Continuing yesterday’s email about keeping the client in mind during implementation…
4. Consistency
There are multiple ways of building something with consistency.
– If you’re taking over an existing platform, use the client’s existing approach. My philosophy is, if you’ve built it wrong, it’s better to be consistently wrong (with some caveats).
– If you’re building from scratch and have a team, don’t make it look like there were 8 cooks in the kitchen. Decide an overall approach and have everyone follow it.
5. Naming conventions
This is a type of consistency that deserves some special attention. Design a new or adopt the client’s existing naming convention. Either way, be sure everything respects that convention to keep things easier to understand and decrease frustration.
6. Documentation
Yes, documentation sucks. We all know it, but we’re talking about the basics here. Start with adding a proper description and helpful help text to custom fields.
Even this low effort documentation allows some AI tools to better analyze what’s actually going on in your client’s org.
The takeaway
The more you keep your client’s mindset in mind during the build phase, the easier the decisions are.