospects. I was outgrowing my delivery role but couldn't progress because of the way my expertise was (or wasn't) sold.
We're Delivery People, Not Marketeers
To do this, we need help with business development and marketing. As a delivery expert, marketing strategy and business development are completely new to me. I would like to invest in getting our message right and visible in the right way. As we're brand new, and there are only a certain number of hours in the day, we rely on experts to help us with this.
We're planning to run a launch party, a blog, explainer video and a series of thought leadership events and we would love to have your participation. Take a look at some of the rewards we're offering to see what takes your fancy. The Architech Club is globally visible thanks to the success of Ladies Be Architects, and we're keen to increase that on the business side.
Why wouldn't an implementation partner do this?
Implementation partners don't have the time to throw resources at developing operating models; they have to grow talent, increase revenue and keep their people billable. With a variety of skillsets, implementation experience is the best way to grow that talent. So we're not into competing with them. Instead, we want to enhance their implementation experience by bridging the gap between the customer's strategy and their delivery outcomes.
This project successfully funded on 30th March 2020