The Situation
You’re sitting in the middle of a Salesforce project and it’s taking much longer than you expected.
Maybe the original estimate was three months. Now it’s six.
Maybe it was supposed to launch this quarter. Now it’s next quarter.
At some point it becomes natural to start asking What the hell is going on?
The reality is that Salesforce Project Delays are extremely common. The unfortunate part is that many people assume it’s because Salesforce itself is difficult.
In my experience, that’s rarely the real problem.
Salesforce Project Delays: The Short Answer
In my experience, Salesforce projects take too long because of structure.
Consulting firms are not structured to deliver projects quickly and efficiently.
They’re structured to deliver projects in a way that protects their business model.
On top of that, many consultants are afraid to hold customers accountable to the things they agreed to do.
Those two factors combine into a situation where projects drag on for months longer than necessary (if they get completed at all).
What’s Actually Going On
There are several forces working against getting your project completed quickly.
Most Salesforce consulting firms weren’t designed by people obsessed with efficiency.
Instead, many consultants learn how projects work at one company, leave, and then recreate the same structure somewhere else because “that’s how the industry works”.
The problem is that the industry has normalized a lot of behaviors that create Salesforce Project Delays and waste time.
The underlying structure of many consulting firms is designed to:
- Manage risk
- Protect scope
- Track hours
- Create documentation
- Defend decisions
Those things aren’t inherently bad, but they can easily become 85% of the working day.
That leaves 15% to do the stuff you’re paid to do.
1. Billable Hours Fight Against Speed
This is the most obvious culprit.
If a project was estimated at 100 hours and you complete it in 38.6 hours, that isn’t necessarily something to write home to mom about.
The consultant has now delivered fewer billable hours than expected.
That’s not an accusation. It’s simply how the incentives work.
Many consulting firms have built multi million dollar businesses around billable utilization.
The result is that speed can not be rewarded.
This is closely related to a concept called Parkinson’s Law. Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
The same thing often happens with Salesforce projects.
If there is room for another meeting, another requirements session, another review cycle, another document, the project absorbs that time.
Before long, a project that could have been completed in twelve weeks takes six months.
2. Consultants Are Terrified of Holding Customers Accountable
A lot of consultants are wimps (sorry guys). They just simply don’t want to hold customers accountable and are terrified of creating productive friction.
If you want a project completed quickly, customers have responsibilities too.
They need to:
- Attend demos
- Make decisions
- Test configurations
- Provide data
- Answer questions
- Stop reopening previously approved work
Those activities sound simple.
They’re not.
Many projects slow down because nobody is willing to say “We need this by Friday at 3 PM or the timeline shifts”.
Consultants fear upsetting customers. Customers assume the consultant will keep things moving.
Nobody applies pressure so the project date quietly shifts by a month.
Then everyone wonders why the timeline doubled.
Good consultants don’t just build.
They facilitate momentum.
Sometimes that means having uncomfortable conversations.
3. Unnecessary Administration Consumes The Project
There is an entire category of project work that creates the appearance of progress without actually moving the system forward.
Examples include:
- Massive project plans
- Endless requirements gethering
- Excessive user stories
- Status meetings about status meetings
- Hour tracking exercises
- Scope protection documents
- Zero-dollar addendums (my favorite way to waste time)
- Approval chains that never end.
Eventually everyone feels busy, but no productive work is happening.
The Salesforce configuration itself becomes secondary to the administrative machinery surrounding it.
That’s a dangerous place for any project.
4. Internal Business Design Destroys Focus
This is probably the least discussed cause of Salesforce Project Delays.
Most consultants are constantly switching contexts.
Meeting.
Project.
Customer.
Meeting.
Escalation.
Proposal.
Meeting again.
Oh I’m actually supposed to work too.
Then people wonder why productivity suffers.
Deep work requires uninterrupted focus.
Many consulting firms design that out of existence.
When consultants spend all day bouncing between responsibilities there is no time for production.
Even talented people struggle to move quickly in environments that don’t allow them to concentrate.
The result is a project that technically keeps moving while feeling like it never goes anywhere.
What Salesforce Project Delays Look Like In Real Life
Earlier in my career I worked for a consulting organization where three-month projects turning into one-year projects wasn’t unusual.
The people were smart. The customers were good people.
Nobody woke up trying to create a bad experience.
The structure simply worked against efficiency.
Requirements gathering would stretch for weeks.
Meetings multiplied.
Zero-dollar addendums would appear every time someone wanted to protect themselves from a potential scope issue.
Dates would slide, then slide again, then slide again.
The structure was so crazy that I could potentially work with the entire department in the course of a quarter:
– 25 Consultants
– 12 Developers
– 30 Data specialists
We weren’t on delivery teams so we were left to essentially figure out how to be productive individually.
The result wasn’t a lack of effort.
It was a lack of structure that rewarded momentum.
Why Salesforce Project Delays Keep Happening
At its core, this is a business model problem.
For a very long time, the profitable consulting model looked something like this:
- Estimate hours
- Track hours
- Protect scope
- Bill hours
- Document everything
- Minimize risk
- Repeat
The model worked, so people kept doing it.
The issue is that what’s good for a consulting firm’s risk profile is terrible for project velocity.
That’s why Salesforce Project Delays continue to show up across organizations of every size.
The Cost Of Letting A Project Drag On
The obvious cost is money.
But that’s rarely the most damaging consequence.
The bigger issue is momentum.
When projects drag on there is a good chance that the product never gets used.
People start looking for alternatives.
Some organizations begin questioning whether Salesforce was the right decision.
Others try to get refunds from Salesforce, which rarely goes the way they hope (good luck).
The longer a project drags on, the harder it becomes to create excitement around the outcome.
What started as a business initiative becomes a source of frustration.
What Cloud Trailz Does Differently
At the time of this writing, Cloud Trailz has completed more than 250 projects with a team of three people.
That isn’t because we’re superhuman.
It’s because we’ve spent years removing things that slow projects down.
We intentionally avoid structures that create unnecessary drag.
We focus on:
- Fast decision making
- Clear accountability
- Focused work time
- Demonstrations instead of endless meetings
- Building instead of discussing building
- Perhaps most importantly, we are willing to tell customers when they are becoming the bottleneck. In a loving way of course.
Not because we’re trying to be difficult.
Because accountability helps projects move.
We’ve found that customers generally appreciate honesty far more than endless politeness followed by missed deadlines.
Efficiency isn’t an accident.
It’s a design choice.
Closing Thought
If you’re experiencing Salesforce Project Delays, it’s important to understand that you’re not alone.
In many cases, the problem isn’t Salesforce itself.
The problem is how the project is being structured, managed, and delivered.
The good news is that structure can be changed.
If you’re frustrated with a project that’s dragging on, we’d be happy to show you how we think about delivery and what we’ve learned from completing hundreds of projects with a very small team.
You can also learn more about how we help frustrated Salesforce customers here.
Sometimes the fastest way to finish a Salesforce project is to stop accepting the idea that it has to take forever.