Alter Everything Podcast

AlteryxMatt

In this episode of Alter Everything, host Megan Bowers speaks with Emil Kos and Bart Smuga, co-founders of Data Pal, about the importance of building centers of enablement for Alteryx users. They discuss the differences between centers of enablement and centers of excellence, addressing challenges in Alteryx adoption, the significance of onboarding new users and fostering internal communities. They also share strategies for tracking the value of Alteryx projects and offer advice on creating successful user enablement initiatives, including the role of leadership support, promoting successes, and the use of dashboards.

Panelists

Emil Kos, Co-Founder of Data Pal – Emil_Kos, LinkedIn
Bart Smuga, Co-Founder of Data Pal – smugabart, LinkedIn
Megan Bowers, Sr. Content Manager @ Alteryx - @MeganBowers, LinkedIn

Topics

Ep 173 (YT thumb).png

Transcript

Episode Transcription

Ep 173 Building Internal Communities & Driving Alteryx Adoption

[00:00:00] Megan Bowers: Welcome to Alter Everything, a podcast about data science and analytics s culture. I'm Megan Bowers, and today I am talking with Emil Kos and Bart Smuga co-founders of Data Pal. In this episode, we chat about building centers of enablement, overcoming challenges with Alteryx adoption, fostering internal communities, and tracking the value of Alteryx projects.

Let's get started.

Bart. Emil, it's great to have you on our podcast today. Could you each give a quick introduction to yourselves for our listeners? We'll start with Bart.

[00:00:37] Bart Smuga: Sure. Thanks Megan. I'm Bart, and some of you may know me from LinkedIn. I'm a huge fan of Alteryx as a result of our passion. Together with Emil, we co-Founder Data Pal, a consulting company, which is specialized in Alteryx enablement.

We do everything to make sure that Alteryx users are working fully with Alteryx in the end.

[00:00:59] Emil Kos: Hello everyone. My name is Emil and I'm a co-founder of The Data Pal. And I'm here because I'm a huge Alteryx fan. I'm here because I'm huge fan of internal Alteryx communities. Basically together with part we have one which is quite popular, and you are free to jump in because this is fully remote.

So even if you are not available on site, you can always join us.

[00:01:26] Megan Bowers: Awesome. Well, I'm really excited to talk to you guys today. I know that you spoke on this topic in an Alteryx tech talk in November, and I'm looking forward to hearing your expertise. So today we'll be talking about centers of enablement, and I'm curious, how do you define a center of enablement and how is it maybe different than a center of excellence?

We'll start with Emil for this one.

[00:01:51] Emil Kos: Sure. So the Center of Excellence is a place that is more focused on standards and best practices, proper governance, proper quality control, and reusable assets all in one place to ensure that everything runs smoothly and to ensure that not everyone have access to the things that they shouldn't see.

This is the Center of Excellence, and the center of enablement is more about the people. We want to allow them to achieve more with the Alteryx. We want to help them grow. We want to help and celebrate their successes because Alteryx is an investment and the center of enablement is there to help to secure the investment.

[00:02:40] Bart Smuga: And it's worth to mention that when there is a term of COE. People always think about center of excellence, but from our perspective, we see that. Both. Center of Enablement and center of excellence are very crucial when it comes to successful Alteryx implementation.

[00:02:59] Megan Bowers: That makes sense. So center of excellence is almost like the excellent technology, the processes, the governance, and then enablement is actually getting into enabling users, empowering people, a little more focus on the people as opposed to the process.

It sounds like.

[00:03:17] Bart Smuga: That's correct.

[00:03:18] Megan Bowers: So then why is Alteryx enablement needed? In your experience, what pain points have you guys seen?

[00:03:26] Bart Smuga: First of all, we have seen that the onboarding aspect of Alteryx users is not in place. In MA many cases. We have seen that a lot of organizations are committed to buy Alteryx.

Then Alteryx users are starting using Alteryx. But they don't have anyone who give like additional hand of help, who will help with the onboarding itself. Let's imagine that this is the first day in your new position. You just applied for a new role, for a new job, and you are starting your new position in a new company.

The most important aspect from your perspective probably will be about the onboarding, like you are looking forward to better understand how the processes works, how the systems are in place, how. To use certain things and the same can apply for Alteryx. So when someone is starting with Alteryx, the onboarding aspect is essential to make sure that they will use the full potential of the software going forward.

So. That's the first pain point I would say that we very often see in many cases. The second one would be about the center of enablement, so the places where people can network, inspire each other, maybe they could, a place that they could be recognized for successes, for achievements, for the automations.

We see that a lot of organizations have. An internal community in place, and that could be a great option to enable people. Although the community managers who are responsible for the internal community are not fully dedicated to drive the internal communities, and we all know how it can happen, like how it can end in the end.

Basically, if an internal committee is as. Side job, but it's not a, your 100% commitment, your responsibility, and you have other tasks on your list, on your daily basis that are more important. You don't use that much time and you don't invest that much time because this is a side hustle job. I would say in the end.

[00:05:48] Emil Kos: I fully agree with bar. If so many starting more advanced user can solve a problem in matter of couple of minutes and the beginner would spend hours or even days to solve a, a bigger challenge, let's call it like that. And I was in the same situation like four years ago. I went to athletics community.

Ask one question and one of the Alteryx ACEs supported me and provided me with a really good guidance how I could solve that problem. So a community is also a great place because we can internally ask about our problems and we can identify champions inside of the organization that could actually help us on the Alteryx journey.

This is a big win for everyone because the new person don't spend a lot of time as expert is helping someone. So he's feeling good and this is a win-win for both sides and for the organization as well.

[00:06:45] Bart Smuga: Yeah, I totally agree. And there are certain people that are called us go-to person and that go-to person is someone probably that is really experienced when it comes to Alteryx in your internal en environment.

And from our perspective, it is always related that this person is really occupied with many different tasks and questions from thousands or hundreds Alteryx users from the company. So if I could recommend something, and I do that, often when it comes to bigger environments, think about changing the responsibility of.

Your Alteryx experts in your internal environment to ensure that they have the capacity to answer questions of others. That they have the capacity to basically enable people because there is only 160 hours in the month that they can spend working, and they may be 200 hours of questions that they need to respond.

So let's think about that.

[00:07:52] Megan Bowers: Definitely. You guys both brought up some great points about some of the challenges and the pain points when it comes to enabling Alteryx. So what has been your solution at Data Pal and just individually for driving user enablement? How do we bridge this gap?

[00:08:11] Emil Kos: I really like that question.

Um, what I can say is that we cannot expect that the community will be successful on its own. It isn't like this, that we'll create an internal place where everyone can share ideas and it'll magically be. A really popular place among our colleagues. We need to spend some time on sharing some interesting materials.

We need to maybe organize some user group events so people will network. We talk with each other. They will at least recognize who is sitting in the organization. So at the beginning, this requires a lot of time to actually, like I have mentioned, share relevant resources, maybe share some kind of information about potential learning materials, or we should promote certifications.

If someone had a really good use case, we should invite that person. We should make them a speaker on the user group. We should recognize that because without that, people will not feel that they are part of something bigger. And that hard work at the beginning, this will not work.

[00:09:20] Bart Smuga: I think that tracking and measuring the use cases that you have is really important.

Like let's step back and think about why companies are buying Alteryx. First of all, it's all about the return on the investment and when we ask ourselves how we can get this return on the investment, this is all about the use cases. So based on our experience. It is really crucial during the center of a name thing to start working on gathering the use cases and the successes on our side.

We very often use very simple solutions, like even an Excel spreadsheet for instance. If there is a team that has several of processes, there may be 10 different candidates for the automations. If we don't have this information gather in one place, we are not able to understand on which process we should work with Alteryx in the end.

Then when we have the candidates, we can select the low hanging fruit like we can see. Which process seems to be the easiest to implement through Alteryx and will provide you the most results, like it'll be the most beneficial in the end. And when it comes to our practice, we very often organize a use case training for our clients, a data bot.

The formal is really simple. I'll, I will discover our secret here a little. So you need to select this use case, which I referred to before. You need to find an Alteryx trainer within your organization. Think about the users that are advanced and are already experienced, and then. Select a team that is related to the use case that you would like to work on.

You'll have a few people that could attend a training together with this Alteryx trainer. The trainer could provide some fun dimensional knowledge about Alteryx core concepts, for instance, and on the second day, the Alteryx trainer could take the use case, which we selected at the very beginning. And together with training attendees, Alteryx trainer could automate the process to teach people Alteryx, to enable people how to solve problems on the real life data.

So there are two benefits out of that. New users would be enabled to start working with Alteryx to automate processes on day off, probably after the training itself. And the second benefit out of this would be that you have a real value, business value, a real automation in place after their training like this.

This is not the regular training that are conducted in the organizations nowadays. It's all about automating a real life process. So after the training, you have a real value. After all

[00:12:15] Emil Kos: I, I would like to jump in and add something about the Alteryx champions that bar referred to. Very often people are working remotely and it's really easy to ping someone on tips asking them a question.

Those Alteryx temples are very busy. Usual. If someone approach them and say, couldn't you be so kind and trail? Our Alteryx users, they will say, of course I will do that, but. They are super busy and they are very unhappy people and we don't want that to happen because they are our champions. We want them to stick in our organization for as long as possible because they are champions, not only because they are good in anarchy, but probably they like the place where they are working and they like people.

So it's really worth to invest in those people and also. Be sure that they aren't over busy. They can be over busy for, I don't know, month or two, but not for a year or two because that will not work and ly driving the engagement. I would like to add one additional thing because Bart mentioned not every organization.

Are tracking successes. Not every organization are using like a simple tool, like a single spreadsheet to check the opportunities to check how valuable the for the organization is, the Alteryx, how many use cases we have completed, how much time we saved, or maybe how many dollars we earned thanks to the, and if we have a tool like that, we can go, for example, let's focus on tax teams.

Very often tax teams in different areas, in different countries, they have similar problems. If I performed, let's say, a country reconciliation exercise in one country. I promote it on user group, and I will say that we'll have this use case a lot of people might join and benefit, and they also can scale that success on different countries.

So this is an added benefit to the Alteryx cell because Alteryx is a scaleable solution, which is you can reuse a lot of Stalin you already built, but you can get an inspiration from other use cases. And you can build a similar success in your area. And this also drives a lot of attention. And we see that a lot of people are hyped because of successes of other people.

[00:14:42] Bart Smuga: And I think this is about like that you shouldn't reinvent the will. And there are similar processes which could be scaled. Across different teams. If one team in Germany automate some work, there is a chance that it could be done the same or really similar in another country.

[00:15:03] Megan Bowers: Yeah. Thanks for all that.

That was some really good advice for building out these solutions for user enablement. I was taking some notes and there's a few things I wanted to mention too. When you were talking about tracking use cases, I thought about my previous role as an Alteryx user at Stanley Black and Decker. We just had a SharePoint list that was really nice, kind of a nice format, and you could do dropdown selections of the type of use case, the type of solution, whether it was involved in the implementation, the time saved or the money saved, and that was definitely really crucial, I think, to understanding all the other Alteryx.

Workflows and projects that were going on, and like you said, sharing that and almost advertising what we're doing with it. We ended up getting connected with HR to automate some of their Excel work. And like it span it out to working with other teams at the company because we were like promoting in a way on our internal channels what we're doing with Alteryx and like the time that it's saving.

So I think that's a great tip. I do also wanna call out, we have a new feature on mission control where you can log your use cases there. So that's another avenue where people could keep track of use cases and your Alteryx account team can see it as well, and it can just increase that collaboration. So I'll put a link in the resources or in the show notes for this episode to call that out.

But yeah, I'd love to chat next about what are some of the resources that you all see are most important for enablement? One that comes to mind for me is like our onboarding lessons, which are under launchpad. I think those could be a great resource for people at smaller companies that may not be able to build out as big of a training effort, things like that.

We'll link those in the show notes too, but what are some resources that you all have found helpful?

[00:16:57] Emil Kos: That's very good question. It depends at what stage we are in the community life, let's say in the community cycle. Because if we are at the beginning, the most important resource is time. Like someone need to set it up, someone needs to write some post, someone need to organize some kind of event.

More advanced, it becomes, we can have internal materials, which are guides. How to, for example, connect to SharePoint or share drive, because those things are always problematic, especially for the new users. How to connect or maybe how to send emails via Alteryx. What are the SMTP authentication password and stuff like that.

Moreover. I think if we have a big community and we have like an internal trainer or external trainers, probably we have some recordings that we could include in our learning materials. So it's more about getting all the things into the same place so everyone will be able to find them quickly and be champions.

Yeah, that will be a really good one. Like it's not in every organization, you have Alteryx champions straight away. This is something that you maybe need to recruit. This is something that you can also work on internally, because if you will identify people that are really passionate about the tool, even if they are just starting with the arteries.

But you see that they think it's a great way for them to automate things, to bring value to the organization. We should promote these people, not only because we want them to share more and more successes, for example, but. If we'll promote them, there is a big chance the team will be encouraged to share the knowledge with other people.

And champions are really crucial. Bigger the community, more champions it should have, but it's not so easy and it takes time. It's not one night success, let's call it like that.

[00:18:53] Bart Smuga: There should be a question, how do you get the right people involved? This is all about the combination of soft and technical skills, so don't only search for very 100% technical guys.

Think about as well as soft skills, which are really crucial to manage the community itself to ensure that you'll engage and inspire others. To do more with Alteryx, to automate more with Alteryx in the end. And when it comes to the rest people in the community, in the center of a name, you can invite all like it.

It doesn't matter whether someone is not really familiar with Alteryx. You can invite your colleague to the user group just to present the potential of the tool itself.

[00:19:43] Emil Kos: Maybe I will add one more thing 'cause we are talking about the champions a lot and we also mentioned a second ago, like learning materials.

I'm not sure if this is a resource, but internal trainings sessions and q and a sessions, things that allows people to upskill, things that allow people to remove blockers that they encounter along the way. This is also very valuable. Like there are a couple of different things that we can have in the community and also depending on how many users we got that are pretty new to the tool and how many users we have that are more advanced.

Probably we should tailor the community based on our audience. But it's also really important to organize some kind of internal sessions to upskill people because not everyone have time or commitment to do a learning path. For example, not everyone is interested in self-learning. Some people prefer to have like a live trainer that will ask questions.

So this is also a thing that is definitely worth including.

[00:20:49] Megan Bowers: We've had guests on the show in the past, talk about having a weekly office hour. I think that could be another example of what you're talking about. Just like providing other formats to learn, not just self-guided, but having different forums, different trainings, maybe office hours where people can come with their blocker and Alteryx and troubleshoot together, or brainstorm together on ways to solve problems.

I think that can be super powerful too.

[00:21:16] Emil Kos: Totally agree on that.

[00:21:18] Megan Bowers: Awesome. So I think a great place to end would be if there's people out there listening to this episode thinking, wow, I wanna get a center of enablement started at my company. We have a lot of Alteryx users. What's a good first step to get started for those people?

[00:21:37] Bart Smuga: It is really simple to answer. Think long term, like set some specific goals, why you would like to have the center of excellence or enablement and achieve that step by step. Like set some milestones, for instance, quarterly milestones, what you would like to have. Secondly, start as fast as possible, so if you have even five licenses, it will be war to start some initiative.

It wouldn't cost you that much effort, I believe, as if you would have 100 licenses, but the faster you will start, the people will be more comfortable with the format and it'll be better in the end. The third advice from my side would be that you need to have some engagement from leadership, from senior stakeholders.

Um, this is very essential for getting resources to help with the training itself or to have some kind of support to drop the capacity of the people that are champions. As we mentioned before, champions and Alteryx Ambassador, others people who are really experienced and are really fine with the tool itself are often a go-to person and they don't have a lot of time to manage the committee itself.

So if you have good engagement of leadership early, it'll be easier to make sure that they will have time to work on the committee itself. So those are simple steps, how you can do that. It's all about executing the plan and having the resources

[00:23:18] Emil Kos: As a first step. I would spoke with a boss, with my boss, then with his boss, like I would like to find people that would be my supporters, because this is not one person initiative like you need to make other people interested in this project because usually initiatives like that starts as a side hustle.

Sooner or later, usually they die. Because if you are having a side hustle, it's really hard to find time. But if you have a support from your boss and from his boss, they will find you. Maybe they will take some kind of some small amount of your responsibilities, so you will actually have time, and this will be like in scope of your position because that's totally different story if you have.

Plenty of things on your plate. First thing that usually people would drop is the community, and that's a challenge that we see very often and we think that one of the main reason is that they don't have a support from the top. Like if they would start another way, they should start with getting the support and then they will build their community and not, they are starting their community and then they try to find support.

It's totally different story, in my opinion. It makes this much more successful and tracking the initiatives, tracking the opportunities. Tracking the successes. Actually the successes probably for the beginning might be the most important part to make other people exciting. If we will share the successes and we'll say to head of certain department that there is a value.

Alteryx is bringing return on investment very quickly. We can see that we can solve problems without getting the support from the it. Like depending on the situation, depending on the company, the successes might be different, but we need to talk about the successes. 'cause one thing that I learned while working for the corporation is that you need to promote successes because a lot of Alteryx users aren't really good in talking about their successes.

So the community is also a great place to help them because the community leader can make them put them on stage so they have opportunity to show how great they are. So maybe they will be rewarded later in the future by the organization thinking about how beneficial it is for the organization and promoting not only successes of the other people, but successes of the community can make a big difference in the long run.

[00:26:02] Bart Smuga: There is a fancy word for that. I would say value capturing can describe all the things that we just said. It's all about to capture the value of Alteryx, to ensure the return on the investment, and that's how you can get stakeholders, senior stakeholders engaged, and they will be helpful for you on this journey.

In the end. One more comment from my side. When you have. All the things that I mentioned before, and Amy mentioned as well, you can create a dashboard. For instance, we have seen a lot of situations when companies have a dashboard initiative dashboard or maybe Alteryx manager dashboard. And in this dashboard can be a lot of information regarding Alteryx.

For instance, we can store the information about the successes, we can store the information about the opportunities that. Are in front of us where we could automate something and where there is needed some SU support to work on, you can store there. The information about Alteryx license usage. So you can see how Alteryx is used within your organization to ensure that you're reducing the risk of not use licenses.

[00:27:20] Megan Bowers: I love that tip about the dashboard. I think that would be super cool to see and super valuable for people at the organization. But yeah, thank you both so much for joining today. You have both mentioned a ton of resources for enabling Alteryx users and for building up communities at companies, and so definitely listeners check out our show notes on this one.

We will link all kinds of resources for. Getting started and yeah, I just really appreciate you both coming on and sharing your expertise.

[00:27:49] Bart Smuga: Thank you, Megan. It was a pleasure.

[00:27:50] Emil Kos: Thank you, Megan. Thank you for having us. It's was a pleasure to be here and see you next time.

[00:27:57] Megan Bowers: Thanks for listening. To Access our onboarding resources, view Data Pal's, use Case Tracker and more, head over to our show notes on alteryx.com/podcast. See you next time.

Ep 173 Building Internal Communities & Driving Alteryx Adoption [00:00:00] Megan Bowers: Welcome to Alter Everything, a podcast about data science and analytics s culture. I'm Megan Bowers, and today I am talking with Emil Kos and Bart Smuga co-founders of Data Pal. In this episode, we chat about building centers of enablement, overcoming challenges with Alteryx adoption, fostering internal communities, and tracking the value of Alteryx projects. Let's get started. Bart. Emil, it's great to have you on our podcast today. Could you each give a quick introduction to yourselves for our listeners? We'll start with Bart. [00:00:37] Bart Smuga: Sure. Thanks Megan. I'm Bart, and some of you may know me from LinkedIn. I'm a huge fan of Alteryx as a result of our passion. Together with Emil, we co-Founder Data Pal, a consulting company, which is specialized in Alteryx enablement. We do everything to make sure that Alteryx users are working fully with Alteryx in the end. [00:00:59] Emil Kos: Hello everyone. My name is Emil and I'm a co-founder of The Data Pal. And I'm here because I'm a huge Alteryx fan. I'm here because I'm huge fan of internal Alteryx communities. Basically together with part we have one which is quite popular, and you are free to jump in because this is fully remote. So even if you are not available on site, you can always join us. [00:01:26] Megan Bowers: Awesome. Well, I'm really excited to talk to you guys today. I know that you spoke on this topic in an Alteryx tech talk in November, and I'm looking forward to hearing your expertise. So today we'll be talking about centers of enablement, and I'm curious, how do you define a center of enablement and how is it maybe different than a center of excellence? We'll start with Emil for this one. [00:01:51] Emil Kos: Sure. So the Center of Excellence is a place that is more focused on standards and best practices, proper governance, proper quality control, and reusable assets all in one place to ensure that everything runs smoothly and to ensure that not everyone have access to the things that they shouldn't see. This is the Center of Excellence, and the center of enablement is more about the people. We want to allow them to achieve more with the Alteryx. We want to help them grow. We want to help and celebrate their successes because Alteryx is an investment and the center of enablement is there to help to secure the investment. [00:02:40] Bart Smuga: And it's worth to mention that when there is a term of COE. People always think about center of excellence, but from our perspective, we see that. Both. Center of Enablement and center of excellence are very crucial when it comes to successful Alteryx implementation. [00:02:59] Megan Bowers: That makes sense. So center of excellence is almost like the excellent technology, the processes, the governance, and then enablement is actually getting into enabling users, empowering people, a little more focus on the people as opposed to the process. It sounds like. [00:03:17] Bart Smuga: That's correct. [00:03:18] Megan Bowers: So then why is Alteryx enablement needed? In your experience, what pain points have you guys seen? [00:03:26] Bart Smuga: First of all, we have seen that the onboarding aspect of Alteryx users is not in place. In MA many cases. We have seen that a lot of organizations are committed to buy Alteryx. Then Alteryx users are starting using Alteryx. But they don't have anyone who give like additional hand of help, who will help with the onboarding itself. Let's imagine that this is the first day in your new position. You just applied for a new role, for a new job, and you are starting your new position in a new company. The most important aspect from your perspective probably will be about the onboarding, like you are looking forward to better understand how the processes works, how the systems are in place, how. To use certain things and the same can apply for Alteryx. So when someone is starting with Alteryx, the onboarding aspect is essential to make sure that they will use the full potential of the software going forward. So. That's the first pain point I would say that we very often see in many cases. The second one would be about the center of enablement, so the places where people can network, inspire each other, maybe they could, a place that they could be recognized for successes, for achievements, for the automations. We see that a lot of organizations have. An internal community in place, and that could be a great option to enable people. Although the community managers who are responsible for the internal community are not fully dedicated to drive the internal communities, and we all know how it can happen, like how it can end in the end. Basically, if an internal committee is as. Side job, but it's not a, your 100% commitment, your responsibility, and you have other tasks on your list, on your daily basis that are more important. You don't use that much time and you don't invest that much time because this is a side hustle job. I would say in the end. [00:05:48] Emil Kos: I fully agree with bar. If so many starting more advanced user can solve a problem in matter of couple of minutes and the beginner would spend hours or even days to solve a, a bigger challenge, let's call it like that. And I was in the same situation like four years ago. I went to athletics community. Ask one question and one of the Alteryx ACEs supported me and provided me with a really good guidance how I could solve that problem. So a community is also a great place because we can internally ask about our problems and we can identify champions inside of the organization that could actually help us on the Alteryx journey. This is a big win for everyone because the new person don't spend a lot of time as expert is helping someone. So he's feeling good and this is a win-win for both sides and for the organization as well. [00:06:45] Bart Smuga: Yeah, I totally agree. And there are certain people that are called us go-to person and that go-to person is someone probably that is really experienced when it comes to Alteryx in your internal en environment. And from our perspective, it is always related that this person is really occupied with many different tasks and questions from thousands or hundreds Alteryx users from the company. So if I could recommend something, and I do that, often when it comes to bigger environments, think about changing the responsibility of. Your Alteryx experts in your internal environment to ensure that they have the capacity to answer questions of others. That they have the capacity to basically enable people because there is only 160 hours in the month that they can spend working, and they may be 200 hours of questions that they need to respond. So let's think about that. [00:07:52] Megan Bowers: Definitely. You guys both brought up some great points about some of the challenges and the pain points when it comes to enabling Alteryx. So what has been your solution at Data Pal and just individually for driving user enablement? How do we bridge this gap? [00:08:11] Emil Kos: I really like that question. Um, what I can say is that we cannot expect that the community will be successful on its own. It isn't like this, that we'll create an internal place where everyone can share ideas and it'll magically be. A really popular place among our colleagues. We need to spend some time on sharing some interesting materials. We need to maybe organize some user group events so people will network. We talk with each other. They will at least recognize who is sitting in the organization. So at the beginning, this requires a lot of time to actually, like I have mentioned, share relevant resources, maybe share some kind of information about potential learning materials, or we should promote certifications. If someone had a really good use case, we should invite that person. We should make them a speaker on the user group. We should recognize that because without that, people will not feel that they are part of something bigger. And that hard work at the beginning, this will not work. [00:09:20] Bart Smuga: I think that tracking and measuring the use cases that you have is really important. Like let's step back and think about why companies are buying Alteryx. First of all, it's all about the return on the investment and when we ask ourselves how we can get this return on the investment, this is all about the use cases. So based on our experience. It is really crucial during the center of a name thing to start working on gathering the use cases and the successes on our side. We very often use very simple solutions, like even an Excel spreadsheet for instance. If there is a team that has several of processes, there may be 10 different candidates for the automations. If we don't have this information gather in one place, we are not able to understand on which process we should work with Alteryx in the end. Then when we have the candidates, we can select the low hanging fruit like we can see. Which process seems to be the easiest to implement through Alteryx and will provide you the most results, like it'll be the most beneficial in the end. And when it comes to our practice, we very often organize a use case training for our clients, a data bot. The formal is really simple. I'll, I will discover our secret here a little. So you need to select this use case, which I referred to before. You need to find an Alteryx trainer within your organization. Think about the users that are advanced and are already experienced, and then. Select a team that is related to the use case that you would like to work on. You'll have a few people that could attend a training together with this Alteryx trainer. The trainer could provide some fun dimensional knowledge about Alteryx core concepts, for instance, and on the second day, the Alteryx trainer could take the use case, which we selected at the very beginning. And together with training attendees, Alteryx trainer could automate the process to teach people Alteryx, to enable people how to solve problems on the real life data. So there are two benefits out of that. New users would be enabled to start working with Alteryx to automate processes on day off, probably after the training itself. And the second benefit out of this would be that you have a real value, business value, a real automation in place after their training like this. This is not the regular training that are conducted in the organizations nowadays. It's all about automating a real life process. So after the training, you have a real value. After all [00:12:15] Emil Kos: I, I would like to jump in and add something about the Alteryx champions that bar referred to. Very often people are working remotely and it's really easy to ping someone on tips asking them a question. Those Alteryx temples are very busy. Usual. If someone approach them and say, couldn't you be so kind and trail? Our Alteryx users, they will say, of course I will do that, but. They are super busy and they are very unhappy people and we don't want that to happen because they are our champions. We want them to stick in our organization for as long as possible because they are champions, not only because they are good in anarchy, but probably they like the place where they are working and they like people. So it's really worth to invest in those people and also. Be sure that they aren't over busy. They can be over busy for, I don't know, month or two, but not for a year or two because that will not work and ly driving the engagement. I would like to add one additional thing because Bart mentioned not every organization. Are tracking successes. Not every organization are using like a simple tool, like a single spreadsheet to check the opportunities to check how valuable the for the organization is, the Alteryx, how many use cases we have completed, how much time we saved, or maybe how many dollars we earned thanks to the, and if we have a tool like that, we can go, for example, let's focus on tax teams. Very often tax teams in different areas, in different countries, they have similar problems. If I performed, let's say, a country reconciliation exercise in one country. I promote it on user group, and I will say that we'll have this use case a lot of people might join and benefit, and they also can scale that success on different countries. So this is an added benefit to the Alteryx cell because Alteryx is a scaleable solution, which is you can reuse a lot of Stalin you already built, but you can get an inspiration from other use cases. And you can build a similar success in your area. And this also drives a lot of attention. And we see that a lot of people are hyped because of successes of other people. [00:14:42] Bart Smuga: And I think this is about like that you shouldn't reinvent the will. And there are similar processes which could be scaled. Across different teams. If one team in Germany automate some work, there is a chance that it could be done the same or really similar in another country. [00:15:03] Megan Bowers: Yeah. Thanks for all that. That was some really good advice for building out these solutions for user enablement. I was taking some notes and there's a few things I wanted to mention too. When you were talking about tracking use cases, I thought about my previous role as an Alteryx user at Stanley Black and Decker. We just had a SharePoint list that was really nice, kind of a nice format, and you could do dropdown selections of the type of use case, the type of solution, whether it was involved in the implementation, the time saved or the money saved, and that was definitely really crucial, I think, to understanding all the other Alteryx. Workflows and projects that were going on, and like you said, sharing that and almost advertising what we're doing with it. We ended up getting connected with HR to automate some of their Excel work. And like it span it out to working with other teams at the company because we were like promoting in a way on our internal channels what we're doing with Alteryx and like the time that it's saving. So I think that's a great tip. I do also wanna call out, we have a new feature on mission control where you can log your use cases there. So that's another avenue where people could keep track of use cases and your Alteryx account team can see it as well, and it can just increase that collaboration. So I'll put a link in the resources or in the show notes for this episode to call that out. But yeah, I'd love to chat next about what are some of the resources that you all see are most important for enablement? One that comes to mind for me is like our onboarding lessons, which are under launchpad. I think those could be a great resource for people at smaller companies that may not be able to build out as big of a training effort, things like that. We'll link those in the show notes too, but what are some resources that you all have found helpful? [00:16:57] Emil Kos: That's very good question. It depends at what stage we are in the community life, let's say in the community cycle. Because if we are at the beginning, the most important resource is time. Like someone need to set it up, someone needs to write some post, someone need to organize some kind of event. More advanced, it becomes, we can have internal materials, which are guides. How to, for example, connect to SharePoint or share drive, because those things are always problematic, especially for the new users. How to connect or maybe how to send emails via Alteryx. What are the SMTP authentication password and stuff like that. Moreover. I think if we have a big community and we have like an internal trainer or external trainers, probably we have some recordings that we could include in our learning materials. So it's more about getting all the things into the same place so everyone will be able to find them quickly and be champions. Yeah, that will be a really good one. Like it's not in every organization, you have Alteryx champions straight away. This is something that you maybe need to recruit. This is something that you can also work on internally, because if you will identify people that are really passionate about the tool, even if they are just starting with the arteries. But you see that they think it's a great way for them to automate things, to bring value to the organization. We should promote these people, not only because we want them to share more and more successes, for example, but. If we'll promote them, there is a big chance the team will be encouraged to share the knowledge with other people. And champions are really crucial. Bigger the community, more champions it should have, but it's not so easy and it takes time. It's not one night success, let's call it like that. [00:18:53] Bart Smuga: There should be a question, how do you get the right people involved? This is all about the combination of soft and technical skills, so don't only search for very 100% technical guys. Think about as well as soft skills, which are really crucial to manage the community itself to ensure that you'll engage and inspire others. To do more with Alteryx, to automate more with Alteryx in the end. And when it comes to the rest people in the community, in the center of a name, you can invite all like it. It doesn't matter whether someone is not really familiar with Alteryx. You can invite your colleague to the user group just to present the potential of the tool itself. [00:19:43] Emil Kos: Maybe I will add one more thing 'cause we are talking about the champions a lot and we also mentioned a second ago, like learning materials. I'm not sure if this is a resource, but internal trainings sessions and q and a sessions, things that allows people to upskill, things that allow people to remove blockers that they encounter along the way. This is also very valuable. Like there are a couple of different things that we can have in the community and also depending on how many users we got that are pretty new to the tool and how many users we have that are more advanced. Probably we should tailor the community based on our audience. But it's also really important to organize some kind of internal sessions to upskill people because not everyone have time or commitment to do a learning path. For example, not everyone is interested in self-learning. Some people prefer to have like a live trainer that will ask questions. So this is also a thing that is definitely worth including. [00:20:49] Megan Bowers: We've had guests on the show in the past, talk about having a weekly office hour. I think that could be another example of what you're talking about. Just like providing other formats to learn, not just self-guided, but having different forums, different trainings, maybe office hours where people can come with their blocker and Alteryx and troubleshoot together, or brainstorm together on ways to solve problems. I think that can be super powerful too. [00:21:16] Emil Kos: Totally agree on that. [00:21:18] Megan Bowers: Awesome. So I think a great place to end would be if there's people out there listening to this episode thinking, wow, I wanna get a center of enablement started at my company. We have a lot of Alteryx users. What's a good first step to get started for those people? [00:21:37] Bart Smuga: It is really simple to answer. Think long term, like set some specific goals, why you would like to have the center of excellence or enablement and achieve that step by step. Like set some milestones, for instance, quarterly milestones, what you would like to have. Secondly, start as fast as possible, so if you have even five licenses, it will be war to start some initiative. It wouldn't cost you that much effort, I believe, as if you would have 100 licenses, but the faster you will start, the people will be more comfortable with the format and it'll be better in the end. The third advice from my side would be that you need to have some engagement from leadership, from senior stakeholders. Um, this is very essential for getting resources to help with the training itself or to have some kind of support to drop the capacity of the people that are champions. As we mentioned before, champions and Alteryx Ambassador, others people who are really experienced and are really fine with the tool itself are often a go-to person and they don't have a lot of time to manage the committee itself. So if you have good engagement of leadership early, it'll be easier to make sure that they will have time to work on the committee itself. So those are simple steps, how you can do that. It's all about executing the plan and having the resources [00:23:18] Emil Kos: As a first step. I would spoke with a boss, with my boss, then with his boss, like I would like to find people that would be my supporters, because this is not one person initiative like you need to make other people interested in this project because usually initiatives like that starts as a side hustle. Sooner or later, usually they die. Because if you are having a side hustle, it's really hard to find time. But if you have a support from your boss and from his boss, they will find you. Maybe they will take some kind of some small amount of your responsibilities, so you will actually have time, and this will be like in scope of your position because that's totally different story if you have. Plenty of things on your plate. First thing that usually people would drop is the community, and that's a challenge that we see very often and we think that one of the main reason is that they don't have a support from the top. Like if they would start another way, they should start with getting the support and then they will build their community and not, they are starting their community and then they try to find support. It's totally different story, in my opinion. It makes this much more successful and tracking the initiatives, tracking the opportunities. Tracking the successes. Actually the successes probably for the beginning might be the most important part to make other people exciting. If we will share the successes and we'll say to head of certain department that there is a value. Alteryx is bringing return on investment very quickly. We can see that we can solve problems without getting the support from the it. Like depending on the situation, depending on the company, the successes might be different, but we need to talk about the successes. 'cause one thing that I learned while working for the corporation is that you need to promote successes because a lot of Alteryx users aren't really good in talking about their successes. So the community is also a great place to help them because the community leader can make them put them on stage so they have opportunity to show how great they are. So maybe they will be rewarded later in the future by the organization thinking about how beneficial it is for the organization and promoting not only successes of the other people, but successes of the community can make a big difference in the long run. [00:26:02] Bart Smuga: There is a fancy word for that. I would say value capturing can describe all the things that we just said. It's all about to capture the value of Alteryx, to ensure the return on the investment, and that's how you can get stakeholders, senior stakeholders engaged, and they will be helpful for you on this journey. In the end. One more comment from my side. When you have. All the things that I mentioned before, and Amy mentioned as well, you can create a dashboard. For instance, we have seen a lot of situations when companies have a dashboard initiative dashboard or maybe Alteryx manager dashboard. And in this dashboard can be a lot of information regarding Alteryx. For instance, we can store the information about the successes, we can store the information about the opportunities that. Are in front of us where we could automate something and where there is needed some SU support to work on, you can store there. The information about Alteryx license usage. So you can see how Alteryx is used within your organization to ensure that you're reducing the risk of not use licenses. [00:27:20] Megan Bowers: I love that tip about the dashboard. I think that would be super cool to see and super valuable for people at the organization. But yeah, thank you both so much for joining today. You have both mentioned a ton of resources for enabling Alteryx users and for building up communities at companies, and so definitely listeners check out our show notes on this one. We will link all kinds of resources for. Getting started and yeah, I just really appreciate you both coming on and sharing your expertise. [00:27:49] Bart Smuga: Thank you, Megan. It was a pleasure. [00:27:50] Emil Kos: Thank you, Megan. Thank you for having us. It's was a pleasure to be here and see you next time. [00:27:57] Megan Bowers: Thanks for listening. To Access our onboarding resources, view Data Pal's, use Case Tracker and more, head over to our show notes on alteryx.com/podcast. See you next time.

This episode was produced by Megan Bowers (@MeganBowers), Mike Cusic (@mikecusic), and Matt Rotundo (@AlteryxMatt). Special thanks to @andyuttley for the theme music track, and @mikecusic for our album artwork.

Alter Everything Podcast

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173: Building Effective Centers of Enablement for Alteryx Users

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This episode was produced by Megan Bowers (@MeganBowers), Mike Cusic (@mikecusic), and Matt Rotundo (@AlteryxMatt). Special thanks to @andyuttley for the theme music track, and @mikecusic for our album artwork.