I started taking piano lessons when I was a toddler. I took lessons all the way through highschool. For 15 years nearly everyday I had to sit down at the piano for thirty minutes and practice.
When I went to college and later entered the professional world, my access to pianos was limited. The result, I stopped practicing. Years later, I can sit down at the piano and remember what they keys are and play some simple songs – but I can’t play at the same quality. I cannot expect to sit down at the piano and do a concert level performance.
Why is this? I’m rusty. I haven’t been practicing the craft of the piano for years. The same thing happens to us as Admins if we do not practice an aspect of Salesforce. We get rusty.
The last “Code” from my Dreamforce 2014 presentation, Know the Flow Code, was to “Practice.” (See my other Dreamforce sessions here)
We’re Admins every day we’re at work. But how frequently are we using all the features? For example, I know I didn’t update escalation rules every single week.
How I practice
I practice for three primary reasons.
- I’m learning a new feature
- I’m honing my expertise
- I’m building examples for future reference
Loyal readers may have notice, I like to do fun and crazy things with the platform. Everything from building “Give Thanks” app to building a random Salesforce related Pick-up Line Generator.
I do these projects for fun, for the blog, but they are also great ways to practice.
One of the things I had trouble with when Visual Workflow came out was with Decision Elements. I would get confused and forget about the default outcome or my outcomes wouldn’t be defined correctly. The best way to address this was to create something that required me to use a lot of decision elements.
Enter, Admin Adventure! This is a Choose Your Own Adventure type story using Flow. I’m not done with the whole story, but this got me started creating decision trees.
The start of Admin Adventure
This isn’t the whole thing… that would be cheating!
I’ll be writing more, but I wanted to give everyone an example of how practicing your admin skills can be a fun thing to do. So look at your calendar and commit to practicing once a day, a week, or a month. Just set aside the time and do it! Create a developer org JUST for practice. Soon you’ll be doing concert level performances on a regular basis.
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Love this! Great idea and way to learn at the same time! Now I want to go in my dev org and create a flow adventure too! 🙂
ps. best pickup lines….ever!
“my org is set to private but if things go well I can give you sharing privileges”
Thanks Carol. I need to finish my adventure too, but it is fun!
This is awesome, I can already think of multiple ways to use this!