Salesforce New Years Resolution To Get Healthy

As we are all coming off of the holiday season (and for some, the end of football poor eating habits), now is the time to finally get serious and perhaps set a Salesforce New Years resolution to get healthy. For Salesforce administrators and Governance CoE’s, this is also a great time to take a step back and do a quick Salesforce health check before getting ready for another big development year. Here are some things to get you started:

Reports and Dashboards

This is one area in your Salesforce org that can easily get out of control. It is a good practice to keep this open and allow users to create folders to store their own reports and dashboards, however, many times these become un-managed and can take up space and make it difficult over time to find that report/ dashboard you need. One practice we do at Salesforce is to run a report on report utilization. This is done every 6 months or less. Any report that has not been refreshed, cloned or modified during that time is considered “stale” and that report owner is auto sent a message inquiring if this is still in use. Reports/ Dashboards are then deleted if not used anymore.

Security Model

Over time, we see many of our customers security models grow exponentially and if not kept in alignment of your strategy, will become very difficult to manage for the admins. Now is a good time to look at roles and profiles and see how many are in place today. Look for opportunities to consolidate where possible. Finally, look for opportunities to use public groups or permission sets as an alternative to creating yet another role/ profile.

Workflows, Alerts, Triggers

As companies grow and change strategic direction, this is often an area that is overlooked. Take some time to do a scan on how many workflows and triggers are currently in place. Are these still supporting active processes? Are approvers still the right groups or people? Have any of the business processes supporting these actions changed and need to be updated? A fresh approach to workflow automation will go a long way supporting user adoption and is a great ‘low hanging fruit’ type projects to advance your realized value.

Apex, API’s and Customizations

Never a fun project, yet, a valuable one to keep your Salesforce org running effectively. Many customers will become ‘bogged down’ with Apex calls where a simplification of the process (or looking at newer Salesforce functionality) will enable the process in a more simplified way. Older processes will be your key focus area here to investigate. Customizations and custom apps will be another great area for you to spend some time and validate effectiveness of your design, but also are they still supporting the right business needs.

The 7 Key Domains

Getting your Salesforce Org fit for the new year, you will be able to assess your teams ability to scale and growth with the companies strategic priorities. In order to accomplish this, we see our most effective customers mastering 7- domain areas. Here is a road-map to guide you, and use as a self-assessment on how well your organization is currently mastering each of these domain areas. Don’t worry if you are not killing it in every category, rather use as a guide to help you set up healthy habits for your new year. Good luck with your Salesforce New Years resolution to get healthy!