What a Salesforce platform health review should tell you

A Salesforce platform can keep working while becoming progressively harder to change. New requirements take longer to deliver. Teams hesitate to touch older automation. Integrations depend on knowledge that lives with one person.

A platform health review should help you understand those constraints and decide what to do about them. An inventory of issues is useful, but it is only part of the work.

Start with the changes you need to make

Before reviewing configuration or code, establish what the business needs from the platform. What changes are proving difficult? Where do users work around the system? Which decisions are waiting for a clearer technical picture?

These questions give the review a purpose. They also help distinguish a technical imperfection from something that is actively holding the organisation back.

Look at how the platform fits together

Reviewing components in isolation can miss the dependencies that make change difficult. Data, permissions, automation, Apex, and integrations need to be understood in context.

For example, an apparently unused field may still be part of an integration contract. A small change to automation may affect a process owned by another team. A review should make those relationships visible before recommending removal or replacement.

Useful areas to examine include:

• The architecture and boundaries between Salesforce and other systems.
• Automation and code that operate on the same records or business processes.
• Legacy functionality, its ownership, and whether it still serves a business need.
• Testing, release practices, and the team’s ability to make changes with confidence.
• Documentation and dependencies on individual knowledge.

Prioritise findings in business terms

A long list of findings can create more uncertainty. Each significant recommendation needs enough context to support a decision: what is affected, why it matters, the dependencies involved, and the effort required to investigate or fix it.

The immediate priorities might be a fragile integration or a process that repeatedly blocks releases. Other improvements can sit behind them in a roadmap. The order should reflect the organisation’s needs and capacity, alongside the technical risk.

Where evidence is incomplete, record the uncertainty. A recommendation to investigate a dependency is more useful than a confident removal recommendation built on an assumption.

Agree who carries the work forward

A review needs an owner after the findings are presented. Agree what the internal team will handle, where specialist support is needed, and how priorities will be revisited as the work progresses.

The result should be a shared understanding of the platform and a practical set of next steps. If your team cannot tell what to do next, the review has more work to do.

Talk to Stone Bear about a platform review.