The team's Salesforce org has more than 1,000 objects, and Salesforce's built-in Schema Builder was too slow for impact analysis. Design reviews stalled, so people guessed or stopped checking.
A local snapshot of the org's metadata with offline search and filtering. A lookup takes as long as the question does, not as long as the platform does.
Design reviews, onboarding new team members, and checking what a field change will affect before anyone commits to it.
I joined RBC's Wealth Management Technology team for the summer as a business analyst. The team supports the platform financial advisors use day to day. I ended up leading two delivery squads from the product side: owning intake, deciding what went into each sprint, and cutting work that wasn't worth doing.
The second squad wasn't assigned to me. I picked it up because the gap was there and the work would have slipped otherwise.
The schema explorer wasn't on anyone's roadmap. I noticed the problem in design reviews and built the fix myself.
Before you change a field, you need to know what depends on it. In an org with more than 1,000 objects, Schema Builder was too slow to answer that during a design review, so the reviews stalled or went ahead on guesses.
| Decision | Why |
|---|---|
| Offline snapshot instead of a live connection | Speed was the whole point, and a local snapshot answers a lookup instantly. The tradeoff is that it's only as current as the last refresh. |
| Credentials stay on each person's machine | No shared service account and no shared logins. Each person pulls the snapshot with their own access. |
I also redesigned the team's project intake. Requests landed on a Jira board and were sorted by hand, while two lines of business tracked theirs separately in Excel. I mapped the current process first, lined up the spreadsheet statuses with the board's states, and rebuilt routing as an automated Jira workflow. I tested it across all three lines of business before rollout, and it became the team's standard intake process. Initial scoping went from 72 hours to 5 minutes.