Engine Works
Under the hood of Alteryx: tips, tricks and how-tos.
Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash
An Alteryx CoE (Centre of Excellence or Enablement), is defined as a collective group of skilled knowledge workers whose goal is to provide the organization they work for with best practices around Alteryx in general. For an Alteryx CoE to be great, it needs to do things right. Here are five things that can help in that regard!
#1 Establish a Tracking & Planning Process
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
– Peter Drucker
When starting a CoE, it is always important to know the W’s and H’s (Who? What? When? Why? How?). Although you may think you are doing great for the organization, a quantitative measure is often more convincing and a better gauge of your performance than hearsay.
Who?
There are two groups that you need to monitor. First, your own CoE squad. Second, your Alteryx end users.
It is important to know what your team and your users are doing so that you can keep abreast of all matters relating to Alteryx. It helps you identify the teams that need help and to allocate resources accordingly to prevent burnout and to snowballing problems that will be harder to solve down the road.
Setting up a hierarchy of users is also important to know whom to refer to for better clarity on specific team issues. It helps tremendously as well to identify the right stakeholders so that meetings can be productive and all members can add value to the discussion.
What?
What are you tracking and planning? Here’s a list of things you need to track and plan for:
- List of Users, their License Keys, their License Types (Alteryx, Intelligence Suite, etc.), their teams, and when their licenses are to be renewed.
- List of Workflows built by the CoE, co-built by the CoE and end users, and built entirely by the end users.
- The Workflows should also come with when they were requested, when they were made, QA-ed, UAT-ed, and brief information about the workflow along with how much they contributed in terms of time savings, accuracy improvements, and job optimization.
- It is also important to keep tabs on end-user progression through Alteryx badges and certifications, which involves tracking the end user’s Alteryx community profile as well.
When?
It is best to start tracking the day you begin operations as a CoE! Do not delay, as the effort spent on these administrative tasks will pay handsomely in the future especially if your CoE is tracked for success by a project sponsor!
Why?
I get it, administrative tasks are mundane. Tracking is burdensome and tedious. But just imagine having to get information about your CoE if an emergency wills it or if the project sponsor wishes to see progress quantitatively, how will you respond?
We circle back to the quote we started with – Peter Drucker is correct. If you cannot measure your CoE’s progress quantitatively, you are not managing it well. It is more likely to crash and burn than it is to succeed.
How?
We live in an era of abundant tools at our disposal. There is a myriad of tools that are focused on delivering key aspects such as tracking and planning, which we will be focusing on for today.
In terms of tracking, you will need to use a tool that has an interface for users to interact with to raise their issues with your CoE, store all information regarding your Alteryx builds, tracks key metrics as part of CoE’s KPIs, and to act as a golden source of truth for all matters relating to your CoE work at your organization. Just as a bonus, I will always recommend users to use a tool that enables single sign-on (SSO) authentication for a seamless and more secure experience for your organization.
For planning, it is good to find a tool that allows you to have an overview of what your CoE is doing either with a calendar view or a project board that showcases your tasks, workflow builds, follow-ups, and data clinic sessions that your organization is setting up. It is also recommended for this tool to tie into your tracking tool, so that you can easily cross reference when necessary.
Lastly, for documentation, the tool of your choice will serve more as an internal documentation hub rather than an Alteryx specific documentation hub as the Alteryx documentation site is more defined by the Alteryx team themselves. Your internal documentation will be important as it can serve as your onboarding starting point, a reference point for users when they have issues, and to clearly define your team hierarchy and duties. Of course, internal documentation is not an exhaustive list of items, and as part of the CoE team, you can decide what you want to be put in there.
#2 Establish an Internal Community in your Organization
Solving with Alteryx is thrilling indeed. But without anyone to share it with, the thrill is not there anymore. Having an internal Alteryx community within your organization is crucial for your CoE’s success. An internal community fosters a sense of camaraderie, teamwork, knowledge sharing, and celebrating success in doing away with old spreadsheets.
A great way to start is to have a platform ready for your internal community to start posting! You can make a community and add members to specific channels built around specific departments, projects, or multi-country endeavors! It is important to note that your community can exist on any platform that your organization is using and is comfortable with. The important part about the community is not where it comes from but what you do with it.
Celebrating milestones and successes and sharing useful information on a timely basis will do better for your organization and helps keep your Alteryx CoE fresh in the minds of the people you are helping.
Remember, the goal has always been to help make the lives of end users better with Alteryx.
#3 Create Pockets of Teams with Alteryx Champions
Now that you have a community and a proper tracking mechanism in place, it is time to establish your special squads and Alteryx Champions! At this point, you are doing great!
Source: GIPHY
Alteryx Champions are the people in your defined squads that have experience with Alteryx: knowledgeable about the data they work with, decision makers within their own specific departments, or a combination of multiple factors in addition to those mentioned, which makes them prime candidates to lead smaller scale Alteryx teams working on specific projects/departments.
Your Alteryx Champions serve the role of helping advise their teams on all aspects of Alteryx and help act as a bridge between your CoE and the teams they lead. After all, it is not possible to manage every team yourself from your CoE, you will need to delegate some of it to the Alteryx Champions for better management of resources.
Once your Champion has been selected, schedule follow-up sessions with them and provide them with resources such as by opening Alteryx Data Clinics – built specifically for answering questions related to Alteryx and is a dedicated time space meant for specific groups of people.
It is also important to check up on your Champions and to get them involved with their on-the-ground feedback, as they know the lay of the land better than you would. It is also good to train your champions with best practices from Alteryx documentation and to provide them with ample time to learn on their own to get certified. It is always a plus to be certified as it showcases your credentials, but it should never be a prerequisite to be a Champion. Grow fast as a team but remember to go at a reasonable pace.
#4 Regularly Demonstrate Value through Alteryx
Now that the administrative and team setup is complete, it is time to showcase your value to the decision-makers of your organization. Yes, you heard me right, the decision-makers of your organization. They can range from Department Managers to Senior Management, all the way to C-Suites.
We know that Alteryx is a great tool that helps us save time, increase efficiency, enhance accuracy, and a myriad of other fantastic benefits which we otherwise would not have if we had not chosen Alteryx, but sometimes, the project sponsors or decision-makers may not see it outright. Who can blame them? After all, they are busy people making decisions that rely heavily on the output of the people who report to them. They too are buried under a mountain of spreadsheets and endless reports, which is exactly why you need to set aside time to showcase to them the results.
It is not useful to just keep building and tracking with Alteryx. You must show your results to the people above so that your end users can get the commendations they deserve for using Alteryx. Once end users can articulate what Alteryx does for them and the organization, it is easier for decision-makers to understand the true value of Alteryx and to see how it fits in the grand scheme of things.
Now, this does not mean you get a free pass to showcase everything to them every single second. It means to build, gather feedback, and consolidate your findings to a monthly presentation (hopefully automated with Alteryx! Want to find out how? Here’s a cool article by Megan Dibble!) that showcases the value of Alteryx to the organization in teams of time savings, accuracy enhancements, and what added value your end users are adding with the extra time on their hands.
Once the value of Alteryx starts doubling every presentation, the decision-makers will become fans themselves. Sooner or later, you will get an avalanche of requests and updates to know more about Alteryx. You will then have a new problem to solve, a good one at last!
#5 Leverage on Alteryx Resources & Work Closely with Alteryx Teams
You have done all the work, and now you are getting more work. It is cliché really, rewarding great work with more work. It is thrilling to solve with Alteryx and to help end users, but after a while, your CoE will burn out if you are not careful.
That is why it is important to know that you are never alone in this. Alteryx has a great community run by great people – reach out to your Alteryx official partner or Alteryx resources to help your CoE.
If you find that your internal community is growing too rapidly and you are unable to resolve all queries, there is always the Alteryx Community site for your end users to post and contribute to discussions as well. There are so many Alteryx fans worldwide that will be willing and happy to help! The ACEs and frequent contributors are always there as well to resolve your questions.
If you need documentation, Alteryx has that covered totally. Everything about Alteryx, including its tools, is documented well on their site and even in the Alteryx applications. If you need sample data, they have it. If you need sample workflows, they have them. If you need a tool breakdown, they have it. Just ask around, and you will find it.
If you are onboarding new Alteryx users and find it mundane to keep repeating yourself, the Alteryx onboarding resources are available here!
Just reach out to Alteryx, and they will be more than happy to help make your Alteryx CoE a success.
Finale
Thank you for reaching the end of this blog post! I really appreciate that you took the time to read everything. Do you have any tips you wish to add to this? Comment down below what you are doing in your organization so that we can all learn from each other!
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