A while ago, I lived in a townhouse with an old and crappy fence separating my backyard from my neighbours.
While doing major renovations to the house, I inquired to the city about replacing the fence. They said the only option, as per the bylaws, would be to replace it with a steel picket fence.
I didn’t want a picket fence, I wanted a cedar one. So I kept asking the clerk questions. Finally, he lowered his voice and said, “Look, you cannot COMPLETELY replace your fence with another wood fence. But you can replace a PORTION of it with wood. And then replace another portion. And another”.
I’m telling you this story because it applies to technical debt.
When you inherit a Salesforce org with lots of tech debt, you “cannot” throw out the entire org and start again, and you cannot change everything in one phase.
But you CAN replace piece by piece of it until you’ve dug yourself out of most of the debt.
And a good place to start is with the data model.
The takeaway
By replacing technical debt piece by piece, you can eventually get yourself out of debt. Just don’t try and do it all in a single pass.