How To Encourage Analysts To Do More Documentation

  The Documentation Saga: An Introduction To Elements.cloud

“Documentation is not about what we do. It is typically what we end up searching for.”

It seems tough to remember what we had for dinner yesterday. Your future dev team will find it even more challenging to remember why the System Admin added 10 custom fields with no descriptions to your company’s Opportunity object. Your users might remember some of the reasons why they were asked to populate the information, but more likely unless they need it for critical reporting needs, they won’t remember either.  Add to that the continuous stream of change requests and new releases, and pretty soon your System Admin will lose track of what changed in your Salesforce org and why!

We all agree that documentation is the last thing on everybody’s mind - and really, where do you even start? But what if there was an easier way to tame the chaos and get rid of the documentation debt you have?

Enter - Catalyst by Elements.cloud

Catalyst allows you to:

• Sync your orgs with elements org models to get insights on field usage, %filled, last used and more
• Clean up your orgs using in-depth org analytics
• Link to documentation regardless of where it lives
• Create business process flows, requirements and user stories
• Collaborate with co-workers and consultants, on the web, inside Salesforce Setup or on mobile

When you connect Catalyst to your org, it creates a tree-like representation of your metadata. That there, is half of your documenting needs taken care of. Every field now displays a list of where it is being used - workflows, validation rules, formulae and even reports! It even lets you know the percentage (%) filled for each field and about all Salesforce items that are missing description and help text - a great way to focus on beginning documentation.

Other mission critical artifacts include -

• Apex classes and triggers
• Dashboards and reports
• Email templates
• Visualforce components and lightning pages
• Global actions and Flows

NOW that we have your attention - these are the only questions you need to answer:

• HOW does your particular business process work?
  • Start with a critical process or pick any one area to document
  • Bring in non-Salesforce users and all BAs to help
  • Use Catalyst’s easy process drawing tool to visualize your flow
• WHAT did you do in Salesforce to accommodate this process?
  • Connect process activities to classes, fields, WFRs, validations, process builder and other customizations

• WHY did you make these changes?
  • Link your documentation to the process to make your team more nimble
  • Gather all related documentation in one spot -URLs, requirements, user stories or images - to enable quick research

In a nutshell, if you are anybody who uses Salesforce - embrace documentation. And let Elements.cloud be your guide through this journey.

Watch this space for our next article on how to take documentation to THE next level using Elements.cloud.

To know more on how we used it for our customers, click here

Find an interesting read at https://www.v2force.com/catalyst/