The CTA Review Board Candidate's 30-Day Action Plan

Having already passed salesforce.com's Certified Technical Architect Multiple-Choice Exam, and having then failed my first attempt at the Review Board Presentation, I'm now faced with a sobering reality: My second (and likely final) attempt at the TA certification is less than 60 days away.

Complicated by the following factors, I asked myself, "Can I really do this?"

• I'm fully billable for 40 hrs/wk between now and then on an important project where my role is the Salesforce technical architect
• I'm the happy father of a 7-month-old, and there's no one at home to support my wife except me, since our closest parent is about 1,000 miles away
• I'm paying out of pocket to take an MBA class right now that I cannot afford to fail

The reality seems to be, "Do I really have a choice?" It's now or never, sink or swim. So, to help center myself and to aid any others who're about to embark on a similar journey, I'm going to lay out what I'm going to do in the next 30 calendar days, dubbing it, The CTA Review Board Candidate's 30-Day Action Plan.

A few notes on terminology used in the plan:

• A "comprehensive scenario" includes use cases for Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Community Cloud, Chatter, the Salesforce1 Platform, the Salesforce1 mobile app and Heroku
• "Large data volumes" means that at least one object holds over 1 million records
• A "technical work stream" involves making changes to Salesforce itself or to an integration job or migration effort

Luckily for me, in Spring '15 the requirement for a customer case study is no more! This change implies extra scrutiny on the Hypothetical Scenario Exam, Presentation, and Discussion, but I feel the odds for me personally just improved ever so slightly.

All right, then. Let's do this!