Salesforce offers anyone with System Admin permissions great power to customize their Salesforce org. The Salesforce platform is so intuitive that anyone, including those without expert knowledge, can customize their pages. Unfortunately, with great power comes great responsibility. Many Salesforce admins attempting to customize their orgs aren’t very responsible and need a few Salesforce lessons to audit their activities.
From the stories on Org Confessions, a platform designed for Salesforce admins, developers, and consultants to air their frustrations and anonymously share their experiences, it’s evident that a lot of users are running into preventable challenges.
It looks like a lot of people are underestimating the need to document Salesforce org configurations. Indeed, very few organizations even bother to fill out the description field.
It’s important to remember that as the Salesforce platform expands in scope, lack of documentation can kill agility. Documents are a critical part of impact analyses that inform change. Without the relevant documents, every change requires a significant level of manual analysis. This can delay releases.
Solution: First off, org cleanup and optimization are now regular topics at TrailheaDX and Dreamforce. You should check out the two platforms to gather some insight. Secondly, the new DependencyAPI enables multi-level metadata impact analysis while Metadata API makes it possible to pull some org metadata from the org. You can use these APIs to build metadata dictionaries for the implementation lifecycle.