Ops Madness: Road to the Final Fail

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This bracket may break your heart, but it's a different kind of upset. We asked the Wizards of Ops community to share their favorite Salesforce dumpster fire stories, but we couldn't choose just one. In the spirit of everyone's favorite (and the most chaotic) tournament, we're taking their tales to our community to decide which piece of Ops Madness deserves to win the Final Fail.

Follow Arovy on LinkedIn and Twitter to cast your weekly vote and help your favorite fail win the top spot.

We'll update the list below each week as our ops pros advance.

Ops Madness Contestants

Dang Grossberg: "Know your [API] limits, kid."

I was working at a Salesforce Partner in a consulting capacity, working on a fairly large and complex data migration project, where I had to rebuild relationships for a few hundred thousand records. I was heavily using a dataloader to not only extract all the relationships, I was also loading hundreds of thousands of records. At the time, I had no idea what API limits were, so when I tripped the limits on a Thursday evening, I effectively knocked a clients' org offline from connecting to any external service until the following Monday

John Wall: “The Gang Converts all the Leads"

The strategic decision had been made that, as we were primarily an outbound sales org, going forward we'd be a Contact-only shop. “Great! Consolidated reporting, no need for multiple lists for SDRs, what could go wrong?!" But 90,000 Leads of dubious quality stared back from the void. And while Ops leadership was on PTO, leadership took the opportunity to mandate alllllll those Leads be converted within a 2-week span without so much as an inkling of a plan. Chaos ensues, duplication and just really crummy data abound for several months. We've still got some of it quarantined almost a year later because we just don't have time to deal. Best of all, we've since developed an Inbound strategy, so now we need to determine how to handle inbound Leads. And no - there is no budget for LeanData

Jacki Leahy: "Oh, did you need those thousands of SSNs?"

My client wanted SSNs to be properly formatted ie. XXX-XX-XXXX. Me, wanting to be super delightful and not a lover of the Validation Rule barfing, decided to approach it with a Flow. It was working SO well—until the next day we noticed the SSNs kept looping through the flow—and they started morphing into morse code.

Erol Toker: 'The one missing field that ruined my month"

Basically, when setting up all of our core reporting in Salesforce, I relied on the Created_Date field in all of my reports on every object. The problem with this it turns out is that when you do migrations (export, delete, migrate back in), obviously the created date field gets nuked and reset to the same day so every. single. dashboard. for the objects in question was worthless. I had to go back in and for every object create a new custom 'Date_Created' field migrate the new data in and rebuild every single report, PB, Flow and Apex code that relied on the wrong field. It took several weekends to fix and we had to get someone else to build our board reporting from scratch in excel.

Keith Jones: "Endless Loop of Account Reassignments"

In an attempt to program a hand-off of ownership on accounts between users with a combination of process builder & distribution engine, I inadvertently created a loop where the system was assigning and reassigning records between SDRs and BDRs over and over again.

It. Broke. Everything.

Oh and the best part. In my hubris and overconfidence that what I had built was going to work, I activated the process and fucked off to lunch. It while I was away from my laptop when I got the text message that accounts were just looping through SDR assignments endlessly.

It was a great day.

Benjamin Reynolds: "It's only an entire country"

Whilst working at an international Financial Services corporation I may have prevented business from occurring betwixt the entire country of Luxembourg and the rest of the world for 48 hours due to an SFDC Sharing kerfuffle on my watch... Nothing major, just like - $2.4B didn't move when it was supposed to...

Jonathan Morgan: "All our contacts are wrong"

We were getting ready to launch a big strategic outbound campaign. The team was briefed, the messaging was created, and the contacts were scrubbed and uploaded late at night before the deadline. We did it, time to launch the campaign. A few days went by and the AEs started complaining about how none of the first names aligned with the email addresses and started blaming our data provider. I immediately felt a panic, went and checked Excel, and Yep, somehow 3/4 of the rows had swapped first names before the upload

Manas Kulkarni: "The One Where We Promised New Territories in 2 Months"

On an otherwise uneventful Monday morning in Jan 2020, we promised our AEs new Sales Territories by the end of March. Had we ever had territories before? Nope. Did we also promise we'd have an account scoring solution in place to help us put accounts in territories? Yep. Did we end up reviewing 10,000+ accounts manually because the vendor's account score sucked? Yep. Did we end up meeting our deadline? Nope. After all the blood, sweat, and tears, were AEs happy with their territories? HAH. Nope.