Tag Archives: ITIL

Building a culture of trust

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We talk a great deal about results, delivery and giving our best in the workplace. But what makes that possible? What are the most important factors in achieving results? Well there are several, obviously, but one of the most important in that of trust. Without trust, we don’t get results.

So I got thinking – and when I get thinking I get researching. And when I get researching I get writing!

Seems to me there are 2 key aspects of trust –being able to trust people yourself and also being trusted by others. Obviously we’d love to have both of them nailed. And some people just inherently seem to be trustworthy. But what are they doing that allows them to be trusted?

Three Elements of Trust

In a recent article [HBR], Jack Zenger & Joseph Folkman outlined their “Three elements of trust”. I’ll describe them here .

  • Positive relationships

Seems obvious but we have more trust in people we have enjoyable interactions with. That might be someone who acts as a catalyst for getting things done, someone that is great at resolving conflicts or someone that provides great feedback. Or perhaps it’s someone who’s empathetic nature makes us feel comfortable. Whatever the reason, they make us feel positive, and that leads us to trust them.

  • Good judgement and expertise

It’s much easier to trust someone who comes with a proven track record of expertise and achievements. If you can clearly demonstrate that you know your subject area and how to do your job well then it’s easier for others to trust you. At highly-skilled organisations the base level of job excellence is kinda assumed, but make sure you add value to the calls you’re invited to and that your opinions and ideas make a tangible difference to others. Speed can also be important here. Trustworthy people often act fast to resolve issues, and many times anticipate problems before they happen.

  • Consistency

These are people that you can rely on. You know they’ll go the extra mile if they can, and that they back up their words with action. One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was that of “Deliver, Deliver, Deliver”, i.e. carve out a reputation as someone that always delivers and you’ll become an indispensable go-to person for others. True consistency is hard to achieve, we all make mistakes, but if you can build that reliability factor then people will trust in your capabilities. Giving yourself that chance to succeed is key here. Set expectations; keep your commitments and Deliver, Deliver, Deliver. [QA]

While these make a lot of sense, there’s a bit more to it IMHO. So I have some of my own.

  • Don’t be a jerk

We all have a bit of jerk in us. We know when we’ve been unfair to someone. The key is to detect the behaviour coming and squash it at source. Developing emotional intelligence and self-awareness is the key here. Don’t take your bad day out on someone else. If you’re a jerk, then people will give you a wide berth.

  • Equanimity

Rather like the best poker players, you’ll find that key leaders respond in the same way when things are going badly and when they’re going well. You don’t see overreactions or huge displays of emotion. This can come across a little robotic, but really helps when the s hits the f. If you know someone is going to respond to problems with a cool head then they rapidly build your trust.

So those are some factors that you can employ to be seen as trustworthy. But how can you develop your own team or colleagues to be people you can trust? How can you help them?

How to build a trustworthy team culture

  • Autonomy

You have to let people get on with their tasks and resist any urge to micromanage. Give your team the freedom for them to say “hey I got this”, for them to let you detach from the nuts and bolts and trust in their delivery. Just like if you’ve ever tried to do something for a 3 year old child that they can do themselves – they’ll soon tell you “I’ll do it myself!” Maybe an adult won’t be so honest so it’s up to us to provide our teams with the autonomy to be able to take action and deliver [WNEXT]. Obviously then they need to deliver of course! J

  • Freedom to fail

I have no problem with my team failing. As long as they’re trying new things, developing new ideas and fixing problems. Creating an environment where we can all safely try out new methods is key to being trusted. I know the team doesn’t want to fail, and for the vast majority of cases, wont fail – but when they do it’s cool with me. I’ve worked in teams where the slightest error is ruthlessly punished, and it stifles innovation completely. See this post for some other thoughts on this topic. [BIZLIB]. Obviously we have to ensure failure doesn’t become a habit or a default outcome, but a good team will self-police this.

Trust vs Control – do big organisations get it right?

These days, many firms are super-highly regulated. The price for misdemeanors from non-trustworthy people is high [RTRAD], for the individuals and the firm. So you’ll probably have a LOT of governance. Mandatory training, compliance checks, risk reviews, market conduct – the list goes on. And sometimes it seems we spend too much time on governance, and not enough actually getting things done. I’ve heard it referred to as a source of frustration at a number of places that I’ve worked.

I’ve got a mixed view on this. The key risk and governance items are absolutely required, and often mandated by regulators. So we just need to get on with them. Automate where possible and seek to optimize. JFDI. However there are times when restrictions do seem influenced by a lack of trust. E.g. rejection of conference presentations because someone, once upon a time, did a bad job. Or blocking social media sites by default meaning we can’t access handy training resources e.g. SlideShare, YouTube etc.  Or excessive scrutiny of expense claims in case someone hasn’t followed policy. Even dressing appropriately for the workplace. All of those are not a problem with the right person. A trustworthy professional knows not to display client information in their presentation. They know not to be updating their Facebook page whilst on a conference call. They know the guidelines regarding expenses, and they certainly know not to wear their favourite Metallica t-shirt in a client meeting. 🙂 If they don’t, then they’re not the calibre of person your organisation needs.

So should we be concentrating more on hiring the right attitudes, rather than tarring everyone with the same brush? For sure it would be cheaper to have genuine trust in people rather than implementing complex controls [FORBES]. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Ok that’s it. Thanks for reading.

Supporting references

[HBR] https://hbr.org/2019/02/the-3-elements-of-trust

[QA] http://qaspire.com/2010/07/21/5-ways-to-build-trust-lessons-from-a-conversation/

[WNEXT] https://whatsnextpodcast.libsyn.com/rising-up-against-the-diminisher-with-liz-wiseman

[BIZLIB] https://www.bizlibrary.com/article/bizlibrary-values-freedom-to-fail/

[RTRAD] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_trading_losses

[FORBES] https://www.forbes.com/sites/keldjensen/2014/12/08/control-is-good-trust-is-cheaper/#518fc721322f

Accelerate your career with a Personal Board of Directors

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Hi all,

As we wrap up annual performance review season, you’ll all be on the receiving end of feedback. Some of it will be good, some of it will be less so, but hopefully it will all be constructive. With any luck there won’t be any big surprises in there, that’s always unpleasant. Feedback should be a continuous process throughout the year, driven by the individual.

A great way of creating that pipeline of continuous feedback, advice and support is to think of yourself as a company. Banoub Inc. if you will. Has a nice ring to it actually. The best companies operate with a solid, skilled and experienced Board of Directors, working together to provide the direction that the company needs. No one person can do it all themselves.

And that’s the same with you. We all need our own Personal Board of Directors. The people that can advise, critique, praise, motivate and generally steer each of us through the minefield that is our career.

I like to think of my own Personal Board of Directors as 6 – 8 people that connect with me in a number of ways. Here are a few suggestions.

  • A Subject Matter Expert

    • Someone that knows my subject area inside out. A person I can learn technical and job-related skills from. A real expert in the field.

 

  • The no BS advisor

    • We all need someone who gives it to you straight. Someone who’s opinion comes with no BS. They’ll tell you how they see it, whether it is uncomfortable for you or not. Often a great way to get the feedback that others are too scared to give you.

 

  • A super-fan

    • Some people just like you. They might like the way you work, or your attitude, or you just click. It’s always good to have a positive fan on your Personal Board of Directors. They’re handy for spreading that positive message about you and for selling your achievements.

 

  • A critic

    • While your super-fan will tell you all the things you do well, it’s good to balance that out with someone who will let you know where you’re going wrong. They might seem negative, but if they’re spotting flaws that you are missing then they’re extremely valuable. Obviously attitude is key here; you want feedback to be constructive.

 

  • The connector

    • We all know someone who seems to know everyone! They’re all over your social feeds, all over forums and events. Their name crops up everywhere and they seem to get all the info on what’s going on. It’s great to be close to someone who has this profile. They’re able to connect you with people from all over the place and they open so many doors. And as cliche as it sounds, it really is all about the network.

 

  • Someone from Generation-Not-You

    • Your perspective on life is profoundly influenced by your generation. And there’s not a whole lot you can do about that. I like my Personal Board of Directors to feature someone from another generation. Be they younger, or older, they see things through a whole new lens and as such can offer an invaluable opinion.

 

  • The non-work advisor

    • I find it useful to have an advisor that I don’t share any real work connection with. Maybe they share the same hobby as you, or have similar life challenges, the non-work advisor can offer unique commentary that you can use to make real progress.

 

Finally I like to think how I can act as someone else’s board member. Maybe you’ll have a mutual arrangement with some of your own advisors? But do consider how your own skills can be of use to acquaintances at work. The recipient might not even realize you could be of use. So offer!

You’ll probably already have some of these roles already filled, maybe without even realizing it. And just like a real company, there will be turnover, hirings and firings, and maybe the odd scandal, but the group will undoubtedly provide a great deal of collective value.  One thing is for sure, your Personal Board of Directors will provide a continuous fire-hose of actionable feedback and advice, that you can use to shape your career for the better. Don’t rely on the usual feedback channels, go out and get hiring!

Regards, Paul

What to name your Tableau Server?

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Hello all. Yes, contrary to popular belief, I did indeed survive Tableau Conference 2017. I’ll admit it was a close thing, but I got through it!

Now back to business..

This one all started with a tweet from my good pal, the Wizard of Excel (and Tableau genius) Mr Dan Harrison (@danosirra) who was wondering what to name his Tableau server host.

This awakened the server admin in me (not that it’s ever asleep).. It also made me question Dan’s taste in music.

An example being…

And this is the point. Server naming is critical in any organisation, large or small.

Picture the situation – you get woken up at 2am by an alert or a call from an operator – server “superman” is down. Fine if you’re experienced and know the environment inside out, but what if you’ve only just joined the company. You know the servers are named after superheroes, but that’s it. Was the production server superman or spiderman? Or was it WonderWoman? Do you need to take action? It’s not clear and you need to dig into a server inventory system to get more info, and that takes time. And you’re new, so you can’t remember the URL for the inventory system.

You assume superman is your production server. But it’s not reachable via console, and you need to call someone to get into the datacenter to fix it. So you call the hardware team – sure they’ll go in, but they need to know if the server is in the London or the Birmingham datacenter? Errrr…

So you dispatch Server 5’O to fix the box, and then the next day you find out it’s a development machine and could wait. What a waste of time.

So you get the problem here. It’s very tempting to name servers after Simpsons characters or animals (I’d choose sharks obviously), but those names convey no organisational information and as such, are useless.

So what should you do?

There are tons of different naming conventions you can use. Here’s one that I like

When I get that call in the middle of the night I (or the hardware technician) will want to know..

  • Where is the server?
  • Is it production, Disaster Recovery, UAT or development?
  • What application is it? Tableau, obviously.
  • Which worker of my Tableau cluster is it?
  • What operating system is it?

So I get called and am told server lnpwtsw3.company.com is down. Let me think..

  • ln – London
  • p – Production
  • w – Windows
  • ts – Tableau Server
  • w3 – Worker 3

And with that info, I know it needs acting on now, which platform admin to call if it’s an OS issue, and where to send the hardware technician if it needs physically addressing. I also know which worker it is so what the potential impact to my cluster is.

Yes the server name is a little harder to remember, but that soon comes and it is possible to create a DNS alias to reflect a friendlier name if needed. There’s also a balance to be had in terms of character count etc.

Another example – this time server name is lndwtsw1

  • ln – London
  • d – Development
  • w – Windows
  • ts – Tableau Server
  • w1 – Worker 1

Fine, that’s development. I’ll go back to sleep and deal with it in the morning.

So as you can see, it’s pretty important. Not just for me and my Tableau environment, what if you’re a server admin in charge of 5000 servers across the globe? This needs to be right!

Anyway, that’s it. Pretty simple. For the record, Dan made his choice…

See you next time, Paul

Data driven interviewing with Tableau

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Hi

Continuing the series of posts where I explain how we are building an enterprise grade Tableau Centre of Excellence.

Here at Vizninja towers we pride ourselves on knowing Tableau & data. After all, we need to be able to add value and help users with their myriad queries.

So when we get the chance to hire, it is critical that we get the correct people. People with great skills in Tableau, data & visual analytics. People that can tell stories and make data come to life. People who want to help others see and understand their data. And being a data driven team we use data and visualisation to help us make the selection.

Our interview process goes like this.

  1. An initial screening call with the Agile BI service manager (that’s me!)
  2. A technical interview with the team
  3. An exercise involving Tableau Public
  4. A final chat with the big boss (that’ll be me one day)

Some more detail on a couple of these steps.

 

The Technical Interview

We have a series of technical questions that the team asks each candidate. The questions are split between Tableau Server and Tableau Desktop and also categorised in terms of complexity – e.g. Level 1, Level 2 & Level 3, (see here) with the more complex questions being at L3 level. So I wait until my team are in a bad mood and then I let them off their leash at the candidate….

Our interview viz. Created by @jakesviz

Click the image to get a better view of the tooltips. Apologies if they’re not so clear. Here’s what some of them look like. So we can see the exact question asked, points achieved and any comments.

On the dashboard, you can see the questions asked, the max points available per question and then the points attained per category and complexity. At the end we spit out a KPI that gives us some indication of a candidate’s capability. Note that a low score doesn’t necessarily indicate that a candidate is unsuitable. Often we see people who are super-skilled in Tableau Desktop but not experienced in Server (as in this case). A few weeks with the team will soon change that though. Our job is to create all-rounders in all aspects of Tableau.

So if the data checks out then the candidate moves on to the next stage.

 

The Tableau Public Exercise

For the next test we ask a candidate to choose a dataset from these public datasets and then create a viz on Tableau Public. The candidate then presents their viz to us and we look for the following

  • Good visual analytics best practice
  • Ability to create an engaging story and develop insight
  • Structured design process and ability to justify design choices

And if they’re really unlucky then @jakesviz will download the workbook and rip it to bits in front of them! Yes we are looking to see if you’ve commented your calculated fields!

Here’s what Jakub Jaros came up with..

https://public.tableau.com/profile/jakub.jaros#!/vizhome/SignigicantVolcanicEruptions/Main

Nice work huh? We thought so. So now you know where to go for your volcano information. This is a really important part of the interview process as the candidate presents their work to us and it can lead to discussion, debate and even argument. But it really gives a sense of whether someone loves dataviz and you sure need that if you want to work for me. We plan to add some data points to this stage so that we can come up with a final rating for each candidate.

After this, it’s a final chat with the big boss and hopefully a role with the team. And that’s when the fun really starts!

This approach has really resonated with senior management and as a result we are helping several other teams to adopt a similar process.

So there you are. That’s how we ensure we have the correct people to deliver a great service. Feedback appreciated in the comments.

Cheers, Paul

What we got wrong building our Tableau service

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Hi

I spend a lot of time talking to other companies about how to put together a decent Tableau Centre of Excellence. And that’s cool. I love to help people and I also learn a ton from all the other great setups out there.

But that also gets me thinking. We are far from perfect. And we made a whole lot of mistakes on the way to building our service. So instead of talking about the good stuff we did, I thought I’d highlight what I think we got wrong.

So in no particular order of importance, here are our top mistakes

Onboarding

So you’ve done the demo, shown the capabilities of Tableau and your audience is wowed. They want it and they want it NOW! So how do you get them from wanting to having?

Well we didn’t do so well. Our purchasing is handled by another team and the process is fairly complicated. Our mistake was not building a solid enough relationship with the purchasing team early on and making an effort to understand the points of the process that could be improved. We kind of just let them get on with it when we could have offered more assistance. This meant that on occasion users had to wait up to 2 months before they actually got their licence! And sometimes that cost us users, who gave up during the process.

Eventually we got together and helped the purchasing team out. And now things are a lot better. My advice – if you see a team you have a dependency on are struggling, then speak to them and help them out. Sounds obvious, but on this occasion we didn’t.

Setting Expectations

I spend a lot of time talking to users, often at a senior level, asking them to feedback on their experience with Tableau. On the whole it’s great stuff that comes back, but occasionally I used to get surprised with users informing me that their experience was poor. Tableau didn’t do what they wanted, it was inflexible and hard to use.

That didn’t sound like the Tableau I know and love. So I did some more research and it turned out that the users who didn’t like Tableau were trying to get it to do something that it wasn’t designed for. Now that’s fine if you’re Allan Walker or Noah Salvaterra but most of my users aren’t that level – in fact few people are. And of course that meant the users were getting frustrated.

I think the comment that really resonated was “Tableau? That’s Excel online isn’t it?”. Er – NO IT ISN’T!

The problem was obvious. Users thought Tableau was something it wasn’t. And naturally they would get a degraded experience. So we created a document that clearly states what Tableau is good at, and what it isn’t good at. We make users read this doc when they sign up for the service so they know exactly what they are getting.

This was very successful and really cut down the instances of poor feedback.

Some related posts on this subject from Dan Murray, Matt Francis & Peter Gilks

Training from the Get-Go

I’m a self-learner. So is my team, and most of the people I work with. I’m sure you are as well, that’s why you’re here reading this. And as a result I expect others to be the same. And for the self-learner, the world of Tableau is great. Tons of bloggers, forums, help articles, Tweeters, online videos and all sorts of quality learning materials. It really is one of the strengths of Tableau IMHO.

So we created guides & 101 pages etc and told users to go and help themselves. And to be fair, some of them did. But not as many as we’d have liked. And as a result we got tons of newbie questions and consequently poor quality content on our server.

About 8 months into the service we decided to implement a structured, instructor led training programme, amongst other training initiatives. More details here. Much of the syllabus is covered by Tableau’s own online videos and other resources but for some reason, new users really responded to this structured course. As a result we saw a corresponding improvement in the quality of published content and a reduction in the basic level questions to the team. In hindsight we should have implemented this right at the start, rather than assuming everyone would be keen to self-learn.

Commercials

Much as I love Tableau, their commercial operation isn’t the most flexible. That’s not just my opinion, it has been mentioned in Gartner reports. As a result we’ve struggled to negotiate the most competitive packages that we could have done. There have been some valid reasons for that but I don’t think we put as much effort into resolving the related issues as we should have.

And that’s important. I don’t want to get the best price for the sake of it, in big enterprises there are a lot of competitive threats from other tools. If Tableau isn’t competitive with pricing then the people that make the technology decisions will be perfectly happy to rip it out and replace it with something else. Not what anyone wants.

Again much of this is down to relationship building. As our relationship with Tableau has grown, we’ve seen improvement in this area.

Gamification

I’m a big fan of gamification. It can really boost engagement and turn a good initiative into an awesome one. We’ve had a couple of half-hearted stabs at competitions, to try and get things going but there is so much more we can do. Hackathons, viz games, competitions and internal Iron Viz – we’ve got a ton of ideas but never made it happen yet.

I think that’s partially down to the wide geographical spread of my user base. It would be really hard to get people to show up in a particular location. Users are also insanely busy, would I be able to round up enough people to make it worthwhile? So lots of excuses and not a lot of achievement in this area. I’m open to ideas if you’ve got this one nailed.

That’s it for now. There may well be a part 2 to this as I’m sure there are more things that will come to mind as I cry myself to sleep thinking what a mess we’ve made of it all… 🙂

Thanks to the awesome Matt Francis for inspiring this post.

Happy vizzing, VN

The Three Levels of Tableau Support

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Hi all,

Let’s talk a bit more about how to build a top Tableau support team. This post focuses on the support my team provides to our user base. At the moment we have just over 1000 Tableau Desktop users, and approximately 8000 active users on the server every month – that’s a lot of demand for our services.

Now users can be a pretty demanding bunch, with myriad questions, queries and problems. And we are busy. So how do we ensure that users get the level of support they need? Well we provide 3 levels of main support, with the objective being to ensure that the type of user query / issue is directed to a channel that gives it the appropriate level of attention. This ensures an efficient use of my team’s valuable time, and critically it cuts down the traffic to our email inbox which is always a good thing.

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Some of the support options for our users

Level 1 – Man down!

Red alert! Something is busted and it needs to be looked at now! For this we need any incident to be logged in a trouble ticket system, with appropriate priority and detail. We use Service Now for this (many other tools available).

So if users think Tableau is broken or they need some immediate help then they log a ticket. This is mandatory. We need to track and log the progress, and the data is audited regularly. No ticket, no fix. We obviously don’t wait stubbornly for the ticket though, if there’s a big issue we investigate while the incident is logged.

Once the ticket is logged it flows through our regular support flow. First my Level 1 team will take a look and see if there’s an easy fix. If they can’t fix it then it’s an escalation to my more skilled Level 2 team, and then a potential escalation to my main Level 3 team for the trickier issues. There may be a future post coming about effective incident management, so I won’t go into detail here.

Some users don’t like us mandating that they raise an incident ticket. But it’s the only way to ensure traceability of problems.

Level 2 – It can wait

Sometimes users have problems or requests for assistance that are not so time sensitive. Maybe a development dashboard has broken, or someone needs help from the team to perfect that Pareto chart, or hey – maybe they just wanna talk about how much they love Tableau (it happens!)?

screen-shot-2016-11-22-at-14-48-33

Book your appointment with a Tableau Dr.

That’s where a Tableau Dr. Session is needed. We dedicate 3 half days a week to Tableau Dr. Sessions. Users log onto our community page and can book their session from a list of available slots. If the next slot is in a couple of days then they have to wait to be seen. Providing this structure to the sessions is critical as it allows my team to keep control. Before we implemented the structured sessions we were getting peppered with do-it-now requests for Dr. Sessions. That meant my team was context switching all over the place and other projects were being impacted.

Providing structure also makes users understand this is a finite resource and thus they are more appreciative of this dedicated time with my Tableau experts.

 

Level 3 – Let’s talk about Tableau, baby

Next level of support is for general chat. Could be a question about functionality, or a point about performance, or a geeky joke, or someone just wanting to ask a question about our upgrade strategy – could be anything really.

 

That’s where our Lync Group Chat comes in. We’ve generally got a couple of hundred users on the chat channel at any one time so it’s a decent forum for such questions and banter. It’s great for my support team to see a question get asked, and then before we have a chance to pick it up, another user has provided the answer – a self healing community – IT support nirvana!

screen-shot-2016-11-22-at-14-45-08

Wanna chat Tableau? Use our Group Chat

 

What’s in it for me?

These support options ensure that each query gets an appropriate response. If it has all hit the fan, then we act quickly. If it needs more care and detail, then we book that time, and if it just needs someone to talk to then we’ve got a community of people ready to give that data hug. It also means we get hardly any emails. And email is a dreadful means of logging an issue, as there’s no traceability or feedback. Users only get annoyed when they feel a query is being ignored, and ensuring the correct channel for a query means users get feedback as appropriate and aren’t left wondering where that email question went to.

Also my support team can plan their work and aren’t constantly context switching, one of the biggest enemies of productivity.

So that’s it. Pretty simple to implement but mightily effective. As always, ping me if you want a more detailed run-through.

Happy vizzing, Paul

Tableau on Tour Keynote Speakers – Some Suggestions

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Hi all, I love the Tableau Conference. But I also have a lot of fun at the smaller “Tableau On Tour” events. In particular I love the keynote speeches. We’ve had some crackers recently, with particular recent favourites being Tim … Continue reading →

Empowering Your Tableau Users With Makeovers & Proactive Support

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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 Screen Shot 2016-08-07 at 21.21.00getting 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”.

screen-shot-2016-11-17-at-21-17-13The 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

Building user engagement with Tableau Champions

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Hi all,

More on building an enterprise Tableau Centre of Excellence. That’s pretty much all I know about hence why I seem to be writing about it a lot…

This is a short post about an initiative that is proving to be pretty successful at my organisation, we call it Tableau Champions.

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We are the Champions!

We’ve based this loosely on Tableau’s own Zen Master initiative. For those that don’t know, Zen Master is effectively a title awarded to members of the community on a yearly basis. For more information see here – http://www.tableau.com/ZenMasters

 

What makes a Tableau Champion?

We award the Champions badge to users that demonstrate

  • Passion & enthusiasm for Tableau & data visualisation
  • Support of the Agile BI service at my organisation
  • Skils in Tableau & visual analytics
  • Willingness to share & assist other Tableau users
  • Involvement in the Agile BI community

Even amongst a huge user base like I have, it is easy to spot users that demonstrate these characteristics. They will become your trusted advisors, providing great feedback and helping you iron out the bumps in your service.

 

What’s in it for a Champion?

Here’s what my team does to help Champions

  • Build Tableau skills & contacts
  • Increase internal profile across the org & gain stature as a Tableau SME
  • Increase external profile
  • Exposure to extra product information & roadmaps
  • Contribution to the development of the Agile BI service
  • Great collaboration opportunities across the firm

 

 What’s in it for my service?

And in return Champions help us by

  • Makeovers & dissemination of Best Practices
  • Publicising events & webinars
  • Blogging on Agile BI community site
  • Host local user groups
  • Champions help local users evolve Tableau skills
  • Driving better understanding of visual analytics & Tableau

 

So it’s a mutually beneficial scheme, with Champions effectively acting as an extension on my own team. Win and indeed – win.

One thing I noticed was the way the Champions initiative immediately started to raise the bar in terms of user interaction with Tableau at my org. No sooner had I posted the first blog announcing our initial Champions, then I had multiple emails from other users saying “I want to be a Champion”, “What do I need to do to get this recognition?”. I could even tell that some users were a little miffed not to have been selected. I then saw these users upping their game, posting more, interacting more, trying to be noticed. We’ve seen this with the Zen Master scheme eliciting exactly this kind of response from the external community.

So there you have it. We love to empower our users. And we love to reward those users that have become hooked on Tableau like we have.

Cheers, Paul

How to Build a Tableau Support Team

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Hi

So you want more about how to build that awesome enterprise Tableau service? No? Oh. Well tough – I’m gonna crack some more knowledge eggs on yo ass. That’s what the kids say these days isn’t it?

This time, it’s a big one. How to build a team to support that Tableau environment. As with most of my posts there are many ways it can be done but I’m going to describe what I’ve got in place. And it’s working pretty well even if I say so myself. Ner ner…

This post is going to concentrate on people-related aspects of your support team, rather than technologies. There may be another post on the way about that depending on whether anyone bothers to read this one other than Mrs Ninja.

Before I kick off, I am aware that most of these IT service posts don’t have the sexy factor of all those other cool blogs about Level of Detail (LOD) calcs, viz design or those games that people keep creating in Tableau. BUT – if you want to get Tableau to take off in a massive Enterprise then these are the things you’ll need to consider. Get one of them badly wrong and your dream could become a nightmare. So I don’t care if you don’t think it’s glamorous.

 

Some assumptions

I’m gonna assume that you’ve already been through the aggro of fighting for precious headcount and that you have what you have. Hopefully that will be a good few people, more likely it will be n – 1 where n = the bare minimum needed… You’re just gonna have to accept that – you’ll never get enough bodies. If you work somewhere that gives you tons of people – give me a call…. (just kidding boss).

 

Where you gonna put them?

A few options here. We’ve located the whole Level 3 (see later for L1 / L2 / L3 roles) team in London. The main reason for that is that I’m here, so is my manager and the infrastructure is also in London. That gives us better oversight as we get this thing off the ground.

You may wish to consider splitting your team across regions if that is the company strategy. This can give advantages that you have close to 24 hour L3 coverage. It’s great if you get an towards the end of UK time, and are able to then hand off to your USA team, who then run with it and resolve while you’re enjoying forty winks.

In the future the demands of your service may determine where you locate additional people. Much of this may be down to your company strategy, where there may be a preference for lower-cost locations as opposed to paying the big bucks to people to come to London or New York etc.

But you should also be mindful of where your service usage is growing. Using our Custom Admin Views (post on it’s way about them) we can see exactly what regions our Server is being hit from and where our Desktop users are located. If you see adoption in a particular region going through the roof then maybe you should consider recruiting in that locale? We got a tremendous response from our Singapore user base  when we went live. They LOVE a bit of Tableau. But when they are online, we are asleep so they get delayed response to queries. I should probably put someone out there to give them better service.

It’s not all gravy though. Managing remote teams is difficult and takes a lot of organisation.

I’m sure you get the drift. You may not have much choice in location, but then again you might…

 

Support Levels

Typically large organisations will have a standard Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) model of support roles and responsibilities. To summarise.

  • Level 1 Support – Detects and registers incidents. Can apply basic remediation but more likely to escalate to Level 2. Level 1 also performs incident triage and communication to affected user base.
  • Level 2 Support – More skilled technicians with access to your production environment. Can often solve incidents and manage appropriate user communication. L2 also assist us with Tableau Server upgrades and failover tests etc.
  • Level 3 Support – That’s my immediate team. We have break-glass (non-standing) production access to assist if L2 can’t solve the problem.

More info on these roles and responsibilities here.

It’s really important to get this working well. An efficiently functioning L2 will come to be your team’s wingman, taking the pressure off your engineers. We’re lucky to have a good L1 & L2 setup, so only approx 10-20% of incidents ever filter all the way down to my L3 team to fix. L2 can usually deal with most.

Your L1 & L2 teams will tend to operate exactly by the book, so make sure they have appropriate process and documentation to allow them to succeed. They’ll also probably be supporting more applications than your precious Tableau Server so bear that in mind. Yes some people actually work on other applications not just Tableau – the fools.

 

What’s Your Service Model?

This is a topic that can make or break your service. As far as I’m concerned the only option for a big organisation, where you’ll never have enough people is to go Self-Service.

That means – my team doesn’t create visualisations for anyone. Users don’t submit tickets to us for us to create their vizzes. Why?

  • Context – Users know their data best. They know how it hangs together.
  • Volume – My team wouldn’t be able to handle the sheer volume of requests coming in and that would lead to a slow service.
  • Agility – So many tools at big organisations are mired in red tape, delays and bureaucracy. Not my Tableau service. We’ve cut through all of that crap to give users a tool that they can use as they wish, get results and get into production fast. What’s the point of giving someone an agile tool and then making life hard for them to get results?
  • UX –  I love it when a user thinks they are not technical enough to use Tableau. I tell them to go and try it and come back in a day if they are still stuck. I find they come back in a couple of weeks instead, having had a blast. If we just did the work for them, then they wouldn’t get that magical UX that we all love, and they’d think Tableau was just another tool. So I want them to do it themselves, and get that brilliant realisation that they’re using a fantastic application.

So we make sure users know this is a self-service model, and a true Data Visualisation Centre of Excellence. Check this post for how I constructed our CoE. I’ll be doing another post later on how this service model hangs together.

In summary, because we don’t create vizzes or datasources for users, we have time to concentrate on the extra value items that differentiate us from other IT services.

 

Your Team’s Roles

So what type of Tableau work will your team need to cover? We kinda bucket our tasks into the following groups

  • Engineering – Building, customising and integrating our beautiful Tableau Server with other systems. Upgrades, tuning & generally being nice to it.
  • Training – Delivering our World Famous training syllabus, Dr Sessions and all the other goodies detailed in this post.
  • Consultancy – Helping users with visual analytics, issues, performance, or anything else they want.

So you’ll have to decide if you want each person in your team to be able to cover the whole spectrum of tasks, or do you want to have specialists? I’m lucky enough to have a cracking team, where my girls and guys can swap between any of these buckets with relative ease. It’s still cool to dedicate one person to user work and the other to engineering for a time though, but be aware there may be an impact when one is on holiday.

We have chosen to keep the training programme operated by one person though, as this has allowed us to build up a more consistent programme that can be tweaked and refined.

So because we empower users to create their own content, we can dive head first into all this juicy work. It’s interesting for us, and users love it.

 

Adding The Gloss

Some other activities my team perform as part of our service. I class these as the glossy items as I don’t see any other IT services doing them. And the reaction we get from our users is phenomenal.

  • Makeovers – We pick a viz, download it, make it loads better, send it back to the user with some notes on what we did and what they can do to better understand why we did it. Always a winner. Who doesn’t like their work being made better for free? Needs sensitive communication though as we don’t want these to be seen as a criticism of someone’s work.
  • Competitions – We’ve got a weekly challenge competition going on and we periodically do other larger viz-offs. We get Tableau involved in the firmwide Hackathon events and offer swag or dedicated time from the team as prizes. We also encourage users to get involved with things like IronViz.
  • Interviews – Our series “Agile BI talks to…” is proving popular. Basically an internal version of the “2 minutes with…” interviews that we do on this blog. Users love a chance to sell themselves so we have a queue of people wanting to take part.
  • Champions – This is an internal version of the Tableau Zen Master programme. It is great for building engagement, encouraging competition and driving up standards across your user base. We currently have 2 Champions but I know there are several users who are desperate to be recognised as a Champion. This is a 2-way initiative, Champions sell and evangelise our service and in return we give them extra insight into the product, vendor etc.
  • Proactivity – Using our Custom Admin Views (wait for post on those please) – we can tell when users are having a bad experience with Tableau – usually down to slow performing visualisations. So rather than have them complain, or suffer in silence, we can reach out and say “We think you might have a problem, let’s fix it”. This usually blows them away. I’ve had comments back like “This is the first time I’ve EVER had an IT team come to me and tell me I may not be getting the most out of their tool – I usually have to complain first – it’s incredible!”.
  • Tableau Touchpoints – Again, using our Custom Admin Views – we can tell who is engaged with our service. And we can tell what rank they are, and where they work. So I spend a lot of time reaching out to these people (the more senior the better), and making sure they are fully aware of the services we offer. I’ve packaged it into a standard experience called Tableau Touchpoints. Told you I was into branding…
  • Polls – Simple. Think of a question, put it to a fun vote. We have one on the run at the moment called “What is your favourite chart type?”. Gets people talking and interacting. Sometimes it gets heated. But it always gets people clicking on your community page.

 

You’re Certifiable Quint!

quint

Quint was certifiable, just not in Tableau

Try and get your team certified. You want to be seen as the experts then you need to wear the badge. While certification certainly isn’t a substitute for on-the-job experience, it does give that air of confidence to your users. It’s also fun to do.

Senior management will also like to demonstrate to the business that your Tableau service is manned by highly skilled, vendor certified technicians. So more of a branding exercise but still very much worth doing…

For more info on Tableau Certification check this out.

 

Monitor Your User Base

One of the things that tends to happen with Tableau is that *some* of your users will totally fall for the tool. Just like I did and many of you out there. These are people you should be aware of as they are heading down that path to wanting to make Tableau their whole career.

Keep an eye on users that are spending lots of time with the tool, have seriously engaged with your mission or that have been demonstrating great expertise. They could be potentially interested in moving to work for your team. I get asked regularly by my user base if there are any jobs going in my team. That’s obviously cos I’m an amazing boss and we have it totally going on – who can blame them. It’s got nothing to do with Tableau…

But seriously, rather than going out to market and risking getting the wrong person in, the answer to your resource issues could be right under your nose.

 

Freedom of Expression

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Let your team express themselves (with data, not paint)

I think it’s really important to allow your staff to express themselves. Data visualisation is a creative art, and allowing your team a free mind is critical to their creativity, enjoyment and success.

I make sure my team know that I’m all for them blogging internally & externally, interacting on social media, building contacts and going out to our user base proactively to help. If they see a viz on our server that they think they can improve then they just go for it. If they want to dive more into a particular user’s requirements then just do it. Wanna write a blog – do it already!

This applies to contractors & consultant staff also. I want consultants to leave having developed into more able technicians from having worked with my service – I don’t regard them as hired gun resources to squeeze work from, they are valued contributors to our mission.  I find that consultancies really appreciate this approach and it has led to us building some great relationships with consultancies and individuals alike.

I’ve heard you even have to give your team days off. They’re called “holidays”. Yeah I know, it’s a legal thing apparently. Won’t catch on.

 

Freshen it Up

I actually operate a model where I swap out consultants every 6-8 months regardless of how well they are doing with us. I do this because it is useful to get a fresh perspective on our environment, with each new person bringing something different to the table. I also do this for the benefit of the consultant themselves. No-one wants to be stuck in a single role for 18 months, so I like consultants that work for me to work hard, learn lots, then take those skills away to their new roles. Again this is really appreciated by the management at consultancies as part of our strategic partnerships.

 

The Human League

human-league

We’re only human…

You know what users hate? They hate it when they have to submit a ticket or email to some faceless system, that gets picked up and processed by someone they’ve never met, in some region thousands of miles away. It feels, well, inhuman.

Not in my team. We’re all about being as human as possible. My team all have their individual profile pages on our community site. They have blogs. They have photos and backstories of their career and interests. They advertise their social media presence. They are contactable and approachable. People know who they are, what they look like and what makes them tick. When you deal with my team you are getting a proper service, from real people that you know care.

We get much better user engagement like this and as a result my team has gotten to know some users really well.

 

Change & Incident Management

Ah everyone’s favourite subject. So Tableau is great right, but it’s still only a piece of software. And as such you’re gonna get issues. So you need to handle them correctly.

Firstly, make sure you’re utilising Level 2 support for your changes and handling your incidents. This will take so much heat off your Level 3 team. L2 should be able to do all of your paperwork, manage the communications to your users, and even perform the majority of standard changes like upgrades and config changes.

We always make sure we over-communicate on changes and incidents. We involve power users and get them really ingrained into what we are doing and why we are doing it. Your power users will love to know why something broke, what Tableau are doing about it and when that fix will be implemented because they want to really understand the application. Often they come up with good suggestions as to what you can do to help prevent a recurrence. So get them involved.

I’m not going to go into too much detail on this, there’s a ton of ITIL related reading you can do. The message is – you can get a lot of positives from handling a negative situation well. Show empathy to your users for the impact they have experienced, show you care, don’t hide anything and be totally transparent.

 

A Big Thank-You!

To give great support you have to have great people. People that are skilled, passionate and dedicated. People that care about the service they provide and your mission. If you don’t have great people then don’t mess about – get someone else. You’ll be the one judged by users and management, so there’s no room for sentiment.

I’m lucky. I’ve had really great people. So a big thanks to Jake, Carl, Andy, Emma, Jonathan & Dave for helping to build and run our service!

OK that’s it for this one. There may well be an update to this post as it’s such a huge subject that I’m sure I’ve missed some things.

Now if you’ll excuse me my team seems to have gone to the pub… Err guys? GUYS???