If you are a sfdc admin or person responsible for managing your salesforce instance, you always worry about org clean up. Now the reason to clean up is always obvious which is like sludge in your sink or car. But the question of how do i explain this to my users and get their buy-in to do the clean up or  what are things which i should do first is an unsolved problem?  Business does not find any value in it and the fear within ourselves on why are we cleaning up just for the sake of it. This post would help you to make the business case for you and also a strategy on what to do first and tactics on achieving it.

When explaining clean up to the business, never tell them that you are going to do a clean up for the sake of clean up. The below list would help you to prioritize the items you want to start first on your clean up.

1. Items affecting adoption and productivity of your users

Make sure you document the number of clicks user have to do, number of unwanted scrolls you page layout causes, search  results getting garbage data and quantify this in terms of time. For e.g Every click or scroll can take 1 to 3 minutes and multiplying this on an average of 4 times a month can result in 4 to 12 minutes of rep time a month. Equated this to a year would be 48 to 60 minutes for a rep which is his valuable time. If you multiply it with the users, you can quantify organization time you can save.  Here is the list of items which will fall in the category.

1. Unwanted fields on leads, accounts, contacts and opportunities
2. Updating page layouts with minimal fields for the above standard objects
3. Fixing profiles with only relevant fields to show up for users. E.g account teams need not see marketing information etc.

2. Helping Admins to do Quicker deployments

When doing clean up, if you plan to clean up profiles, page layouts and record types, it would save a lot of admin time on maintenance . Every profile or record type clean up adds a 1 to 3 minutes of maintenance time per month because the amount of testing admin has to do on new changes, data load activities and integration issues. So on an average , you can quantify your deployment time reduction to 4 to 12 minutes a month based on the level of work you are doing on an org. The items which would fall in this category are.

1. Removing  unwanted profiles
2. Removing record types, permission sets
3. Cleaning up messed up roles
4. Cleaning up unused page layouts.

3. Reduce  High Risk (Ticking Time bombs)

This would be the technical debt items which will completely prevent you from future releases or pushes to production. E.g apex classes with code coverage less than 40%, frequent governor limits exception code on mass imports like cpu time outs, stack overflows which will bomb out when the data is huge. This could be an area which you want to clean out at some point of time. E.g of the following items are

1. Apex classes which deal with import features
2. Visual force pages which deal with lot of objects.
3. Apex classes with less than 40% test code coverage.

By following the above three items, you can successfully complete a clean up much needed on your org. To summarize, these are the 3 key takeaways for you on this post.

1. Always clean up items which would increase productivity of your users.
2. Clean up items which eat your maintenance time
3. Focus on the ticking time bombs and fix them before they explode on your org!!

As always feel free to post your comments and feel free to email me at buyan@eigenx.com for further questions. I do have a checklist of items which i can share with you once you have decided to do the clean up.