Students helping Students

During a conversation with my buddy Mark Zeigler, I mentioned about our Salesforce Certification Class down at the Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan when he mentioned he has just taken a position as Director of Clear the Air Foundation (http://cleartheairfoundation.org/) and recently awarded a scholarship to a Latino, this made me very happy and proud, we continued talking about how he manages donors, contacts etc, but he didn’t have the budget for a CRM tool. Then it clicked, Mark needed to get Salesforce, I put him in touch with Salesforce.org when it clicked again, why not have the students at the University help Mark with his Salesforce implementation and customization under my Architecture guidance?

And that is how the Project for the January – May 2019 Semester was born, the University Students and myself will be volunteering hours to help the non profit Clear the Air Foundation achieve their goals using Salesforce, this would empower the already awesome free licenses that Salesforce.org provides to non profits, we will then at no cost, help Mark try to double the number of scholarships available to students.

The students at the University will work in an Agile model, we will start with a discovery session to build a backlog of items that will be prioritized by Mark, we will select a ‘Scrum Master’ among the students and break the rest among different roles, at the end of the semester the students will do a presentation showing what they achieved and what they learned in the process.

Students will also be learning Salesforce Best Practices, Declarative before customization, Apex programing, Lighting Components, Validation Rules, avoid Technical Debt, coding Best Practices, etc.

Last semester the students worked in real industry projects, but this semester we are giving them access to real world experience, we are getting a real Product Owner and really helping Mark get more scholarships for more students by leveraging the Number One CRM.

Stay tuned for after deployment metrics! 😀

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