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How (and Why) to Document Your Customizations in PatronManager: https://help.pm.leapevent.tech/a/929284
So you identified something you wanted to change in your database, tested your customizations in a sandbox, and implemented those changes in your production account. Great job! End of story, right? Well, not quite.
How will anyone tomorrow, next week, or a year from now know about this change you implemented, or why you implemented it? Documenting your changes, both in the system (utilizing Help Text and Descriptions) and outside of the system (utilizing a change log), can be a huge boon to your organization. In this article, we'll go over what to log, why to log it, and how to get started.
To help set you up for success, we’ve put guidelines together to help you avoid interfering with PatronManager functionality, corrupting your data, and to prevent negative impacts to your customizations due to PatronManager product upgrades.
Why document customizations?
Documenting your customizations helps current and future staff understand how to use, and how to further customize PatronManager, from an educated perspective. An institutional memory surrounding PatronManager will save everyone loads of time, energy, and headaches. Here's just some of the benefits to logging your changes:
- No one will have to re-invent the wheel
- Something we see pretty often amongst our clients is a tendency to solve the same problems over and over again, using slightly different methods. If, instead, coworkers are able to see what changes have already been made, they'll be able to make tweaks to an existing customization instead of spending time starting from scratch.
- Future employees will be informed
- New employees have a lot to learn about PatronManager. After they get the basics down, it's a good idea for them to take a look at the change log. It will give them a better idea of the goals and methods of your organization, and help them to hit the ground running.
- Troubleshooting becomes a breeze
- If a customization you've made stops working, or you notice some strange behavior in your system, it helps immensely to take a look at the changes you, or your coworkers, have made. Maybe a new update isn't playing well with one of your installed apps; maybe your workflow stopped working because a coworker removed a crucial field. These problems become clear with a change log.
- You'll know what features to test when adding your next customization
- Anytime you're making a change to the appearance or functionality of PatronManager, you should test those changes in a sandbox before you create them in your production account. When testing, you'll want to know how your changes will affect the rest of the system - specifically, how your new customization will affect any of your previous changes to the system.
What to document?
While you don't need to log changes you make to your data (i.e. correcting a misspelled Account Name), you should log anything that changes how PatronManager looks or functions. New record types, fields, changes to page layouts, workflows, installed apps, and new picklist values, just to name a few, should all be logged.
When in doubt, err on the side of logging too much than too little!
How to document?
It's a good idea to keep track of the changes you make in PatronManager both inside the system, where coworkers can view pertinent information immediately, and outside the system, where you can more easily centralize all of your customizations into one, cohesive change log document.
Documenting Outside PatronManager: Change Log
The golden standard of documenting customizations is the change log. By creating a change log, and keeping it up to date, you can create an institutional memory, a history of all the customizations made to your PatronManager account.
But where should you log the changes? You and your coworkers should be able to update the change log from any computer, at any time. It's important for current and future staff to have access to the change log easily and quickly. We recommend creating a spreadsheet, or similar document, via a cloud-based platform, and sharing editing access with all coworkers that have the ability to make customizations to the system.
Here's an example of what your change log should look like. Remember, you don't need to go wild, expounding upon every excruciating detail. Just make sure it's clear when the change was made, what change was made, and why.
| Date of Customization | Who Implemented Customization | Type of Customization |
Customization Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3/6/2014 | Lisa | Update to Page Layout | The Contact page layout "Student" was pretty messy, with information in seemingly random order, and not grouped together. Created a new section, called "Student Details", to house fields specific to the Student record type. |
| 8/18/2014 | Bart | New Object | Created the "Detention History" object, added the related list to the "Student" page layout only. Object created because there was no current way to track details of each detention a student has been punished with. Goal was to record date, the reason for the detention, in/out of school, and any other details regarding the incident. |
| 7/15/2015 | Abe | New Field | Created the "Senior Citizen's Discount" checkbox to the Contact object and to all Contact page layouts. |
| 1/27/2016 | Edna | New Contact Record Type | Created the "Teacher" Contact Record Type and accompanying page layout. Created the fields "Grade", "Subject", and "School", added all three only to the Teacher page layout. |
Documenting Inside PatronManager: Help Text and Description fields
If you're creating a new record type, field, or page layout, fill in the Help Text and Description fields. These give coworkers and future users an idea of the reasoning behind a newly created field, record type, or object.
Help Text pops up as a "?" icon next to fields on page layouts. By hovering over the icon, users can get a quick reminder of how to use the field:
While Help Text can only be used for fields, Descriptions can be used for nearly every aspect of PatronManager. The Description is visible within the setup menu, or, in some cases, when creating a new record. Use the Description field to log why the record type, object, or field was created:
