Resources for the Nonprofit: the Architect Treasure Trove

I’m often asked by new(er) Nonprofit Admins for advice on how to begin to wrap their arms around their new role, and one of my recurring answers is: “Know your resources.” Welcome to our “Resources for the Nonprofit” series, where we go into a deep dive on just one of the resources every Salesforce Admin needs to rock their role and thrive!

About Personas and Resources

The world of Salesforce professionals is often framed through the lens of the various “personas” associated with our work.  Like the element of a technical requirement, Salesforce’s personals help anchor how we see our world and better understand our needs.  Of course, because it’s Salesforce, they come with the bonus of cute little woodland creatures. 

All the Mascots, at what I assume is their Annual Mascot Meeting #WhoKilledChatty

Now, Salesforce does kinda blur the lines a little bit here – some of these critters are more representative of a specific product (Muley) or feature (Flo), but for the most part they serve as shorthand for personals like an Admin (Cloudy), Marketer (Brandy), or Developer (Codey) or Architect (Rosie).  

Now I’m firmly on record as being pro-mascot, but one pitfall of all this effort to channel us all into our correct categories is that it can blind us to great resources because we think they aren’t “for us.”  This often happens with the Admin-Developer divide, and in an effort to understand it we’re all increasingly using terms like “Admin-eloper.” 

The resource I’m talking about today is so very frequently overlooked by Nonprofit Admins because we tend to think of it as “for Architects.”

What’s an Architect?

Straight outta Trailhead:

“Salesforce Architects design, build, and deliver solutions that businesses need to succeed…”

Sounds an awful lot like the typical nonprofit Administrator if you ask me. Granted, typically Architects are folks who are reasonably experienced on the platform and often hold additional certifications at the Architect level which help them in this work… But I rather think a lot of us, especially those of us who serve as the solo Salesforce professional in our organization – which is quite common in nonprofits – often have to fill this role for our own organization. 

So, given all that, cast away your prejudices oh ye Admin, and let us explore!

Architect.Salesforce.com

Welcome to the home base for Salesforce Architects, https://architect.salesforce.com/.  You’re gonna want to bookmark this page!  Here you’ll find all kinds of concrete resources to help you in building your own Salesforce org and practice, but let me break down some of my favorites.

Salesforce Well-Architected

For starters, let’s look at the pages that together make up the “Salesforce Well-Architected” guide.  If you haven’t yet had a chance to hear the Dreamin’ roadshow presentation on this topic, let me give you the quick version.  Salesforce Well Architected (I’ll call it SWA) is a conceptual framework that you can use to assess your own org and design better solutions.

Like all good frameworks, what it does best is give a place to “hang” a particular concept, practice, design pattern, or other tidbit in a clarifying and actionable context.  Let me expand what I mean about that.  

It can sometimes feel in the world of Salesforce that there is just way too much to learn. It’s overwhelming, I know.  There are so many do’s and don’ts, so many hacks and practices to consider and adopt.  It’s easy to spend all your time chasing after the latest blog post guide without being thoughtful about what you SHOULD spend your time doing. 

SWA gives a scaffold to hang all these tidbits from, and then gives you the information you need to understand a particular topical area and assess your org’s risk in that area.

Using this framework to understand these concepts, you can then look to your org and give yourself a grade.  For example, let’s look at “Resilient” under the “Adaptable” domain.  Maybe your continuity planning is awesome – you have an apprentice working with you, ready to step in if needed.  And let’s say your App Lifecycle Management game is top shelf.  But… have you considered Incident Response?  If you give yourself a low grade there, can you overall say your org is Resilient?  

Having answered these questions for yourself and your org, say you head to your next Dreamin’ event, and you’re choosing sessions.  There’s tons on Application Lifecycle Management, but buried in there is a session on Incident Response.  So what should you go to?  That’s a rhetorical question, I think you see what I’m getting at.  

Yes, using this resource is a bit “squishy” because it requires us to make very opened end assessments or ask questions for which we may not always have the answers, but it can help us direct our attention to the right weakness and keep us, and our orgs, honest and on the right path. 

Diagrams

If the last resource was squishy, this one is hard as diamonds and just as precious, too.  One of the biggest chores we have as Admins is helping our users, stakeholders, and leadership quickly and easily understand complex technical topics.  In my experience, very little does more to support understanding than a diagram. 

Now this one is only for the Lucidchart users, but if you’re new to Lucid this could be worth taking the time to learn, and Lucid does offer a free subscription level.   

In the Diagram section of the sign you’ll find just that – a bank of diagrams and diagram templates you can download and customize in Lucidchart. Building charts is often insanely time consuming, so don’t start from scratch?  Whenever I have to build a technical or conceptual diagram, I always start here!  Even if I don’t wind up starting from one of their templates, it often is enough to get my creative juices flowing.  Assets include BOTH technical diagrams and more conceptual examples like process diagrams and compatibility maps. 

Yes, it takes some time to get used to Lucidchart, but time invested here can pay dividends by making all your subsequent work faster.  

Decision Guides

This one is probably my favorite.  The Decision guides are long-form documents that walk you through the technical and process considerations associated with a particular functional area.  They also often include roadmap information that lets you know if a key feature is coming soon that can affect your final design.  

So far there are only four:

• Event-Driven Architecture
• Data Integration
• Building Forms 
• Record Triggered Automation

Admittedly the first two are probably not topics most apprentice or journeyman admins are clamoring for, but the later two ARE.  

“Building Forms” has a confusing name; they mean this the way Developers mean forms, which is NOT a webform like a “web to case” style form.  Rather, they mean forms in the context of “dynamic forms” or all the various ways we can make things appear on pages in Salesforce.  I remember when Dynamic Lightning Pages first came out, and everyone wailed that troubleshooting field visibility just got a lot harder!  It did, and here you can find resources to help not just with that troubleshooting but to better design pages that use the right features at the right time to create dynamic user experiences.  Better still, this section digs into when and why to use a given feature. 

Considering a Same Record Use Case?  Here’s where it’s Available… or not Ideal

My personal favorite, the crown jewel of the collection, is ”Record Triggered Automation.” This guide walks you through all the ways to trigger automation from a record, and the when and why for their use, contextualized with various considerations like volume/batch size, processing speed, ideal design patterns.  If you’ve ever had a bar fight with your fellow admins on whether it’s better to have one mega flow per object or a bunch of flows with assigned order, here’s how you can settle that dispute.  Seriously, this should be required reading before building your first record-triggered flow. It goes DEEP and you may not understand every detail; I often come back to this resource to find I understand a bit more of it all the time.  

Your Turn

This particular resource definitely takes a bit more effort to get benefit from, but it’s well worth your time investment.  And if you’ve ever doubted it – it is FOR YOU, oh Admin! 

Have you ever used Architect.Salesforce.com?  What did you use it for?  Did you have trouble?  Was it useful?  Tell us about it at @crmnavigators on Twitter.