A Force to Reckon With

When you’re developing, you’ll hear mention of the MVP.  No, that’s not a reference to someone on your team or a client, or a spokesperson, but to what has been determined the Minimum Viable Product.  MVP is what everyone has agreed to being the minimum functionality to determine the project a success.

For the Disney app, I could go crazy with options and data and all sorts of fun things.  It would also take longer to build and prep for training.  Since this is for fun and this is just to model how to build an app, what we will do is determine what our MVP looks like for this version.  That’s the beauty about Salesforce, you can go back and build on, enhance all you want later.  You’re not stuck with what is accomplished in the MVP.

So here are the things I would like to track in this initial version:

• Date of visit
• Which parks were visited
• Which rides were rode
• Wait times for rides – posted and my experience
• Rating for ride *open question- overall or per experience?*
• Report or dashboard showing rate of completion.
• General park impressions (crowded, tour groups, empty)

Those I’m going to use as my baseline and for how I am going to structure my org.  Will there be other ways to do it? Of course.  Better ways?  I hope to make the best choices with these goals in mind and forward thinking to what I could want to track next.  Honestly, this is why I love working with other admins and architects- everyone brings different insights and experiences to brainstorming how the app could be built and it is better for it.  For now, you’ll have to suffer through my thoughts unless you care to comment below to add to the conversation.

Looking at my MVP items, I am seeing a structure.  The easiest solution would be to go into a new org and start adding fields to the account object, saying it represents each visit to the park.  You could indicate which park, ride, etc via picklists.  You would open the app, fill out a new record, and be on your way to the next ride.  You could set up fields to automatically default to today’s date and current time to help save a step but you’d be entering a lot of repetitive information or quickly use up all your fields for one record to hold all the data.

This is a bad idea. Shoving everything on the account object is not going to benefit you more at the end of the day than scribbling notes on a sheet of paper that you never refer back to again.  Once you enter the 3rd ride of the day and have repeated the same fields multiple times, you’re not going to want to enter information anymore.  What started out as fun is now a chore- just like many users think of entering data.  So we need a structure that will facilitate the ease of entering information AND also allow us to do all the reporting and analysis of the data later on.  What’s the point of entering it if you haven’t learned anything from it?  Maybe you have a goal of riding everything at least once per visit, without reports and dashboards, it makes it harder to realize what you have and have not rode.

Next post is going to be outlining how I will set up my org to manage all of this.  For anyone reading along, I’m not planning on using opportunities or anything associated with ordering.  Keeping it simple for now.  Till next time!