Developing an Alterxy Community within an Organization

[s7elijah]

Last fall I started with a new organization and was first introduced to the Alteryx platform. Alteryx hasn't been around in our organization for very long, but after seeing the results produced by those fortunate enough to obtain a license, there is quite a bit of interest to expand Alteryx further across the organization. After I received my core certification, the head of our organization's Alteryx community asked me a few questions that made me curious as to what responses might generate from the community.

The questions are posted below, but I've altered them slightly. Where the questions I received were aimed at what I personally thought would help in our organization, I'm interested in knowing what your organization is doing.

1) What does your organization do to inspire users to obtain certification, and is that to a certain level or are there tiers of benefits based on the various certifications?

2) Does your organization have any standard requirements for obtaining/keeping a license, such as achieving core certification within x number of days? 

3) This last one requires just a bit of additional context. For the purposes of QA, we are looking into the possibility of having "gatekeepers" which would perform QA on all prod Alteryx workflows used within their team/department. Does your organization have any such structure or methodology for mitigating errors and defects produced within Alteryx workflows? 

Thank you for your time, I look forward to your responses!

[afv2688]

Hello @s7elijah ,

To answer you questions:

1) My organization doesn't push us to get the certifications. They are something people get to prove their knowledge of the platform. Some people use them in case they move to another company to have some way to show their knowledge. In my opinion, the best way for you to "push" them would be by example. Show them the benefits and create a culture arund it.

2) Our organization doesn't have this kind of guidelines applied. The program is used by those who need it or benefit greatly from it (better performance in general showed).

3) Depending on your background knowledge this can be focused many different ways. It also depends on your applications. But I can tell you for sure that the workflows in our case have many security checks applied to assure the integrity of all the data.

Hope this helps to give you some insight. If you need anything else remember that we are here to help 🙂

Regards

[Greg_Murray]

Hi there, 

We were in a similar scenario about a year ago. We went through an adoption phase and challenged users to find efficiencies with the tool. To answer you questions:

1. We took a gamification approach to 'inspiring' users. We build an alteryx app and posted it to our internal public gallery to collect alteryx use cases from users along with the associated time savings. We built a Tableau Dashboard (scoreboard) that sat on top of that showed the progress of the business as well as individual and department leaders. It stoked competitive spirits and also provided a business case for the tool to the higher ups. The dashboard also showed certified core and advanced users. 

2. We have not implemented anything like this although there has been discussion around it. 

3. We have a standard alteryx review template and all workflows must be reviewed by a peer before being published to server and scheduled. The template covers baseline best practices like annotating tools and/or containers, coloring inputs and outputs, disabling browse tools, etc. Additionally, we use the server usage dashboard and other monitoring workflows to monitor errors and issues on the server. 

Hope that helps,

Greg

[ThizViz]

1) Certification is purely an individual endeavor. But I suspect certifications might be announced during internal user group meetings.

2) IT initially selected license holders based on expressed interest or job roles (does the person already create ad hoc reports/analysis using other methods?) Additional licenses are simply requested through departmental cost centers, but those requests are also vetted by IT, as IT becomes the license owner/maintainer. Retaining a license is dependent on publishing workflows to the server. In my view, this criteria is too narrow. I think there are plenty of perfectly valid uses for workflows which would not require deployment to the server. However, it's my understanding that the license would not just all of a sudden disappear, but rather that the user would be notified and have an opportunity to justify their need for a license.

3) Our Alteryx admin has published guidelines for workflow design and for workflow review/QA.  Every Alteryx user is eligible to review/QC another user's workflow, and are selected randomly to perform that review. Passing this review is required prior to deployment to the production server. License holders within IT and certain other departments are required to follow more stringent SDLC procedures for deployment. The workflow author (or delegate if they leave their position) retains ownership of the workflow and would be responsible to correct any errors discovered after deployment.

[ThizViz]

Also, under certain conditions a workflow would need to be reviewed by our IT security or other groups, such as if there is a call to an external web site. There are other conditions but I can't recall them at the moment.

[HighlanderDGI]

Hi - good questions - see below for responses:

1) What does your organization do to inspire users to obtain certification, and is that to a certain level or are there tiers of benefits based on the various certifications?  

Our company encourages team members to obtain certification and more broadly implement analytics and automation when possible.  One way to inspire otheres is to involve them in a game and recognize achievements either through certification but also on results.

2) Does your organization have any standard requirements for obtaining/keeping a license, such as achieving core certification within x number of days?  

While there are no standard requirements to obtain a license - team members can include certification as a goal for the year or plans to obtain certification within a set timeframe.

3) This last one requires just a bit of additional context. For the purposes of QA, we are looking into the possibility of having "gatekeepers" which would perform QA on all prod Alteryx workflows used within their team/department. Does your organization have any such structure or methodology for mitigating errors and defects produced within Alteryx workflows?

Our organization does not have a formal structure or methodology to QA review Alteryx workflows.  However, the workflows, if leading to actionable management responses would be subject to leader reviews to ensure accuracy.

Hope these responses help.