What is Drift?

As a project moves forward, attention often focuses on outputs instead of outcomes. As a result, projects that were previously aligned with business objectives drift away from the original intent. 

Outcome Drift Monitoring is the process of monitoring a project for outcome drift. As part of any SHoPs or MoPs deployment, drift monitoring ensures business objectives are achieved along with tactical and technical outputs. 

Why do Salesforce projects drift?

CRM projects go off-course for three reasons:

1. The in-house CRM “project owners” experts don’t have enough industry + cloud + practical domain knowledge – but they still sign off on a sprint.
2. The Cloud developers don’t have sales + marketing functional knowledge and no experience in the daily reality of running campaigns for, say, 8 product lines, each running 15 campaigns per industry per year. So how can they know if the flows really work together?
3. The marketing strategy has pivoted faster than the technology delivery – so your project leads aren’t matching the technology requirements to the realities on the ground.

In reality, these three things are all part of the same problem.

It is easy to become distracted by change requests, coding vs config decisions, concerns over tech debt, staffing challenges will compound, and–if not diligently governed for outcomes–the project drifts further and further away from the original intent. 

It doesn’t help that the Solution Integrator you hired doesn’t share your business model. Think about it.

If a Solution Integrator goes 10% over budget or only delivers 90% of outcomes…do you fire them? No. Of course not.

15% over? 85% of outcomes? 25% over?

75% of outcomes? Maybe…

There is seldom a consequence unless they are 30% over or less than 50% of outcomes. They know this. We have trained them to fail to some degree…and their business model depends on change orders for profitability. Outcome drift is a good business model.

Types of Drift

There are a few different types of drift. The main ones are:

• Feature Drift
• Technical Drift
• Deadline Drift
• Data Drift
• Code Drift
• Data Drift

What is Outcome Drift Monitoring?

Outcome Drift Monitoring is a project management and Outcome Agile framework for continuously monitoring the project to ensure output alignment with desired outcomes. 

Over time, this ensures that the project remains aligned with the original business objectives. When drift is detected, alerts are triggered and an intervention is organized with the project team.