CPQ Deployment process discovery checklist

When you come new to the Salesforce CPQ implementation project or when you are a part of a big programme, where many streams are working together, deployment become quite a big activity with many items to handle. The list in this article should help you to understand what areas of the current project or org setup needs to be checked. That’s not the whole list, but a good starting point for you to rock the deployment process in your project!

Questions/Topics to review before Salesforce CPQ deployment:

1. Is there any documentation for the deployment process?
2. How do we know that the UAT was accepted and all is ready for deployment?
3. Is there any HLD document describing the items that are going to be deployed?
4. Are the unit test written and included in the package.xml?
5. Can I have the package.xml file for CPQ package?
6. What are the manual pre or post deployment steps?
   1. Is there any data load activity needed for the deployment?
   2. If yes, is there a list of objects that need to be data loaded? What are those objects and how many records are there to be transferred?
7. Who does the deployment? Is there a Release Manager who does that?
8. Who does the post deployment manual steps? Is this a Release Manager?
9. When is the next CPQ deployment happening?
10. How is the deployment done? Automatically? Manually (ant script)?
11. How old is the UAT org (when was it refreshed)? How many differences between the Prod and UAT?
12. When are the sandboxes refreshed? Regularly?
13. Are there any smoke tests done after deployment, allowing to understand if the deployment was successful?
14. What happens if the deployment fails?
15. Are there any other workstreams deploying at the same time?
    1. Is the CPQ package the only one deployed?
    2. Are there any other packages to be deployed?

Useful artefacts:

1. Deployment package (zipped archive of all components that are going to be deployed) and package.xml for the whole CPQ solution
2. Documentation about the deployment process (pre deployment steps, post deployment steps)
3. List of objects that needs to be data loaded after deployment (CPQ configuration data)
4. Previous packages or access to the GIT repository holding the whole history of the CPQ package

If you want to learn about other items you need to pay attention to when implementing Salesforce CPQ, check my book.