One of my favorite Salesforce activities is cleaning up technical debt. With one of my current clients, we’ve been moving data from custom fields to standard fields and objects.
For example, the contact object had the following:
- A field called Organization, which is different than Account
- Custom fields called Assistant1, Assistant2, Assistant3, as some people had 1, 2, or 3 assistants
- 7 recordypes, which all used the same different layouts, but the same fields were displayed
The account object had:
- A custom field called Street, City, Zip, and State, because they didn’t like the label Billing Address or Shipping Address
- Sometimes was the name of a contact, as they only reported on accounts. So if a contact didn’t have an official organization, they created a placeholder account with the same name
- A custom field called Office Phone, which wasn’t different than Phone
- 10 recordtypes
This was a case of a series of accidental admins not fully understanding how to leverage standard fields. This can be due to a lack of experience and/or time. But it’s not about blame. It’s about looking forward and standardizing.
The cleanup was simple and straightforward. Once I explained how to best leverage the standard data model, the path was clear. Data is transformed and moved with custom scripts, then the old fields and recordtypes are removed.
Of course, all of this was done in a sandbox, to work on the scripts over time and allow user training. Then the same data scripts are run in production.
The takeaway
Sometimes you need to find the little things that give you pleasure. In my case, I’ve done so many data migrations and transformations that I built my own data management tool. So these kinds of tasks are painfully easy.