Professional Services EM Opportunity Tracking

Describes processes for tracking open PS opportunities.

Tracking Opportunities

⚠️ This page is under construction

Salesforce.com Tracking

Tracking the overall pipeline for Professional Services and individual opportunities is important to the Professional Services team to retain visibility and ensure capacity for future projects. This importance increases as we approach the end of the financial quarter (FQ), as we typically see a spike in Closed Won deals at this time.

To help this visibilty, the Engagement Managers maintain a subset of fields against an opportunity under the Professional Services section. These fields are reviewed and updated on a regular basis to support reporting to Professional Services leadership on the current forecast:

  • Engagement Manager - Denotes the Lead Engagement Manager supporting the opportunity
  • EM Confidence, this can be set as:
    • Grey (Default), meaning the EM does not have visibility or awareness of the opportunity
    • Red, meaning in the opinion of the EM, this will not close won within the timeframe stated
    • Amber, meaning the EM is confident the oportunity will close won, but not necessarily within the timeframe stated
    • Green, meaning the EM is confident that the opportunity will close won within the time started
  • EM Confidence Rationale - Context and rationale to support the EM Confidence field
  • Scoping Issue Link - A direct link to the supporting scoping issue

Scoping Issue Tracking

Scoping Issue EM Boards

Scoping issues are auto-generated by the services calculator in the ps-plan project with the label Services Calculator added to them. Each EM has a board to track scoping issues assigned to them.

Triage of new scoping issues

New scoping issues can be accessed from the “Issues by EM” board and will be tagged with the Open label. Any Engagement Manager can triage new issues, label them appropriately, and assign them to the correct EM. The EM assigned to the scoping issue should be the person who works the region specified in the account record, under the Account Demographics section, Sales Territory field, unless otherwise determined by the team in order to balance scoping issue load across team members.

  • Add the appropriate Segment:: label based on which region owns the opportunity (see “Other labels” section below).
  • Assign the new scoping issue to the relevant EM who owns this region

The board uses scoped labels with the proposal key to track the standard scoping issue workflow:

Column Definition
Open Starting state for each scoping issue - EM has not reviewed the scoping issue yet
proposal::Awaiting_Discovery EM is waiting or additional information, either from account team, or via a scoping call, in order to be able to create an estimate
proposal::Strawman_WIP EM has a strawman estimate in process
proposal::Estimate_Feedback EM has completed the strawman estimate and is awaiting feedback from the account team and/or the customer
proposal::On_hold PS engagement might proceed but there has been a delay in the timing
proposal::SOW_WIP EM is in the process of creating the SOW, or SOW draft is being reviewed by the customer and we are awaiting feedback
proposal::Ready For Approval SOW has been drafted and reviewed by account team and customer and we have been given the greenlight to proceed for signatures; GitLab revenue has approved
proposal::Approved SOW has been approved by Dir. of PS and can be submitted for legal stamp and then signatures
Closed opportunity has closed or we have received word from customer that they will not pursue PS

Delivery Team Review and Approval

During proposal::Strawman_WIP stage, its good practice (for anything that is not-straighforward) to bring in a Technical Architect to review the initial estimate. You can do this by adding a label and signaling in slack. Specific process is defined on the TA Handbook page here.

During the proposal::SOW_WIP stage, it is required to gain Regional Delivery Manager (RDM) approval as the RDM is responsible for succesful delivery of the proejct being scoped. You can do this by adding the RDM::needs-review label on the issue and signaling in the #ps-engagement-mgrs channel to @ps-deliverymanagers.

Win Rate

Win rate is calculated by:

Win Rate = ClosedWon / (ClosedWon + ClosedLost)

Where:

  • ClosedWon is determined by the associated SFDC opportunity going into closed/won status. This is done with the proposal:Closed_Won label
  • ClosedLost is determined by the associated SFDC opportunity going into closed/lost status OR the scoping issue not having any activity for a period of 2 months. This is done with the proposal:Closed_Lost label. This helps us be objective with what should be considered Closed/Lost. This is a general principle and can be overridden by an EM if the opportunity is still active, but has not had contribution within the last two months.

As we have a quarterly reporting cycle, we need to know the quarter in which these opportunity scoping issues closed. We accomplish that by adding the close_qtr::QXYY ( example:close_qtr::Q322 ) label to any issue that goes to closed won or lost.

Other Labels Used for Tracking Scoping Issues

  • EM_Status - manually added to scoping issues as a visual to see what the EM needs to follow up on

    • Waiting: EM is waiting for information from the account team or customer before we can take action to move the issue to the next stage
    • ToDo: EM has the next action for the current scoping issue
  • Segment - manually added to scoping issues to track what sales region the issue is for

    • Ent_APAC
    • Ent_EAST
    • Ent_WEST
    • Ent_EMEA
    • MM_APAC
    • MM_East
    • MM_EMEA
    • MM_West
    • SMB

    Note Public Sector US is a label automatically added to scoping issues that are created via the Services Calculator when the PubSec US checkbox is checked.