Hi all,

More on building that dream Tableau Centre of Excellence function. I’ve previously posted about how to structure your support team and ways to build user engagement with “Tableau Champions”, this post focuses on how you can use Tableau’s introspection capabilities to deliver a more proactive support function.

What is proactivity?

The traditional definition of proactive is as follows.  To me it means means seeing into the future and getting to an issue before it even happens. In the world of IT Support, proactivity really is the Holy Grail, meaning the difference between a good support function and an amazing one. But it’s super-hard to achieve, especially in the complex enterprise level setups that have multiple break points. You can almost never prevent something from breaking, no matter how good your monitoring is.

What you can do is add some proactivity into the way your team operates by identifying when your users are not getting the best from your service. In Tableau Server world we have the ability to spot the following and much more.

• Slow Tableau visualisations
• Consistently failing extracts
• Stale content

I won’t go into how to achieve this, it’s the subject of a future post. But I’ll point you in the direction of these 2 posts that should get you on the way. Go check out Custom Admin Views by Mark Jackson and Why are my Extracts Failing – by Matt Francis.

I get my team to scan our admin views, to identify those users that in our opinion are not getting the best experience they can from Tableau. If we see someone who might be experiencing consistently slow visualisations, or have regularly failing extracts then we give them a call. Often the users won’t even have a complaint. But our message is “We think you’re not getting the best experience possible, and we want to make that happen”.

The initial reaction is often surprise. “I’m ok, I didn’t raise an issue” will be a common response. But then once we’ve worked with the user, and improved their experience, you’ll find they are blown away. You may even get a call from their management!

You’ll find this kind of service is very rare in most organisations so if you can deliver it, even sporadically, then you’ll be regarded very highly.

Makeovers

This is pretty simple, if a little time-consuming. Browse the Tableau content on your server. Spot something that doesn’t look great – it might be slow, not compliant with your best practices, or just fugly. Download that content, and give it a makeover. Make it look great, maybe add some improved functionality, make it nail best practices.

This is one of my team’s favourite activities due to the reaction of the user / client. They LOVE it. It really creates a sense of engagement, the user feels that your team actually really cares about them. We’ve also had our Tableau Champions participate in Makeovers which is even better as it saves my team some cycles.

Be careful though, some user content might be confidential and the user may not appreciate an admin poking around in their data. Also, remember that by doing this you are implying a criticism of their work, so handle the communication with care and sensitivity.

Also ensure that you don’t just change stuff and then drop it back on their laps. In a self-serve model like mine users develop and support their own content so it is crucial the user knows what you’ve changed, how you’ve changed it and what benefits you feel the modification brings. Pull them and their manager into a call, run through what you’ve done and then hand it back over to them to run with it.

These have been very successful in my organisation. Users truly appreciate the help and my team has fun doing it.

So there you are, a couple of tips for adding that gloss to your Tableau support service.

Cheers, Paul