ACE Spotlight Series: Isobel Lowry

[MeganBowers]

Today’s ACE spotlight is @Carlithian! Keep reading to learn more about Isobel and what makes them a unique Alteryx super user.

Tell us a bit about your professional background. 

I did a three-year degree in computer game development, which I loved. But within the first year, I knew it wasn’t going to be my career because the game industry is so tough; you really have to want it to succeed. After finishing university, I bounced around a bit, trying to find something to do with what I’d learned, but I always had my coding experience to fall back on.

I ended up in an Implementation Coordinator role at a company where they had really old Excel processes with VBA coding. If anything went wrong with these files, it impacted people’s work. I had to re-code all of these files, and it felt good to get back into that. And then I was handed Alteryx. I was frustrated at first because I had just re-done all of these Excel files, and now I had to redo them in another tool. After a couple of days, I changed my mind—I could do development work quickly with the drag-and-drop interface. I liked Alteryx because it felt like an accumulation of all my weird skills.

Now, I have 6 years of experience with Alteryx, and my role at PwC is to run the community of Alteryx users in the UK and EMEA. I help with training, events, and activities to keep people engaged with the software. I even ran our own little internal Grand Prix. I also sometimes jump on calls with people to answer ad-hoc Alteryx questions, which is fun for me.

What is your favorite Alteryx tool, and why? 

I think it will always be the Control Parameter tool. It opens up Alteryx to batching processes, and I love how it gives you so much control over individual tools, allowing you to make fully dynamic processes.

What has been your favorite Alteryx project? Can you tell us about the business problem you solved?

My favorite project was one I pulled together while trying to deprecate some old macros that we needed to get rid of but weren't sure which workflows still used them.

Making use of some great blogs on the community, I built a process that would download all the workflows from the Gallery, unzip them, and review the contents XML. This allowed the team to track what macros were being used and where and update the relevant workflows.

On top of this, I included reviews on multiple tools so we could keep track of data connections, file dependencies, and much more. That allowed our team to get a better view of how data was being used internally. We could keep track of things like credentials being used for the e-mail tools, so those could be updated quickly if there were changes. Overall, the project gave us a better view of what was happening on Server.

What advice do you have for new community members?

Find yourself a User Group community—there are so many to choose from, and with many of them having options for joining virtually, you are not limited to those that you can travel to.

These mini-communities are fantastic places to meet users across a wide range of professions and hear of countless ways you can use Alteryx that you might not even have thought of before.

What is your favorite way to engage as an ACE? Also, what area of the online community do you spend the most time in?

My favorite way to engage is in person with User Groups. I run the North West UK User Group, and I like having our sessions and getting to see people in person. I love sharing anecdotes from Alteryx work, helping others with little things here and there, seeing how other people use Alteryx, and coordinating getting the speakers we need. I enjoy being a part of the mini-communities that exist within the larger Alteryx Community.

On the Community site, I do enjoy going to the Designer Discussions page every so often to answer questions that don’t have any responses. I like doing this when I’m having a difficult day myself—it gives me that boost of confidence and happiness to be able to get back to my own work and hopefully troubleshoot my own issues.

What discussion topic(s) could Community members tag you in for help?

Anything surrounding Alteryx training and enablement, as well as automating processes and working with XML.

What is one fun thing about you that community members might not know? 

I have lots of hobbies, but currently, I play volleyball in one of our local leagues. So that’s what I spend a lot of my free time doing (and getting injured). I’m trying to build some little Alteryx workflows to help with tracking stats and sorting games for the league as well. I’ve been playing for the last couple of years or so, and it’s just a fun time.