Kristian

Kristian Jorgensen - His Road To Becoming A Published Author

Expertise
Our Waegers tend to do remarkable things both in their jobs and outside of them. Their achievements are a testament to their drive, creativity, and dedication, and we are truly fortunate to have such talented and well-rounded people on our team. One of these gems is Kristian Jorgensen, Solution Architect at Waeg. 

While helping our customers tailor projects so they can fit their needs and simultaneously co-leading projects’ engagement together with the Project Managers is pretty impressive in itself, Kristian's professional life gives him even more reasons to be proud. More specifically, publishing his first book, and to celebrate that fact, we sat down with him for a brief interview. Keep on reading to learn more about him, his journey to becoming a published author and the insightful book itself!

Please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background. 

My name is Kristian Margaryan Jørgensen. I live in Copenhagen, Denmark​, with my brilliant wife, Sona, IT Lawyer, and our two-year-old, very energetic, sweet, and strong-willed daughter, Esther.

I work as a Solution Architect and Team Lead in the Solution Engineering practice at Waeg, where I’ve just celebrated my one-year anniversary. All in all, I have nearly a decade of Salesforce experience from both the customer side and in consulting. Before focusing on Salesforce, I held various roles, from sales and key account management to channel management, business intelligence and analytics, to financial controlling.

On March 10th, your book Salesforce End-to-End Implementation Handbook: A practitioner's guide for setting up salesforce programs and projects to deliver superior business outcomes comes out. Could you tell us more about it? 

Certainly. It’s a book full of practical examples, case studies, and recommendations covering the end-to-end implementation lifecycle of Salesforce projects and programs - aiming to enable its readers to manage enterprise-grade Salesforce programs for getting the maximum return on their investment.

The book covers an arguably broad scope as it is cross-functional and multi-dimensional. This means it covers many disciplines and domains without being a pure-play book on any one topic in particular. The topics covered – all in a Salesforce context – include: 

  • Business architecture and strategy, enterprise architecture, and Salesforce architecture

  • Project management, Agile, and DevOps

  • Project, program, and technical Governance

  • Change management

  • Data management and analytics

  • Product management of the Salesforce platform

Where did the idea for writing this book come from?

There are many excellent books about Salesforce architecture as well as implementation handbooks covering one specific Salesforce cloud. When I got into Salesforce - and later on the consulting side - I wondered why there wasn’t a book covering the implementation life cycle. 

Having gained the experience over the years - combined with a motivational push from Tameem Bahri (who wrote the foreword for the book), I had the confidence to believe that sharing my perspectives could bring value to the Salesforce community. Luckily Packt, my publisher, believed so too.

What did the process of writing look like, and how were you able to balance it with your day-to-day work?

It was an extremely structured process - it had to be. Since signing the contract with Packt, there was a precise schedule to deliver a preliminary draft of a chapter about every two weeks. It breaks down to a couple of pages per day over 6-7 months. I also discussed the project with my manager and HR, who have been fully supportive throughout the whole process.

How do the topics of the book relate to what you do at Waeg?

Every day I am fortunate to interact with our customers and potential customers to understand their challenges and objectives. It ranges from extensive program discussions where co-creating the CRM strategy and platform vision and roadmap are key to very discrete concrete projects with clear scope to deliver. I really enjoy having the privilege of dealing with the diversity of challenges - it truly is the same with implementations, both big-picture thinking as well as execution.

What were the obstacles (if any) you bumped into along the way? Are there things you wish to have done differently?

The main obstacle has been personal calendar Tetris, as I’ve spent most evenings and parts of the weekend writing, my wife and parents have - over more than half a year - been extraordinarily supportive. We discussed this going into the project, but knowing how much it required from my family, I would have done more to alleviate the extra weight they had to carry. I definitely owe - and also dedicate - the book to them.

If you could name just one reason why people should buy your book, what would it be?

To grow their ability to empathise with others. 

I know this may sound fluffy for a tech book. But as the book covers and describes the entire implementation life cycle across multiple aspects, it gives the reader insights into challenges faced by different actors and stakeholders in a project or program. Hopefully, this will give readers (program and project managers, product owners, architects, and developers) a better understanding of the organisational context they are in.

What’s next for you?

I have too many ideas and initiatives underway to mention them all, but the key ones are:

1 - Continue being part of the exciting journey Waeg is on - and be inspired by the ambitions of our customers and the immense talent of all Waegers.

2 - Build and publish a microsite for the book ‘Salesforce Implementation Help Center’ where visitors can troubleshoot an issue they’re facing (or at risk of encountering) in their implementation and be presented with strategies for mitigation and prevention. Of course built on the Salesforce platform using Experience Cloud, Knowledge Articles, and Flow.

3 - Organise a series of virtual events together with Francis Pindar (AdminToArchitect), Ines Garcia (Salesforce MVP and Author), and Lars Malmqvist (Salesforce CTA and Author) called ‘State of Salesforce Implementations'. The idea is to create a webinar series talking with experts in different domains and aspects of Salesforce implementations. It’s planned to go live in April.

   

If you want to know more about Kristian, here is an Inside The Wave episode and if you’re interested in knowing more about his brilliant book, you’ll find more information by going here and purchasing it! In case you still have any questions, whether that be about his journey, his role at Waeg or his book, feel free to contact Kristian anytime. He will be more than happy to have a chat with you!

   


Wiktoria Kaglik, Copywriter @Waeg, an IBM Company

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