OrgConfessions – root cause analysis

The Salesforce platform is very powerful, but as Spiderman was told “with great power comes great responsibility”. And whilst we can laugh or grimace at these OrgConfessions.com, there is a serious point here.

We can all laugh, grimace or hold our head in our hands as we read OrgConfessions.com, but there is enough data now to draw some conclusions or pick out some common themes. So we looked at every confession and decided what we thought the root cause could be.  Clearly some confessions have more than one root cause and we don’t have the full back story as they are anonymous.  A few were just plain weird and outliers.

Here are the root cause categories and some explanations:

Analysis = Poor business analysis or requirements capture; building without challenging the business need or simply replicating an existing system in Salesforce
Architecture = Data structure or architecture; building without thinking through the data model
Documentation = No documentation or naming standards; no idea what was built or why, maxed out and duplicated fields
DevOps = No implementation methodology; no formal cycle followed i.e. development in Production
User training = End users not using what was built correctly
Permissions = Profile / permissions / roles; not implementation of a security model
Consultants = Consultants explicitly mentioned as responsible
Coding standards; fake code coverage, hard coding user data
Trailhead= Doing Trailhead in Production.   Classic is #169

Vertical axis: # confessions

As Forrester back in 2017 said in their research: Five ways to cut the risk of Salesforce

“The Salesforce@scale dilemma is a challenge for clients to overcome, rather than an inevitable outcome of large-scale, strategic Salesforce implementations. It is a big issue because Salesforce has become a much more strategic supplier in technology strategies to win, serve and retain customers.”

We wholeheartedly agree. Which is why we wrote the ebook Chaos to Control which is a free download. It sets out an achievable step by step approach to clear the Org debt and build strong documentation habits. The approach and Elements Catalyst platform provide a very powerful combination to help mitigate the Salesforce@scale Dilemma, so that Salesforce potential is not limited by its own success. And most importantly, keeps you off the OrgConfessions.com list.