[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to another X-Force Data Summit Presentation. We're happy to have Mark Jones, who's a data coordinator at a nonprofit called Oasis Community Housing. And Mark is going to talk about how he worked with them to work through their data model and get their data model redeveloped.
[00:00:37] And I'm sure he'll do a better job explaining what he's going to say than I just did. But thank you, Mark, for joining us. Take it away. Great. Well, thanks for having me, and thank you for that introduction. As Leonard said, I'm Mark, I work for Oasis Community Housing, which is based in the Northeast of England predominantly, and I have been a data [00:01:00] coordinator since
[00:01:00] 2017. To begin with, I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself to seek a little bit of the background. And I always think it's helpful for people attending a talk or a seminar to know who's presenting. So I'm going to just cover a little bit about who I am and then a little bit about Oasis before we dive in.
[00:01:19] So about me, I, like a lot of people, became a Salesforce admin almost by accident. In 2016, I started working for a charity, which wasn't Oasis Community Housing. And on the job interview, the chief executive of the company asked me, Have I ever seen Salesforce before? And I tell him I sad seen Salesforce My dad, who was with us at the time worked for Honeywell, a massive international organization who had him use Salesforce org.
[00:01:51] So I've seen bits and pieces of Salesforce and how that works from my dad. So I just said, Yeah, I've seen Salesforce, know a little bit about [00:02:00] it. And when they offered me the job, I came in on my first day of work and said, You mentioned you'd seen Salesforce before. Yeah. You're developing our Salesforce org for us.
[00:02:12] So it's a little bit of a baptism by fire. No real experience with Salesforce other than seeing it. So there was a lot of learning on that, on that job. And about a year later, I started the move over to Oasis Community Housing as their data coordinator. Well, I was in charge of their Salesforce org, which uses a package called Info, and you'll hear a bit about doc during the presentation.
[00:02:38] And at the moment we are still redeveloping the org and have been since then, so really the summer of last year. August 29th is when we began. And so there's a lot of work gone into it, and at this stage, the project I would say is about 60 to 70% done. Now, [00:03:00] doing some of the work that needed to be done once you've done a job like this.
[00:03:05] But we'll get into that in a little bit. In 2019, I spoke at my first Salesforce event, and it was called Inspire East in Cambridge in the UK. And this was my first time speaking outside of a Christian context. I myself attend church in the UK and all my speaking
[00:03:30] opportunities from there. That was in a church setting, so this was a very different experience. Since then, I've become a community group leader with the Trailblazer community program leading a group in the Northeast of England, and I've been working on building up a network of user groups in the Northeast.
[00:03:50] We have quite a big pool of Salesforce talent in that area. Admins, developers, architects, CTOs, and the like. [00:04:00] So I became a community group leader last year and we started the user group at the beginning of this year. I became a Trailhead mentor as well in January of this year. And I'm now mentoring three different individuals.
[00:04:13] And overall, I've built five different Salesforce orgs since 2016, with, each with a variety of different reasons for them and for a variety of different groups. Yeah, a couple of them for charities. And that's kind of been a big learning curve as well, looking at different areas of bespoke work for them.
[00:04:37] I'm also now providing support as part of all my work to over a hundred different people who use the In-Form package specifically. That covers staff within Oasis Community Housing and two organizations as well in the Northeast of England, and there's more potential in the pipeline this year. So that's a little bit about me, [00:05:00] a little bit about Oasis Community Housing.
[00:05:04] Just so you know, again about who we are and this cause this presentation is based on my work with them. So Oasis Community Housing is a national homelessness charity in England, predominately based in offices I've mentioned. And we have projects spanning and the Northeast, and we also have two projects in London as well.
[00:05:27] Where we work with at-risk, vulnerable people from young to old, and we have different projects. We have some residential projects where when women would come and live with us, and we will support them to help them try and find, find and ultimately find their own accommodation, which they can look after and live
[00:05:49] On their own, and manage on themselves outside of that. And we also have some crisis services as well for people who are struggling [00:06:00], sleeping on the streets, being out of work. So we have quite a lot of different work that needs to be done, and that's relevant to this kind of subject because there's a lot of different needs within the organization.
[00:06:16] So that's a bit about Oasis Community Housing. And kind of give you a little bit of background on our history with Salesforce because it's kind of important to me to fit that in as well. So we know a bit about why this work had to be done. Now I'm going to talk to you about just a bit. It was in 2015, Oasis Community Housing purchased the In-Form Managed Application from Homeless Link who developed this?
[00:06:42] And that's a minor step on Salesforce. And basically over a number of months that was developed between Oasis Community Housing and Homeless Link, it was rolled out to some staff as part of a pilot project in August 2015 with a full [00:07:00] rollout happening in January 2016. As I mentioned, I then joined the organization in 2017 in June,
[00:07:07] specifically. And I was the first member of staff to actually be solely responsible for In-Form Oasis Community Housing. Prior to that we relied on staff who were part-time had to do In-Form on top of their other duties. So as you can imagine, there was not much of a priority to some of the staff because if they had their jobs to do as well as managing the Salesforce org, using In-Form
[00:07:34]When it was made available to staff generally, we started with about 40 users. Now, with over 60. At the last count, it was 63 users. Now will you have, and that fluctuates as well, quite regularly for us. So since I've been in post, we've hired over a hundred different people using our specific Salesforce or who've have come and gone.
[00:07:59][00:08:00] But we're sitting at 63 at the moment. So to really get into the, the nuts and bolts of why this project was needed of all things. It started off with a meeting to discuss KPIs for the organization. So our targets and the, the germ of this product really started when our chief executive asked us to
[00:08:24] look at how we could record In-Formation on the children living with service users in our residential projects. And at the time, all we were really captured on those children was that they were living in the projects. So my first response to that was, we don't capture anything. So that kind of began a big process of really reviewing what we were capturing, why we were capturing it.
[00:08:52] Because we've come into the organization. Two years after we adopted Salesforce, I came [00:09:00] into something that was already developed, and that's in some ways is in a lot of ways actually good because it means there's less work in terms of the development initially. However, in my case is actually being more work because we've got, we got to a point where I'd seen
[00:09:19] requirements that we wanted that weren't on the system. For the first year, it was mainly kind of looking after what was already built, stuff to work with what was already there, and then came the need to readdress what we were capturing and why we needed it. So that's how this whole process started. And
[00:09:42] After a lot of work came to the conclusion that we needed a different approach. And the plan was to really streamline the data we were capturing. Well. I'll talk about the research that we did in the bit. Well, one of the things that we had from staff feedback and [00:10:00] research was that the system was quite clunky, and it took a lot of time for staff to input data. As an admin, one of the things that
[00:10:10] you might understand, and a lot of people here do, is that when you try and make something simple for staff, it makes things a lot more complicated for the admin. It's always a lot more well work. But the idea was to make it so that staff could record high-quality data that we need, and that actually benefits us because, as a charity, we are depending on the funding that we receive from outside of the organization.
[00:10:37] So, we wanted to record something that actually covers the base of what we do on a day to day basis, but also we can use to sell ourselves too external funders and on social media and those all the like. So it was a bit of a mixed bag of requirements. So let's say we reviewed the whole of the pack In-Form app that [00:11:00] we were using.
[00:11:01] We've received feedback from the staff across the organization. We asked every member of staff to contribute to that, and not everybody did contribute, but we got the majority of staff did. The majority of them were staff who used the Salesforce org for us. Who used the In-Form app. A lot of them were actually staff who were stakeholders in the organization who don't use on a daily basis, but had opinions on what they would want to see coming out of the system
[00:11:33] for their work. So some of the feedback that we got was good. Some of them wasn't so good. As you can imagine. One thing that I found somewhat upsetting at the time was that only 38% of our staff felt that In-Form in its current form was very useful. And 33 thought it was useful to some degree and [00:12:00] 25% of staff,
[00:12:01] well, had no opinion on whether it was helpful to them or not. We asked staff to rate the system on a scale of one to 10 as well, just to have a helpful numeric feature, and 33% of staff, which is the biggest figure that we had for that, rated it as a seven. So overall more stuff were kind of written the quality of the system towards the middle ground ready.
[00:12:29] I'd have much preferred a higher figure on those things. But that's a good learning curve. And that's one of the things I would suggest when looking at doing a job like this is check, reviewing with the staff first and seeing what their feedback is because their views can be very helpful to point you in the right direction.
[00:12:51] So a few things I learned from that research phase was that users of the org needed to be able to capture the data in a [00:13:00] bespoke way, where one of the big bits of feedback we had was that. Some of the areas that they had access to when relevant for their work. A couple of the things I learned was that we needed to lower the amount of objects required.
[00:13:15]Some staff had access to upwards of 20 different objects at a time, which when you've got a range of it competency across the organization, sometimes I found that that many different objects and stuff would potentially have to use is a big ask. So I wanted to lower that.
[00:13:39] Should I say, to kind of condense that down so that wasn't such a big task for them to input the data. And one of the bits I learned from that was that how we linked in various people together need to be much more simple. The way In-Form was built [00:14:00] originally was that they use the accounts objects to record the organization's projects, and you'd have the service users as contacts.
[00:14:10] Well, if you had users, if we wanted to capture children of sales users. They wouldn't be linking them at that time through the accounts object, which from a Salesforce standard perspective is quite a bit of a challenge. One of the better ways to do that kind of thing would be through the accounts and contact model.
[00:14:33]Even if you read label accounts to something different, using that basic set up is actually the best way of keeping people together. Like say a household account, for example, which is standard within MPSP for anybody who uses, you see that in the nonprofit circle. So the plan, simply, in a nutshell, was to create a multi-app org using lightening ups as we move from [00:15:00] Salesforce classic to lightning the year before this review was done.
[00:15:05]so we want to use the lightning app to build a multi-app org where each bespoke area of work had their own app, and they would share some areas in common. So they would share the context, object, the account object, and they will share over objects But, each HR would have bespoke views. They would have different report charts.
[00:15:30] They would have their pages. And so it was essentially, it was a custom approach for each department. Essentially for us, it improved our approach, would lean heavily on tools like Flow and Process Builder. I had to help create better automation. And one of the things that we had, which as an example, which I always found a bit more of a [indecipherable] was that we have an object.
[00:15:59] Oh, it had an [00:16:00] alternate time called CCIS, which is an alert, a client alert, and we would want staff to be, send them to approval to like managers. And when it was originally built, staff would have to click the submit approval button. And in my experience, about seven times out of 10, staff would forget to click the button.
[00:16:25] So I wanted to use Process Builder to lean on that. Do you automatically submit those alerts for approval? And that's one example. Other examples would be email alerts and notifications. We wanted to use the system too. Send staff emails if, say, a case was about the cause on the service user, for example.
[00:16:49] So say at the time of writing the redevelopments around 60 to 70% don't. And with the main bulk of work now being importing historical data [00:17:00] into the new areas. One that has been born of chance, and we'll talk of that in with some detail in a bit. When I talk about what I've learned for the process, well, to do what I've been doing, I've had to take out historic data from all the objects and then move them into new objects due to the chance of having to manage to up.
[00:17:23] And the challenge of having them match up can be that some fields will be only able to be edited. I would say apart from people who actually have management access to that, of itself. So for us it was fields in some of the objects where we didn't need them anymore and they couldn't be changed. So I had to come up with approaches to work around that.
[00:17:48] One thing with that is. One of the big things. I know straight away when it was, we had the challenge of having to do this [00:18:00] live and in all honesty, but if you were to do this kind of project yourself, I would recommend sandbox rather than doing it live. You can do it live and you can do it well by doing it live.
[00:18:13] But if you are able to push to get it done in the sandbox, it's much better doing a sandbox. It takes away some of the headaches. And what you can do is you can do the whole project and a sandbox and rule it out once you're done. That's a much, much easier approach if you can do it in that way.
[00:18:34] We didn't have that luxury from the requirements of my management. So we, we worked around it. And one of the more challenging ones are hard for is the first time, first role of trying to move the data across. We had data that went to the wrong person, for example. So we had client records that went to the wrong client.
[00:19:00] [00:19:00] Thankfully, I had backed everything up, and that's one big recommendation. I would always say. So the way we approached it was that we kept all the old records in their place, in the objects that are in. They will stay in there until the migration was complete. So although a bit of a bit of a headache.
[00:19:23] It wasn't the end of the world, but for us, that was one chance that we had. And we found, when I looked into why that was the case, we found some on found quite a bit of historical errors that were inputted, which is something that I thought that was a bit, that was one of the more humorous ones, but thankfully the data was backed up and that saved our skin in that area.
[00:19:56] So do you have a once that we had was [00:20:00] changing the way certain pages looked from one day to another and staff coming to us and going, Why is that all of a sudden changed? That wasn't there yesterday. Why is this different now? And we've had, I have quite a few occasions where staff have said, I can't find this record.
[00:20:18] And ironically enough for this sitting pretty much right underneath their nose when you looked at what they were seeing on the screen. So those are kind of things you might run into. And there's ways to do that in terms of inputting your data. I would recommend using the Data Report Wizard. If you can, don't use the data loader too much.
[00:20:47] That was how we had the issue with the data going to the wrong person. We use the Theater Loader application, which is a great tool as it was a lot of record at the same [00:21:00] time, however, it doesn't, let's say, filter out any data that's got inaccuracies at times, so that was one of the giants that we had.
[00:21:10] So we use the Data Import Wizard instead. Things I've learned so far with the project, I think this kind of stuff is really helpful and really important for us to understand in this kind of work is that sometimes it's okay to hit the reset button. I did that twice during the process. I, before we moved to the multi-app model I wanted, I had planned just to make i
[00:21:38] similar to what we had originally put to the improvements. So basically, it would be one, one up for the entire organization where we would have different objects with different areas of the company. And we tried that approach. And some of the feedback we got from staff was, It's still too clunky.
[00:21:58] It's still a bit [00:22:00] too much work for us to input the data. And that kind of brought in the idea goes, actually, we need something bespoke for each area. Really to kind of ease up on those challenges. Well, things have learned to help in the community is always, is only a question away. I've leaned very heavily on people that I know of in the Salesforce ecosystem.
[00:22:27] If through success community or through people I know through my work as a community group leader. So I regularly have email conversations or message conversations over LinkedIn with other community group leaders and picking their brains so help's never too far away and this kind of thing. CRM development isn't, isn't a case of one shoe fits all.
[00:22:55] That's a big learning curve. If you're in a small organization [00:23:00], yeah, it might be one shoe fits all approach for that, but if you're in a bigger organization with different requirements across the organization, and the approach is maybe what you need. Data historical problems that we're paying the deal with.
[00:23:19] That's another one, as I mentioned, when we did, when I did the first attempted migration of data found, there was a lot of historical inaccuracies, no amount of reporting would tell you because if you just work on that, take a volume of data. That's a bit of a pain at times. One of the things I've learned as well.
[00:23:44] Somewhere, somehow, somebody will complain, when you make a change of any kind, you will get resistance. However, if you are passionate about what you do, you can really help staff, too, and [00:24:00] users, too, actually embrace that change and work through it. And with that. That does take some time.
[00:24:07] It takes more time with some than others. Well, I've, I've found, generally speaking, if you spend the time with staff, I spend the time with users. They will start to embrace that change. So the complaints, whilst they might be a bit hard at first, then they don't take too long necessary to get passed.
[00:24:31] Yeah. Others have valuable insights into how to make a job work. One resource I used regularly was a website called Salesforce Band, which many admins here may have seen. It is a really good tool and I've used a lot of stuff that's been written on there from like years ago, even to help in this process.
[00:24:54]As you go through, you use it. We'll need lots of trail in June. The process and. [00:25:00] That may have to be one on ones. It could be group trainings, but you will have to get a regular trainer in that. One of the best things I've learned is to give the project time. Initially, we had had set this project would be about a year of work, and a couple of months into it I spoke with my manager and said, Let's take off the deadline.
[00:25:26] Essentially. Let's put deadlines on some of the more immediate task was having it, but for the project overall, let's just say this is a permanent thing because there's always improvements to make as you're going through a job like this. And then the last one is on things I've learned.
[00:25:49] Sometimes I spent several hours working on this stuff. Spent several hours outside of my paid employment at the back end of last year, I'd amassed over a hundred [00:26:00] hours of lieu time, which I've never not taken. And so there is a lot of effort that goes into it. And. Some nights you'll be, maybe almost be pulling your hair out because of some of the challenges that you've run into.
[00:26:16] Well, it's going to be fine. You know, as we say. If he gets stuck on things, there's plenty of people who can, who can help. And the success community is great, as is the Trailblazer community and the sites, I guess as they like Salesforce Ben is really good. Salesforce Kid is fantastic as well for stuff.
[00:26:37] So there's always somebody else who will have went through the same challenge that you're going through with Salesforce and you will find answers. So, so brief. Essentially, it's. The headache, the headaches, and, and too big of an issue, I would say. Yeah. The results of the project [00:27:00] itself it's worth it if this is the kind of thing you want and need to do.
[00:27:07] So the big real piece to kind of go through is how can you do a project like this yourself? Because I've told her about my experiences. But what if your thing, and this is the kind of thing you might want to do or might need to do in your organization. So I've got some tips. I've got some things to, to make a note of before you, you start with a project like this, and I've got some tips as well for managing a project like this.
[00:27:40] So things to note before you start is. First one. It's a simple, it's a simple question and it's, one is one thought when I raised it, we got some laughs in the room because the first question is, Does it need to be done in the first place? If it's a [00:28:00] case of your wanting to do this because you don't like the way it looks, that might not be enough of a reason to do it. A job like this should really be done to leverage Salesforce to get the best result of your data for your organization. So if that's to pass out statistics to the funders, social media, to the management, those that can raise it should be, this project should be done for, to kind of get the most out of your system, to help your users to work with the system easier.
[00:28:36] And also they really use that to sell yourselves really well and the sell in a good and high quality. How much time will the project take? Like I said, in our case, we initially anticipated a year, but we ended up saying let's not have a tight, strict deadline on the finalizing of this.
[00:28:59] Let's put [00:29:00] deadlines on the milestones, I guess you could say. A recent example of this was we just moved our housing department, which was the last department to move in this work I've been doing to the new way of using Salesforce, and we just moved them over last week, after many discussions imagined since really November, trying to get them on to the new system.
[00:29:26] We moved them over last week. So have a think about what kind of time frames you need to do this/ That may come from you, from management. But what one of the things I would say is if your management set a time frame and if you think it's not going to be feasible, talk to them. I've found in my experience that that margin can be quite flexible if they.
[00:29:54] If you give them good reasons as to why you need a bit longer on certain jobs, or if you [00:30:00] can do jobs quicker as well. They really do like if you can do jobs quicker than the original deadline as well. What additional resources or training might you need as well? Again, you can lean very heavily on
[00:30:17] different resources out there. I have my office, I now have a bookshelf full of Salesforce books, which has proved very helpful as well. So have a look at kind of what resources or additional training you might need. Well then again, like I mentioned, will this work be done live or in sandbox?
[00:30:39] If and even I've said so far it might be best to try and do this first and the sandbox because really doing it, that approach will be far easier on you as an admin or say if you have to do it live, you can do live with new [00:31:00] features are going to be added.
[00:31:01] So thinking things like validation, rules, flows, processes, email, assets, and even third-party apps. One of the things that we integrated, fairly recently in the terms of the development was the Salesforce a third-party component called CMTD Enhanced Relentless. Well, we started to use that dynamically, the show records from the current day.
[00:31:31] So we have an object that we have for sales use case. Well, all of the work that we do with them, it's logged in that and we have a list that pops up using our CMTD enhanced related list product for what's happened on the current day, so staff can hop into, so it was user's record. They can see if any works we're doing with that.
[00:31:57] So it was usually on that day. Well, that's an example [00:32:00] for us. There's other ones that we have implemented. So that's the kind of thing you want to be thinking about with new features. What validation rules, processes, third-party apps you might want to do. Want to include. If live, what work needs to be done to ensure this move.
[00:32:19] Migration of data. That's a, that's a big one. Like I, like I mentioned before, we had that challenge where. The first attended migrant and the data we had records going to the wrong service user. And for us, thankfully I said that wasn't too much of an issue because we, we kept the data and historic data is stored as well.
[00:32:41] So what we were able to do, we have to remove all of the new data that we import it and go back to the old data and then start working through that a bit more gradually. And so you want, I've looked at. How you would migrate the data. we've been doing it more recently in phases. [00:33:00] So rather than trying to import, everything won't go.
[00:33:02] We've went through different stages and, working through any anomalies that happen. Cause you will sometimes run into anomalies that happened. Yeah. When you import data. So we've been working through that as well. How was the project going to be managed? Is it going to be completely up to you? Is it can be run with a team of people?
[00:33:27]in my side of things, it's pretty much me who's looking after it and just feeding into management and relevant staff. What changed the common. For you and your organization, you might have to have a team of people working on it with you. In my side with, it's been a bit more of a case where it's just been me who's been doing all of that work.
[00:33:54] So some tips for managing approach like this. [00:34:00] I planned, planned out the project, think through kind of the time frame that you need to do that. Think through the practicalities. If you're going to do it phase by phase, think of things like what, who's going to go onto the new way of doing things first, and plan new things out?
[00:34:20]Determined the required integrations. So with that, I mean, that's mainly thinking things like third-party applications, additional tools that aren't already narrative to your instance of Salesforce. With that, you're going to have to look into things like how, if there's any ones that need to be paid.
[00:34:39]And then the goal, obviously, through how you approve those payments as the organization. There's a lot of good free ones out there as well. Another example for now that we use is one called a record map. I forget what exact name is, but it's through, [00:35:00] but it's a free one that's on the app exchange.
[00:35:02] And what you do is you determine what fields from a particular object you're using for the address, and I'll bring up a Google Map of that location. So we use that for properties that we have in our portfolio. A determiner, quiet validation rules as well. The validation rules are very helpful and they are very good to use as often as you can.
[00:35:29] One example that we have of a validation rule that's in place is on our case, an object where we have some staff who don't use, who, we need to record who's done what work, but don't have a Salesforce license. So we have their names and, and a picklist, but we also have staff would use the same record who have a Salesforce account.
[00:35:58] So what we have is you have two fields [00:36:00] for asking who the, who's logged that particular work, and the validated validation rule we have in place for that is, If the local feel for the user is blank, the picklist is required. And that validation rule inverts on a self-safety picklist is it's not as set to none.
[00:36:24] I'll ask you to fill in the local field. So that's an example of ones that we use. and we have quite a few more that we can, that we use as well. As well, determining the required processes, in Process Builder. And you might currently be using Workflow Rule. We use Process Builder. Workflow Rules do similar work, I would personally recommend Process Builder, especially Enlightenment.
[00:36:51] It's a lot more, it's quite a bit more powerful. Okay. You can link it very easily to flaws or [00:37:00] to approve a process. So I mentioned before the example of our client alerts that we asked staff to submit for approval. Now what we have is we have a process in place where if a particular type of alert, we call an incident is recorded.
[00:37:18] Once that's saved, it'll go to approval to the manager and the users don't actually have to do to submit it. It'll submit automatically. And that's an example of a processor we use. Got a bit of a library going essentially of processes and Process Builder is really helpful too. Again, take your time with it.
[00:37:42]if you've got, you've got a deadline, obviously, try to work within your deadline. Well, I would say don't rush it. That's kind of what I mean by take your time with it. When you rush a job like this, you will encounter mistakes, and mistakes are OK, but [00:38:00] you want to learn from those mistakes.
[00:38:03] Regularly backup your data as well. That's a real helpful one, especially if you move and lots of data around. So we, I'd always give me housing. I have set up a weekly backup. So I get an email once a week, from Salesforce where everything that we record backs up once a week. I was doing that beforehand, anywhere, but that's something I started doing over a year.
[00:38:29] Two years ago now, actually, and before this pro project even began, but regularly backing up your data and you can have Salesforce send you that update on a weekly basis, which is very helpful as well. Again, I've mentioned before you use your Sandbox Apostle. It's a real helpful tool for that.
[00:38:51]Keep users regularly update when you're doing a big job like this. Especially if you're having to do a live, like [00:39:00] what we've had to do. It's good to keep your users In-Formed. To help give them a bit of peace of mind and also give them opportunities to come back to you and ask questions if they have them around that.
[00:39:15] Most admins that I find who, like the only admin such as myself. The charities tend to do very basic development work as well. Work some working with complex floors, and the like. And the thing I would say with that is test on work out regularly. And if you build things like floors, and you can use the daybook area in flow to help with that. Nut test at work regularly because what you don't really want to have happen is for you to roll it out
[00:39:49] and if for it to not work. So test you work out regularly when you produce some things like that that also works with applies to Process Builder as well. and [00:40:00] validation rules, test these things out, as much as you can. You use tools like Trailhead and the success community. Again, I've mentioned like.
[00:40:10] The, the community around Salesforce help is really great, and it's very helpful for jobs like, and Trill, how does a lot of really good stuff on there? Before, before I started working on the floor side of things for this project, I hadn't done any floors before. I don't, lots of things with Process Builder and work for rules, but never even were floors.
[00:40:34] And so I did a Trailhead on floor, and since then I've built a good 30 different floors. Some of them are still being worked, worked on, due to the demands of the project. Well. Sure, Head is a fantastic resource for you, for you in those areas. Don't beat yourself up when things don't work at [00:41:00] first.
[00:41:00] like I said, we had to re-hit the reset button on the project twice in initial stages. Because of things that we, we run into. Because I had an idea of how the project would look and as going into it. And come to the conclusion it needs to be done a little bit differently. So, and you might find, again, things don't work.
[00:41:23] Like again, I mentioned about the data issue that we had in the first instance. When I first realized that was the case, I really kind of felt a bit bad about that because like, Oh, this is so much data. Well, again, like I say, we, we'd had to set up, so that wasn't really an issue. We could just remove all of that data
[00:41:48] we'd imported because we still had the historic data store. And that for the most part was fine. And so if you run into things that don't quite work the way you want, don't beat yourself up [00:42:00] about it. But I would suggest is looking into why those things haven't worked. And then. Work on it from there. And you can always tweak the things that have been a bit challenging. Also, give yourself some room to think and debrief on it.
[00:42:18] One of things I've learned in this project is that it's great to have input from users. Sometimes that input will be almost overwhelming. You'll have people come with all these different ideas, some of them great, some from you probably don't want to touch at all because they would not be helpful.
[00:42:41] So, and sometimes you need to give yourself a little bit of space to kind of deal with that noise and to kind of work through. All of the things that, going on with that job and to kind of pick out was worthwhile, what isn't, and also learn to shut out the noise a little [00:43:00] bit. So those are the tips I would say on that.
[00:43:06] And that kind of really brings me to the end of, of the talk. Hopefully you found our experience somewhat helpful. my email is here on the screen and I'm also, you can find me on places like LinkedIn and more than willing to talk to people if you have any questions on this kind of stuff.
[00:43:29] That's kind of really what I've got. I hope you've enjoyed the talk. Thanks, Mark. I had a couple of questions. So you're saying that you migrated people from one thing to the other. Are you running out of two orfs, like moving people from one orf to the other one, or how are you managing that?
[00:43:50] So what I mean by that, maybe it wasn't too clear about that. We have, it's moving data around different custom objects [00:44:00] essentially. So, when the org was built originally, due to some of the limitations of having a minor staff, we couldn't change things on those custom oaks that were built. So the biggest one for us for that wasn't, what was the customer jet that was labeled timeline events?
[00:44:18] Well, it had, it's linked to the accounts object, which was, they were using to point to project within the organization. Whereas I wanted us to move back to a more traditional model of a contact account, star model. And with the amount of stuff, we weren't able to take fields out of page layouts and for that object.
[00:44:42] So the work was to retire that custom object and to move them into essentially a new, a new version of that object. So we created a new object. Which we labeled as cases because that's for us as an industry-standard term. So it was moving data from [00:45:00] an old custom object that was going to be retired to a new one.
[00:45:05] Okay. So basically you just, you just enabled those custom objects when you array for the users to look at them, you can just, yep, that makes sense. So are you, are you basically dishing In-Form then? So we're trying to keep this as true to the In-Form package as we can because we didn't want to completely throw away
[00:45:25] what had been done. What we wanted to do with it was, improve our usage of info and keep as true to the product as we could. Well, also making it bespoke for us as well. So most of the model that they have, we've just tried to streamline what they were already using, and to keep true, to say it to what they had.
[00:45:50] Originally built so many is a lot of it's been recreating new versions of their objects so that we could [00:46:00] use them but keep them true to them because staff are familiar with In-Form. That makes sense. And so basically you're saying that 70% of your staff has been converted over to the changes that you made, 70 plus percent and then you're still working on the remaining 30%. So when I say the project is about 70% that's not necessarily about the staff using it.
[00:46:24] All of our staff are now using the new versions of it. But it was having to do in live. There's certain things that, having to be worked on still, while staff are using that In-Form that we've, we've been building. So I mentioned like the account content model that we've been working with, that hasn't been fully fleshed out yet.
[00:46:49] And that is one of the areas that's in that remaining 30% of work. So we've just say moved our last department over to the, to [00:47:00] the way we're building it, and we should hopefully be able to get within the next few weeks, even the next month. The account contact have style of doing it built like we wanted one too.
[00:47:13]So we just have to clear off that data. So the remaining 30% of work is around, tweaks to the system, like the account contact model, over wants to do with, how we do our assessments of service uses those kinds of things. All of our staff are using the new way of working on the set on the new org.
[00:47:36] Good. Good. Well, Mark, thank you so much for sharing your experience, especially your experience going from zero to, help to mentor as administrator and also, you know, streamlining your org as fixing the airplane while it's flying, basically. Right. Well, thank you very much and hope it's been good.
[00:47:55] Yeah. And thanks for spending your evening with us. Oh, well thank you very much.