Rajeev Godara

Short Info: I have built an application for one of the global giants in the mobile payment industry that integrate the salesforce system with seven external systems via client-side web methods system to generate a Sales 360 view of the merchant providing details at the Salesforce side.

Background: The client's presence has been over two decades, and during this long time it has acquired many smaller firms which have resulted in it having data stored in multiple different systems. The pain for them was that whenever the user wanted to get a holistic view of how a merchant performs across the globe, the user must connect with resources from different systems and get the reports generated and merge in the end. All of this was taking a lot of time and there is where they come up with this requirement to build a merchant 360 page that could get details from different systems and help them have one stoppage built-in to interact with them all via their web methods system.

An oil and gas giant's lubricant business executes a lot of projects yearly. These projects were mainly created and managed by their PMO department—coordination with all the project participants, communication, and status reporting were all handled by the PMO Team.

In each project, around 15 participants from 11 different functional groups participate and own multiple activities/tasks. Projects were managed using Microsoft Project. Assignment of tasks, progress tracking, notifications, and collaboration was done using MS Outlook. Storage of Documents and version control was done using SharePoint.

As most resources involved in various projects were Salesforce.com users, the robust Salesforce platform was the obvious choice for implementing a solution for tracking all the projects, thereby achieving the following vision and objectives:
business value, standardization and automation, 360 degree and real-time project view, effective collaboration tool, cloneable, template-based auto-generation feature, and mobility.

Existing AppExchange application named “Milestone PM – Project and Task Management” was leveraged to provide basic data structure and functionality. It was further enhanced to meet client needs.

This project was for one of the US finance and mobile payment giants. As the client kept growing bigger and bigger, it had acquired smaller firms. I led a team of eight offshore resources, including one for Eloqua, two for ETL (Informatica), two Salesforce developers, and three QA resources. This was primarily a migration project; however, while migrating, the client wanted to transform all lightning aura components from the legacy system into LWC.

Challenges Faced: As all the previous team members have left the legacy system’s organization, no one on the client-side completely knew what functionality the application offered. Thus, before getting to start developing the components, the challenge was to dig deep into the code to understand the existing functionalities and get the user stories created by BA. Once user stories were created and refined as per the existing behavior, it was required to modularize the functionality to increase scalability and fix a few existing system issues.