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Project Governance (COE)

What is Governance?

The goal of project governance, and the creation of a COE is to establish, maintain and enforce enterprise standards across all projects. It's also in place to ensure that every project stays on track and conforms to the businesses ideal vision for the it.

How to weave this into your CTA Scenario

You should not just generically mention these roles, the roles you mention should be directly linked to requirements you read throughout your scenario. Generic suggestions for COE members will not get you any points. So if you get a scenario requirement that says something like, "The experience cloud site should be available in English, French, and Spanish" you should weave in your COE's "translation team" for your solution. An example response would be something along the lines of, "We would use translation workbench as well as experience cloud site translations and work with our COE's translation team to ensure the translations were accurate and appropriately vetted" or something like that.

You should essentially be thinking about if a COE membership should be involved/consulted for each requirement and weave them in wherever they are relevant.

What is a COE?

A COE is essentially a body of individuals who manage the governance and operations for a Salesforce Org (or IT initiatives company wide). At a larger business you will likely have multiple COE's, but there will be two major types of COE's:

1) Global COE - This is the enterprise wide COE that tries to maintain a vision for the entire business/suite of technology the business uses. This sets the baseline architecture, security, data standards, etc for all IT groups within a business

2) Local COE - This is a COE local to your project. It ensures that all project teams working in your Salesforce Org (or tech stack) follow the same rules, and align to the businesses vision for what needs to be delivered to customers.

Common Governance Acronyms/Matrixes

COE - Center of Excellence

ROAM - Resolve, Own, Accept, Mitigate. This is a risk management acronym/matric. When a risk is identified it is placed into one of those four categories by the COE.

RACI - Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. This is a responsibilities matrix whose goal is to bring structure and clarity to the roles that each stakeholder plays in a project.

CAB (Change Advisory Board) - The ITIL-standard term that's effectively synonymous with your existing Change Control Board; worth noting since the exam/scenarios may use either term interchangeably.

DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributor, Informed) - An alternative to RACI you'll sometimes see cited as a lighter-weight decision-making matrix.

Common COE Roles

When sitting for the CTA Board you need to make a decision on who to add to your COE based on the criteria in your scenario. You SHOULD NOT just produce a generic COE structure. You need to link your COE actors back to requirements in the scenario.

Executive Sponsor - Responsible for getting executive support throughout the business, and making sure the projects goals are aligned to the goals of the business.

Steering Committee - Keep project goals, timeline, and budget in check. Also responsible for resolving any conflict between project teams.

Architect Review Board - Ensure all architecture domain standards/guides are in place and that all projects are adhering to those standards. It approves and denies any new architecture/development efforts.

Change Control Board - This group is the final group of decision makers as to whether or not a new initiative can take place. They make sure that new initiatives are following the rules and staying within budget.

QA Team - Ensures high quality testing and quality control standards are in place.

PMO (Project Management Office) - This group sets and maintains all project standards.

Compliance Team - This team ensures that all regional government mandated legalities/rules are upheld by the project team.

Security Team - This team ensures that projects abide by both the businesses and the local governments security standards for the data in their systems.

Release Management Team - This team ensures that all apps/projects follow the same release management cadence and have the right suite of tools in place to make releases as smooth as possible.

Translations Team - Team is in charge of ensuring any/all translation work required follows the same quality control guidelines.

Data Steward - A business-aligned role accountable for the quality, definition, and appropriate use of a specific data domain (Accounts, Products, etc). Defines data standards, business rules, and data quality metrics, and works with IT to get them enforced. Owns the "what" and "why" of the data, not where or how it's physically stored.

Data Custodian - A technical/IT-aligned role responsible for the safe day-to-day storage, security, and technical management of data (backups, access controls, encryption, retention enforcement). Implements the policies that Data Stewards (and, at a higher level, Data Owners) define. Owns the "how" of managing the data infrastructure, not its business meaning.