Top 25 OrgConfessions of the decade

We’ve reviewed all 603 confessions. And the results are in. Originally we intended it to be the Top 10, but there were SO many hilarious (and educational) confessions we could only narrow it down to 25.

How we decided

We didn’t just pick the scariest, worst or funniest. We tried to pick a range of confessions that represent the different challenges that we see in Orgs. The root causes analysis of all 600+ confessions is enlightening, and again examples of each root cause can be seen in the confessions we selected.

Top 25 confessions

Confession #1 (where it all started)
We’ve maxed out our field limit on a Task. Let that just sink in for a minute.

Confession #35
Everything was coded in Apex by consultants who didn’t understand core Salesforce features. 3 million lines of code!! Every field was referenced so none could ever be deleted.

Confession #42
Our Org was taken over by keen developers who automated everything and now we have “the world’s best self driving car… with no wheels”.

Confession #58
We’ve let sales people add fields and picklist values to solve their problems.

Confession #74
40 lookup fields on the Product object.

Confession #87
No role hierarchy implemented in complex HR app. New consultant came in and fixed the role hierarchy on Friday. Sunday morning call from CEO “Everybody’s salary is now visible”.

Confession #109
Deleted a field, but only discovered months later when end of year processing integration ran.

Confession #128
That’s a big Org…. 1,058 Custom Objects, 14,108 Apex Classes, 47 Managed Packages, 896 Permission Sets, 2,269 VF Pages and 446 Lightning Pages.

Confession #151
1 process includes 18 PBW, 2 flows, 12 workflow rules, 30 custom formula fields. Plus maybe some code. No one knows how or why it exists.

Confession #168
26 multi-select pick list fields on Accounts.

Confession #169
User did the MyDomain Trailhead in Production. So our Prod login was changed to kittiesarecute.my.salesforce.com It took a tech call escalated to Salesforce Tier 3 support to undo.

Confession #179
A lot of fields were created by someone who couldn’t spell. Fixed the labels, but the API names are used by integrations and code and will never be fixed. So everyone in the company talks about “customer tupes” not “customer types”.

Confession #207
Former accidentals admins would test in production and now there are 782 custom fields on the Account object. I should have looked at the org before accepting the job.

Confession #233
One of my super users can’t access a feature she needs. I’m super busy, and do a ‘quick fix’ and give her the Sys Admin profile. Problem temporarily solved… But wait, she’s a Trailhead enthusiast studying to be an admin. She has accidentally been downloading Trailhead data and applications into production. Ahhhhh jeez.

Confession #256
SI was kicked out of the project but the PM and 2 of his cohorts came back into the building after they were kicked out to try fix all the mistakes of the implementation. When the client PM found out she had security throw them out… Hilarious..

Confession #257
I have no developers and no backup admins! I have minimal documentation because the requests never stop and they’re rarely prioritized. Someone from each department will drop by and push their projects to get to the top of the list.

Confession #443
Did a data load of contacts into the wrong client’s org

Confession #447
Hid a field from every user including Informatica, which broke a complete overnight job!

Confession #472
12 year old Org
14 different Admins
7 different SIs
“I’ve been told you can migrate us to Lightning in a month”

Confession #497
If we don’t have time for UAT and we’re not 100% sure it’ll work we just tell the users it’s beta release and to be extra vigilant.

Confession #507
We’ve rolled Salesforce out to the worldwide organizations so now we have 800 objects in our Org. And I am the solo Admin.

Confession #512
Lightning Object Creator is my worst nightmare. Admins can create an object with data directly in production with no business analysis, architectural design and no documentation.

Confession #522
To whatever Salesforce engineer required a date format of YYYY-MM-DD to import, yet made Salesforce export dates as MM/DD/YYYY, I hope you’re happy with yourself.

Confession #552
We did the Lightning Readiness Check and the report was 300 pages long.

Confession #602
Worked at a place with 2+ million contacts attached to a single Account record named “Individual”. They turned on an integration to allow people to self-service update contact information. Bad things happened.

And here is TheMovie