Governance / Documentation Considerations

jes115

We are working on building out our documentation and wondering what you recommend having in place. What do you require of workflows before they can be shared on the Server (any specific sanitizing procedures? posting requirements? peer review?) What types of Collections or Districts do you recommend to keep things organized? Anything else you didn't think of right away that needed to be outlined and shared with your team?

Thanks!

Harbinger

Because Alteryx is a self service tool, I like to keep the path to production relatively low-drag. That said, a poorly engineered workflow can cause issues so there are some things that I like to check. Also, for business critical workflows, I will have the equivalent of a code review and testing. 

Input/output errors are pretty common. To prevent these, I always suggest clients use Gallery Connections for databases-- these have oodles of other benefits beyond execution durability. For file inputs, make sure that the workflow is pointed to fully qualified network path that the server run as account has access to.

If the workflow references custom macros, they will need to be in a repository the server and the client has access to (see Creating Network Drive in this community article. 

I like to use a documentation template and containers to make sure the workflow is standardized. This is something that I don't force-- instead have some fun and have a competition to see what groups can have the most documented workflows and then give them company swag and cred if they win. 

As far as organization goes, districts will organize your publicly available workflows collections will be used to share non-public workflows.

For districts, I will typically just have one per department. sometimes, when there are nuances in a department, I may have more than one. For instance I may have Marketing-Experiential and Marketing-Social Media districts. 

regarding collections, one per department has worked well here too. This will also work for cross departmental collaboration. For instance, Data Governance + Human Resources collection for workflows they need for collaboration.  

Also, less organization for the end user and more for admins: USE GROUPS. this will make your life much easier! 

Those are my initial thoughts!