What’s the Problem?

Flow Proliferation

Background / current state

Flows Proliferation

There are over 250 active flows (including managed apps flows within the Salesforce environment. Unfortunately, many of these flows lack proper documentation, leading to challenges in understanding their functionality, dependencies, and potential risks.

Impact of Undocumented Flows

AQ, Blackthorn etc.) within Jarvis Salesforce Org. Many of them have been created by individuals (both from business & ICT) with no overarching business or technology context, lacking documentation on the fundamental need. This has led to large number of flows on the core objects such as Contact where there are 20 active flows in use now.

There are potential conflicts among the flow updates, some of the scheduled flows update very large number of records, resulting in errors to the business users on a day to day basis.

It is a challenge for the TAP Product Team to diagnose, troubleshoot and resolve the flow errors on a timely basis, consuming delivery capacity.

Following is a high level breakdown of flows by business group and Salesforce Object

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Impact of legacy flows

1. Error Occurrences: Legacy flows contribute to increased error rates as changes are made without a clear understanding of their interconnectedness.

2. Knowledge Gaps: Lack of documentation hinders the transfer of knowledge between team members, making it difficult to troubleshoot and resolve issues efficiently.

3. Maintenance Challenges: Updates and modifications become cumbersome, leading to potential system instability and delays in adapting to business changes.

Why do we need to review Flows?

Complexity

This complexity is not a viable option to introduce any new Salesforce capability, such as the proposed Contact Points simplification, a front runner to support implementation of Marketing Automation - Preference Centre

Risk Mitigation

1. Error Reduction: Documenting existing flows allows for a comprehensive review, identifying potential sources of errors and mitigating risks.

2. Enhanced Maintenance: Reviewing and documenting flows simplifies ongoing maintenance, ensuring the system remains agile and adaptable to changing business needs.

Increased Collaboration

1. Knowledge Sharing: Proper documentation facilitates knowledge sharing among team members, enabling collaborative problem-solving and reducing dependencies on individual expertise.

2. Cross-Functional Understanding: Well-documented flows enhance communication and understanding between different departments, fostering a more integrated and efficient working environment.

How are we approaching this challenge/technical debt?

• We will:

  • Build a consensus about what the problem is and the need to take action to address it.

  • Standardize, simplify and reduce the number of flows across the Org

During Q1, key activities will cover the following:

• Analyse and categorise all active flows, by business group, Salesforce App, Salesforce Object, flow type (e.g. Scheduled, managed/unmanaged etc. ), creation date, created user etc.

• Identify flows that are frequently throwing errors to business users

• Identify long running flows that results in lots of errors, system consumption etc.

• Prioritise Contact flows, identify recursive patterns if any with Account / other objects

• Assess viability of current Contact flows with the proposed Individual object and associated Contact Points creation in an automated way

• Provide a walkthrough of the current state complexity to the business leads

• Align on proposed changes for implementation during Q2

Consider Flow Best Practices

All

• 2-3 Flows per Object. No More

• Guiding principles:

• Link to the page Yeng has created

• Troubleshooting of Flows:

  • USYD Error Log for the recent Flows

What is(are) the proposed solution incl ways of working?

(Swathi)

How many flows do we think we need to optimise?

What are the steps we need to take to start to address the issue:

Dependencies

Appendix

Business Area

Number of Flows

TAP

131

WB

60

Hogwarts

45

ASOP

13

• Flow Best Practices - Salesforce Help

https://architect.salesforce.com/decision-guides/trigger-automation

https://architect.salesforce.com/decision-guides/build-forms

 https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-spring-24-features-top-10-flow-updates-you-need-to-know/

What is the proposed outcome?

Quick wins identified for Q1:

1.

2.

3.

Candidate Contact flows for revision/consolidation during Q2:

1.

2.

3.