Clean Your Room!
The first 30 days of my adventure started out pretty straight forward, but had some hidden “gotchas”:
I started by eliminating some of the data bloat that existed in the environment. This took shape in a removal of 40,000+ erroneous Account records, 115,000+ identified by:
Lack of activity in years
Improper fit for ideal customer profile (ICP)
Outside our target acquisition market (TAM)
Followed by a deduplication effort of 6100 Person (Lead and Contact) records and a normalization of data within the environment. Resulting in more efficiency for the users as they were working deals in pipeline, supporting existing customers, and promoting a cleaner data environment, improving the insights were able to glean from the data.
Next up, was deprecating bloat in reporting, user interfaces, and user permissions. I removed unused/unreliable:
1000+ Reports
10 Dashboards
13 unused Page Layouts
32 Inactive Validation Rules
78 Inactive Workflow Rules
300+ unassigned Roles
8 Profiles
21 unassigned Permission Sets
The results of this was being confident that everyone was reading the same “sheet of music” and discussing the same topics as we worked cross-functionally to onboard and support customers. Additionally, made supporting the system significantly more efficient by eliminating erroneous entities in the instance.
Prior to completing any of the above in the Production instance I did dry runs of eliminating these items and documented the results heavily in a Full Data Sandbox. This is where the gotchas became reality. There were 28 Frozen Administrator users in this Salesforce environment and through testing I discovered Deactivating them was not an option as they were responsible for running most/all of the automation within the instance, and were hard coded in to the APEX code.
As a result these were left in their previous state and more research was conducted.
“Left unchecked, technical debt will ensure that the only work that gets done is unplanned work!” - Gene Kim
