Born to Run: Automated Agile KPIs

[LizP]

2018 Excellence Awards Entry: Born to Run - Automated Agile KPIs

Name: Luke Light

Title: Born to Run: Automated Agile KPIs

Company: Alteryx (internal)

Collaborators: Jen Dineen

 

Overview of Use Case:

A walk-through of devmetrics.alteryx.com, an intranet site powered by an array of servers to track, interpret, and share progress metrics across our Agile environment.

- Automation – Using Alteryx to perform scheduled pulls from an AP

- Dev / PM Collaboration – building visuals to the specs of various stakeholders

- Sharing Results in a Production Environment – hosting dashboards on the web

Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve:

Tracking and reporting project status is traditionally fraught with unwarranted optimism and subjective judgement, leading to inaccurate reporting. Due to these challenges, Program Management created an internal website -- a single source of truth for development metrics in our own Agile environment.

Describe your working solution:

Alteryx Products: Alteryx Designer and Alteryx Server -- mostly YXDB data sources (API extracts).

Repeatable Workflows: hourly API calls scheduled every hour, aggregating reports, apps on the Alteryx Gallery to manually update dashboards, In-Database tools for our Redshift database, visuals through Alteryx Charting (original) and R, and publishing to Tableau Server.

Steps for our solution:

- set parameters with lookup tables

- call Rally (Agile development management system) data from API

- iterative and batch macros to iterate across multiple teams

- aggregate data into useful, lightweight metrics

- publish metrics to Tableau for visualization (some charts in R and Designer)

Describe the benefits you have achieved:

Our process (powered by Alteryx) gives management a reliable view into our development process -- by trending progress, diagnostics, and catered content (created in collaboration with many teams across the org), we have a much clearer understanding of the needs of our developers and setting reasonable expectations for management.

Related Resources

Slide deck (presented at Inspire 2018) attached.

devmetrics.alteryx.com

[LGC]

Sounds like an amazing success!....Congratulations on being able to leverage the tool for this. 

[Sudeshna]

Wow! looks amazing success for everyone involved. Just wanted to check if you're aware if there's way to connect to Workday to source date. would you also mind posting broader checks, validation etc involved. we're looking to initiate similar initiative hence the query.

[LizP]

@Sudeshna adding Cynthia Eckles @CynthiaE who is the mastermind about Workday + Alteryx solution to assist.

[CynthiaE]

Hi @Sudeshna!

We used static sources for the examples above (Excel spreadsheets) and used *a lot* of joins to compare one system to another. It made comparing the multiple data sources, finding duplicates, etc. *so* much easier than if we had to do it by (yuck) eye. 🙂

However, if you want a live/real-time connection to Workday from Designer, I would suggest checking out Shane Conklin's XML Parsing tool on Alteryx Gallery: https://gallery.alteryx.com/#!app/Workday-XML-Download-Macro/5c34f9cc826fd30988ed9e79

In order for the solution to work, you need a few things:

• If your organization has SSO enabled, you will need to either:

  • Have your Workday security admin allow you to sign into Workday using a username and password. This is managed in the "Manage Authentication Policies" task, OR
  • Create an Integration Security Group and add the group to the "Web Services" Authentication Whitelist.
    • This ISG needs to have access to the data sources that a custom report will use, e.g. "All Workers"
    • Create an Integration System User (ISU) account and add it to the above ISG.
• Regardless of the method above, you will need to enter the ISU's credentials in the username and password section of the macro.
• Once that is completed, create a custom report with Web Services enabled in Workday. 
  • Make sure the custom report you create is an Advanced Report from a single data source with no Group Column Headings (e.g. all from the "Workers" business object).
• Copy and paste the "Simple XML" link from the Web Service URL.
• You can create and add as many of these single data source reports with additional tools on Designer's canvas as needed and use Designer's Join tool to match them (no Workday calculated fields needed!)
  • For example, I have joined a Positions report <-> Requisitions report <-> Candidate report linking the Req # and Position.
• Proceed as you would with any additional downstream tools you would use.

I hope this helps!

Cyn

[Sudeshna]

Thanks Cynthia for very detailed response. yes, i'm looking for ways to download outputs of the reports scheduled in Workday. i feel ( not aware exactly but need to dig in further) the report i'm looking to pull in automated way .. may be querying more than one source etc.. in short violating the criteria you've outlined here.

is there an option to pull data/report via API?

while all this still in nascent stage, will get back to you with more detailed queries. 

Thanks a ton Liz.

Regards,

Sudeshna

[ebwest]

@Sudeshna Did you ever figure out how to do this with automation? I am trying to do something similar for regularly scheduled reporting, but the URL changes every time the report is run.

[dandrews98]

@ebwest Did you figure out how to do this with automation?

[ebwest]

Hi there - No, I didn't figure this out yet. I put it back on hold until I can spend more time trying to work through it.
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[janellek]

@CynthiaE 

Many thanks for your thorough outline of working with the Workday Solution created by Shane. I've been utilizing it in a similar fashion, and was curious if you had ever attempted to utilize the download tool to snag a CSV instead (of the data in Simple XML format via Shane's tool), and if it yielded any success?

I've tried to take this route to reduce the number of times I need to create joins, and it doesn't seem to be working within Alteryx. That is, Alteryx returns a HTTP error when it tries to make the call to the same report which would return when the format is Simple XML. I also want to share that I can get the call to execute appropriately in Postman, so it isn't a question of the link, etc.

Let me know if I can provide additional clarity! Thanks!

[CynthiaE]

Hi, @janellek!

In one of my earliest experiments, the Download Tool was the most successful with CSV, particularly with reports with Group Column Headers. I did not use Shane's version, but instead created this workflow with two tools, which you could turn into a macro, or an Analytic App.

I've attached screen captures of Text Input and Download Tool configurations that worked for me. 

• Pull in a Text Input tool, create a column called "URL" and the other called "Download To".
• In the URL field, copy and paste the URL for CSV from the "View URLs" for a report in Workday. 
• In the Download To field, let Designer know where to put the output of the CSV.

• Pull in a Download Tool, and choose "URL" as the URL field, and in the To A File section, select the "Filename from a field" option and select the "Download To" field.

• Leave all of the other configurations as default.
• When you run the workflow, a CSV will download into the specified location.

I hope this helps you! Let me know if you have any additional questions.

Cynthia

[SabrinaCB]

Thank you for sharing this information @CynthiaE !! Very cool

[janellek]

@CynthiaE ,

Thank you so much!! This solution worked wonderfully, and I was able to write my report to a CSV in the appropriate destination folder.

That said, the output in the browse tool was a bit odd, as it noted there was an error in a section which was created, "DownloadHeaders":

Error: HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized...

Out of curiosity, have you ever encountered this? 

Thank you again for all of your help!

[MKoziol]

It was great to read your post Cynthia - really informative!

I am wondering if you maybe do some testing not only with fetching data from Workday but also with loading data directly from Alteryx to Workday using Workday API? I know that we could simply populate Workday loading template but I am trying to decide if it will be easier to load the data directly.

Thanks!