What Yesterday’s Announcement on Flow Means for Salesforce Admins!!!
My Thoughts on the Announcement About Declarative Automation
OK, so the Winter ’22 Release Readiness webinar happened yesterday. Now, I don’t tend to watch these when they come out, instead I try to spend some time reading the release notes where I can. Yesterday, the webinar was one targeted for Salesforce Admins. I didn’t watch it yesterday when it aired, but after seeing Twitter explode about the section on Flow enhancements, I just simply could not resist taking the time to go back and watch the webinar, and to comment on the announcement that was dropped into the webinar itself.
Before I continue, let me just say that I’m not one of those Admins who is scared of Flow, or who hates Flow. Honestly, I love Flow, it’s probably my overall favourite tool to use in Salesforce right now. However, I know many in the Admin community who are hesitant to work with Flow, or who simply don’t like it and therefore opt not to use it. So this post, is for those Admins. I want to briefly go over what the announcement about Flow was, my reading of it (which might possibly be wrong), and how this announcement affects you and what you should be doing in response to it. Hopefully, what I say here won’t be too scary. I’m not going to get into the technical side of things here too much, there’s people out there who are far more qualified to do that than I am. What I am going to try and do though, is cover the things you need to do to get ready for a world where in terms of declarative automation, Flow is the standard and the expectation for how Admins do automation in Salesforce.
Let’s Talk About the Announcement Itself
What Was It?
The announcement made yesteday was in relation to Process Builder and Workflow Rules. There has been a lot of suspicion within the community that these two process automation tools would eventually be retired.
Well, our suspicions were finally confirmed yesterday when Diana Jaffe, the Product Manager for Flow at Salesforce had this to say:
As we move forward over the next year, we will begin to retire workflow rules and process builder. As well as continue to add more functionality to Flow.
What Does the Announcement Mean?
So it’s now official! Workflow Rules and Process WILL be retired. But what does this actually mean? Does retired mean that we won’t be able to use these tools anymore? Well, rather than have me answer, let’s have Jen Lee answer this question for us, I think this statement might help us get what’s going on.
As you can see from the Tweet shown, the plan seems to be to have only declarative tool for automation in Salesforce, with that tool being Flow. So how I’m understanding the nature of the announcement is that the older automation tools WILL NOT be available after a certain date.
Now it remains to be seen when that date will be, but considering how Diana that Workflow Rules and Process Builder will begin to be retired over the course of the next year. How I read this is that we can expect to see some kind of announcement confirming when Process Builder and Workflow Rules will be fully or partially retired sometime next year (forward looking statement).
Before I move on in this post, I do want to highlight the most recent Flow roadmap I have seen. On it you can see that the plan for the Spring ’22 release is to include support to migrate the workflows and processes you have currently in your org. So you will have help going forward with any migrations you do.
How this Impacts Admins Going Forward
The impact of this announcement is naturally going to be a little mixed. If you’re an Admin who is already heavily invested in Flow and has moved the majority of your org’s automation into Flow, the impact is going to be minimal. However, if your org is predominantly using Process Builder and Workflow Rules and either don’t use Flow or uses it minimally there will be a lot of work to do going forward. This work may be multi-faceted, particularly if you’re an Admin who doesn’t know anything about Flow or isn’t well-versed in using it. I have to brutally honest here and say that for a number of Admins out there, Flow can include a VERY steep learning curve. This is because one can argue that Flow is a tool that is almost Developer lite. It’s certainly more advanced than some of the standard tools we use regularly as Admins, however in my experience Flow is not too overwhelming to learn.
So for the Admin, I would suggest these are the top things to do based on the upcoming retirement of Workflow Rules and Process Builders:
- Learn Flow!!!
If you have already learnt a bit about Flow, look to improve your knowledge. - Consider investing in training on Flow … there are some good courses out there. Consider checking out Andy Engin Utkan’s course on Flow.
- Create a migration plan for your current workflows and processes.
Migrations could have a target start date of Spring ’22 following the release. - Decide to create new declarative automation in Flow.
- Create a documentation template for your Flows and begin to use that.
This is something I’m working on myself using Notion as the tool for that.
Should Admins Be Concerned About this Change
In my honest opinion, the only reason I can see for Admins being concerned with this change is if they put off doing anything about it. I do get that change can be difficult for people, but those of us who work as Salesforce Admins, work in a job where change should be expected. Honestly, if you give Flow the time of day and really invest in learning it you will probably be fine with it. I’m not a developer myself, but I have worked with tools and software that is far more complex than Flow. I do genuinely believe that the thing that holds Admins back the most when it comes to Flow is a hesitancy to embrace it.
So, if you put some time in to learn about it, I do think you will be more than capable of creating Flows and managing your automation well. Like I said, the only reason I can think of as to why Admins could be concerned about this change, is if they do nothing to prepare for this change over the next year. Think about it like the rollout of MFA in February, the only people that will be a problem for is for those organisations who do nothing about it. In one sense, I do think that the migration to Flow could be easier than rolling out MFA, I know that sounds crazy but I do know of organisations where management are taking too much time to either buy into MFA or are trying to reject it being rolled out, I have heard of some organisations asking Admins to contact Salesforce to say they don’t want to do it. With Flow, you’re probably unlikely to get too much objection to it as the only money it could cost to implement it is the money that it costs for the Admin to work their contracted hours.
What Can Salesforce Do to Help
Following yesterday’s announcement, Jen Lee put out another Tweet asking what can Salesforce do to help Admin’s prep for this significant change.
Honestly, I think this is a great question to ask because of the steep learning curve that can be involved in learning Flow. In my book it really is a very good sign when a company asks their customers how they help with the adjustments users have to make when a mandatory update to working practice is set.
So I have a few ideas that I think could help the community out. I’ve already shared these on Twitter myself, but I’ll share them here as well for reference.
Process Automation Superbadges
The first idea I thought of was two-fold and it was around superbadges on Trailhead. With the direction of becoming Flow first in mind, what we will find is that the Process Automation Specialist superbadge will become outdated very quickly as it requires you to use a combination of Flow and Process Builder. This should be updated to reflect the current guidance of building all declarative automation in Flow.
The second half of this idea was to create a new superbadge on Trailhead, possibly called Process Automation Troubleshooting Specialist. The reason for this idea was because in my honest opinion, the Flow Troubleshooting badge fell flat of it’s goal. The idea of the badge was solid, but the execution of it was done in such a way where many will come out not having learnt anything from it. Having a new superbadge on automation troubleshooting will give an avenue where the concept for the badge will be have a much more beneficial outcome as superbadges don’t give you the answers, it gives you the tasks and then it is up to you to complete them based on the guidance offered. Having an automation troubleshooting superbadge will help Admins to level up their skills in regards to troubleshooting issues around automation.
Offer a Process Automation Certification to All Users
The second point I raised was around the topic of a certification. At the time of writing there isn’t a specific cert for Process Automation available to all the community, there is one available to partners though. Automation is touched on in the Administrator and Platform App Builder exam from what I have experienced so far. However, declarative automation is much more expansive than what is covered in those exams. So why not have a certification that is available to everyone in the community covering Process Automation.
Make More Hands-On Training
With something like Flow, experience is the best teacher in my opinion. Having Salesforce do hands-on training sessions for beginner and intermediate users of Flow would be something I feel would be not only appreciated, but extremely beneficial to the community as a whole. It was announced this week that Salesforce.org are going to be hosting a week of learning shortly after Dreamforce. Could Salesforce provide something similar for the community to help prepare them to move their declarative automation out of Workflow Rules and Process Builder into Flow?
A good way to possibly do this would be through a mixture of hands-on learning sessions with Flow experts, and roundtable discussion sessions where people could discuss topics such as automation migration, documentation, best practices and so on. That way you would give chance for Admins to not only learn Flow, but to have discussions to help them to think about how to manage all of these changes that are coming sometime in the not too distant future. Give Admins the chance to plan all of this out well.
Closing Comments
The retirement of Workflow Rules and Process Builder is going to be a big change for a number of Admins. But it doesn’t have to be a scary ride at all. There are plenty of people with the community who would be more than willing to help you out when it comes to either learning Flow or simply trying to get your head around how this change will impact you and your work. Personally, I think the change is a really good move. However, I do understand how it might make a number of Admins feel out there. It might be scary.
I’ve briefly shared my thoughts on the topic. But what do you think? Do you think this announcement was a good thing? Are you looking forward to the change? Let me know your thoughts in the responses to this post here on Medium or in the comments where I share this on social media.
N.B. I was planning on posting about Dreamforce today, but simply had to write about all of this when I heard that the announcement many of us thought would be coming finally came in the Release Readiness webinar for Admins yesterday.
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