TotalEnergies: Running a Salesforce Center of Excellence

Context

TotalEnergies used Salesforce in several parts of the group. The platform needed one place that decided what was built, to which standard, and when it shipped.

That place is what a Center of Excellence is for.

Role

TotalEnergies was a Cognizant client. I ran its Salesforce Center of Excellence from 2019 to 2021, an account of about €1M a year.

What happened

The daily work of a CoE is plain: take requests from the business, sort them, and turn them into releases on a known rhythm.

Salesforce exchanged data with other systems in the group, so each change was checked against those flows before release. Availability was part of the standards the CoE enforced.

Outcome

For the two years I ran it, one place decided what was built, to which standard, and when it shipped. The account stood at about €1M a year.

What I teach from it

The run side of administration in ADX211: sandboxes, release planning, and who owns the backlog once the project team has left.

And the maintain half of ADX261. A Service Cloud org keeps changing after go-live, and someone has to decide which changes go in.

The one-day programme on AI in Salesforce for administrators asks the same questions of a new capability: who switches it on, with which rights, and how adoption is followed.