Scenario 04: Pinnacle Consulting Group

Work in Progress

This content is currently being reviewed for accuracy and will be updated soon.

Scenario Snapshot

Field	Detail
Start here	This question page
Difficulty	Beginner
Industry	Professional Services (IT Consulting)
Heavy domains	System Architecture and Security
Recommended prep window	150 minutes total: 90 min preparation + 30 min presentation + 30 min Q&A
Coverage available	Question + Solution
Study flow	Attempt this page first, then review the sibling solution page after your own attempt.

Recommended Approach

Print this scenario. Read it twice using the Two-Pass Reading Method once for understanding and once for implicit requirements. Then build your architecture within a focused 90-minute practice window.

Project Overview

Pinnacle Consulting Group is a mid-size IT consulting firm providing project-based technology services to enterprise clients across North America. Founded 12 years ago, Pinnacle has grown from a single-location boutique to a three-office operation with consultants placed on client sites across 8 states. The company’s service lines include ERP implementations, cloud migrations, and managed IT support.

Attribute	Detail
Total employees	200
Offices	San Francisco (HQ), Chicago, and Austin
Active client accounts	35
Consultants (billable)	140
Internal staff (non-billable)	60 (sales, delivery ops, HR, finance, admin)
Annual revenue	$28M
Average project duration	4-18 months
Utilization target	75% billable hours per consultant
Engagement types	Fixed-fee projects and time-and-materials retainers

Pinnacle’s “One Platform” initiative has a $350K budget over 12 months. The goal is to replace a fragmented set of point tools with a single Salesforce-based platform for client engagement, project delivery, and internal operations. Executive leadership has approved the initiative and aligned on scope.

Stakeholder Quotes

Marcus Webb, Managing Partner (San Francisco)

“We work with some of the most security-conscious companies in the industry. Our clients choose us in part because they trust us to keep their information confidential. If a client ever found out that another client could see their project data or scope of work, it would be a career-ending situation for everyone involved. Client confidentiality is non-negotiable, and I need to see it designed in from day one, not bolted on later.”

Sandra Chen, VP of Delivery (Chicago)

“Right now I have no idea who is available next month. I’m looking at a spreadsheet that two people update inconsistently, and I’m constantly worried we’re either going to under-staff a project or put someone on the bench when we could be billing them. I need to know who has what skills, what each consultant is working on, and whether we have capacity to take on a new engagement. That visibility needs to exist in real time, not in a file someone emailed me yesterday.”

David Okafor, HR Director (Austin)

“I need Salesforce to be the record for all consultant skills, certifications, and performance history. When Sandra calls me asking who can fill a Java architect role on short notice, I should be able to pull that up in 30 seconds. Right now I’m searching through folders and asking managers to dig up old resumes.”

Current Systems and Pain Points

Salesforce CRM (basic Sales Cloud, 25 licenses)

The existing org has been in use for 4 years but is largely untouched. It tracks client accounts and contacts, and salespeople log some opportunities. No custom configuration for project tracking. No process automation. Data quality is poor: duplicate accounts, missing contacts, no standard naming conventions. The org is grandfathered on a Professional edition license.

Jira (project tracking)

Used by approximately 90 consultants for task and issue management on client engagements. No connection to Salesforce. Project codes are entered manually and inconsistently. Finance cannot pull billing data from Jira without a manual export and reformatting step. Project managers maintain separate Word documents for scope tracking.

Spreadsheets (resource scheduling)

Two shared Google Sheets managed by the Chicago and Austin delivery managers track consultant assignments, availability, and forecasted utilization. The San Francisco office keeps a separate spreadsheet. None of the three sheets match each other in format. Updates are manual and frequently delayed by 1-3 days.

Harvest (time tracking, cloud SaaS)

All 140 consultants log hours in Harvest daily against project codes. Harvest has a documented REST API and supports webhooks for time entry events. Finance uses Harvest exports to generate client invoices, but the export-to-invoice process takes 3-4 hours per billing cycle. Time entries have no validation against approved project scope; over-runs are caught at invoice time, not in real time.

BambooHR (HR system)

Holds employee records, skills, certifications, and performance data. Maintained by HR but rarely updated in practice. No connection to Salesforce or Harvest. When a project role opens, HR and delivery managers exchange email threads to identify candidates.

Business Requirements

Org Strategy and Platform Design

1. Pinnacle will standardize on a single Salesforce org. All three offices (San Francisco, Chicago, Austin) will operate within this org with no sub-org or sandbox-as-production workaround.
2. The org must support clear business unit separation for the three offices, allowing office-level reporting and resource management without creating separate permission sets per office for every object.
3. The platform edition must support the full scope: custom objects, workflow automation, role-based visibility, and REST API integration. Licensing must cover all 200 employees with appropriate license types for each role.
4. The delivery operations team (approximately 30 users) needs a tailored experience focused on project and resource views, separate from the sales team’s pipeline and opportunity experience. The solution must not force all users into a single undifferentiated UI.
5. All Salesforce users must authenticate through the company’s existing SSO provider (Microsoft Entra ID). No local Salesforce usernames and passwords for standard employees.
6. The platform must support a phased rollout: sales and CRM data in Phase 1, project and resource management in Phase 2, and time tracking integration in Phase 3.

Client Data Security

7. Client account data, project scope documents, staffing assignments, and engagement financials must be visible only to Pinnacle employees directly assigned to that client or project. No consultant on a Morgan Stanley engagement should ever see data from a JPMorgan engagement, even if both are active at the same time.
8. The role hierarchy must reflect Pinnacle’s actual reporting structure: consultants report to project managers, project managers report to practice leads, practice leads report to the VP of Delivery, and the VP of Delivery reports to the Managing Partner. Data access must follow this hierarchy so senior roles see all records owned by their direct and indirect reports.
9. A small executive team (Managing Partner, VP of Delivery, CFO) requires visibility across all client accounts and projects regardless of assignment, without granting them system administrator access.
10. The sales team must be able to view and edit their own opportunity pipeline but must not be able to see project delivery records, staffing costs, or consultant performance data that sits on project records.
11. All NDA documentation and client-sensitive attachments uploaded to Salesforce must be accessible only to users with explicit sharing access on the parent record, not to all authenticated users in the org.
12. When a consultant rolls off a project at engagement end, their access to that project’s Salesforce records must be revoked within 24 hours without requiring manual admin intervention.

Resource and Project Management

13. The platform must track each active client engagement as a project record linked to the parent account, capturing project name, start and end dates, contracted hours, billing type (fixed-fee or time-and-materials), and assigned project manager.
14. Each consultant must have a resource profile in Salesforce that lists their skills (by skill category and proficiency level), active certifications with expiration dates, current project assignment, and weekly availability in hours.
15. The VP of Delivery must be able to run a real-time staffing report showing all consultants, their current utilization percentage, their availability for new assignments in the next 30 and 60 days, and any skills gaps against open project requirements.
16. Project managers must receive an automated alert when their project’s consumed hours reach 80% of the contracted budget, with a second alert at 100%.
17. When a consultant’s certification is within 60 days of expiring, HR and the consultant’s direct manager must receive an automatic notification.
18. Delivery managers must be able to search for available consultants by skill category, certification, office location, and availability window, and initiate a staffing request directly from the search results.
19. The sales team must be able to attach a proposed staffing plan to an opportunity before the deal closes, and that plan must automatically convert into a project record with pre-populated resource assignments when the opportunity stage moves to Closed Won.

Integration

20. Harvest time entries must synchronize to Salesforce at least once per hour during business hours. Each time entry must link to the Salesforce project record and the consultant’s resource profile.
21. When a time entry in Harvest crosses the 80% budget threshold for a project, Salesforce must trigger the alert described in requirement 16 without waiting for the next scheduled sync.
22. Finance must be able to generate a billing summary report directly from Salesforce showing total approved hours by consultant, by project, and by billing period, without exporting to a spreadsheet.
23. The integration must handle sync failures gracefully: if Harvest is unavailable, time entries must queue and sync in order once connectivity is restored, with no data loss and no duplicate entries.

Constraints

• Budget is fixed at $350K for the 12-month implementation. No scope contingency has been approved.
• The existing Salesforce org (Professional edition, 25 licenses) must be evaluated for upgrade or replacement before any development begins. The license model decision must be made in the first 4 weeks.
• BambooHR will remain the system of record for HR data during Phase 1 and Phase 2. Salesforce will not replace BambooHR.
• The Harvest integration is the only system integration in scope for Phase 3. No other integrations are approved for this program.
• Pinnacle does not have an in-house Salesforce development team. The implementation will be executed by a single systems integrator, with a 3-person Pinnacle team providing business analysis and UAT support.
• The go-live date for Phase 1 is fixed at 6 months from project kickoff, tied to the start of the new fiscal year.

Implicit Requirements

Pay attention to: the license edition upgrade decision and its cost implications. Client data isolation that must work at the record level, not just the profile level. The role hierarchy design that needs to support both data access and reporting without over-permissioning. NDA-sensitive file attachments and whether standard Salesforce content sharing handles the requirement. The 24-hour access revocation requirement and whether this can be automated with standard tools. Whether a single org with business unit separation is genuinely the right decision here, or whether there are edge cases worth discussing.

Deliverables Checklist

When practicing this scenario, aim to produce:

• Org strategy recommendation with justification (single org, edition choice, license types)
• Role hierarchy diagram covering all user personas
• Sharing model summary (OWD settings, sharing rules, manual sharing, and any programmatic sharing decisions)
• Data model sketch for the core objects: Account, Project, Resource Profile, Skill, Project Assignment
• Integration architecture for the Harvest sync (direction, frequency, middleware decision, error handling)
• Identity and SSO architecture diagram (Entra ID to Salesforce)
• One-paragraph risk register covering the top 3 risks in this scenario

Time Management: 150-Minute Practice Session

Prep , first 30 min: Read the scenario twice (first pass for context, second pass for implicit requirements). List all requirements under the relevant CTA domain. Note any conflicts or ambiguities.

Prep , middle 30 min: Design your solution. Start with org strategy and sharing model before moving to data model and integration. Sketch the role hierarchy early because it anchors everything else.

Prep , final 30 min: Produce your deliverables. Prioritize the role hierarchy diagram, the sharing model summary, and the integration architecture , these are the most likely presentation and Q&A targets.

Presentation (30 min): Lead with org strategy and the sharing model. Then cover data model, integration architecture, and SSO design.

Q&A (30 min): Expect probing on client data isolation (record-level vs. profile-level), the license edition upgrade decision, and whether the 24-hour access revocation can be automated with standard tools.

Ready to Check?

When you’ve completed your own solution, compare with the reference solution.

Related Topics

• Two-Pass Reading Method
• 9 Essential Artifacts
• Mini-Scenario Library
• Domain 1: System Architecture
• Domain 2: Security

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This content is study material for CTA exam preparation. Content compiled and presented with AI assistance. Not affiliated with Salesforce.