Tag Archives: tableau

Learning through teaching

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I am not sure ‘teach’ is the right word, probably it should be skills sharing but anyway let’s call it teaching for ease. I was keen to talk about how teaching others has helped to improve my own skills and understanding.  Since I discovered the magic of Tableau and then went on to implement Tableau in my organisation, part of the journey was getting my team trained.

After purchasing my first Tableau desktop license I had a little bit of training to get me started but then went on to teach myself. I then built the first dashboards for our pilot site which all worked and did the job they were intended to do so I felt pretty confident I could teach my team how to use Tableau desktop. Despite coming from a family of educators I wouldn’t say I am a natural teacher but I did my best to get everyone going with Tableau.

I created a small syllabus of things that the team needed to get them started and we blocked out Wednesday mornings for sessions. The team quickly picked up the skills they needed, and started to teach themselves, helping each other learn new tricks and use Google for the rest. Just after implementing Tableau I went off on maternity leave for 8 months so left them to it! On my return Tableau was firmly embedded in the team and their skills had rocketed, leaving me to catch up. We then all topped up our Tableau skills with some formal training through Interworks which really helped us to push further on with our dashboard developments for the organisation. 

The internal introduction to Tableau followed up by formal training once people have got to grips with the basics seems to work well, so we have continued in this way for the last few years. I have continued to teach my new staff and colleagues the basics of Tableau ever since. I passed my Tableau Desktop Associate Certification last September and although I had been using Tableau for a few years I had to do a lot of revision to get me through it. There was lots of functionality in Tableau that I simply hadn’t ever used, and I was also doing things in Tableau but didn’t necessarily know why.  I am definitely no Tableau Zen master by any stretch of the imagination and actually through training some of my team again I realised I was still doing stuff in Tableau with results but couldn’t explain why! So I have been trying to make sure I do understand what I am doing so that when I show others I can explain why, and encourage them to understand why certain actions result in certain outputs. Therefore learning through teaching!

I have implemented a Tableau competency framework within our organisation for people who are responsible for building dashboards. This framework is based on Fi Gordon’s Tableau Quest (thanks Fi – https://www.vizchic.com/tableauquest/). I have named one of the challenges ‘train the dragon’ which basically requires them to present/train a specific Tableau functionality to others. On a mission currently to encourage my team to take on this element of the framework so their skills continue to grow.

I have also started running workshops on Agile project management this year, and so far have run two workshops with another couple planned in September and October. Again I am no Agile project management expert, and I have no certificates to back up my skills. But what I do have is a few years under my belt using Agile project management within my team and seeing my team use it with good results. The external courses some of my team have attended recently had been poor (all theory and no practical!) so I thought I would try do this myself with help from my colleague Lucy based on our experience and knowledge. The workshops have gone pretty well, with positive feedback and people putting their learning into practice since; which is great! As I said I am no Agile project management guru, but by having to teach some of the theory it has forced me to really understand the theories and methodologies that underpin Agile. After each workshop we have run I have come away more confident about using Agile within the organisation and our team, simply by actually understanding it more through teaching others.

I would encourage everyone to ‘teach’! It will make you more confident in your own ability; you know more than you think you do! You will learn why, because when you share your skills with others they will ask ‘why?’, and you need to know the answer or be able to find out (even if it’s together!). It doesn’t matter how big or small, it doesn’t need to be a whole workshop or a full training session just start sharing what you do know!

Hope you enjoyed reading my blog!

Dude, where’s my dashboard?!

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One of the most useful things we have ever implemented in our Information Team is unique identifiers for our ad-hoc data requests, routine reports and statutory returns. I can’t take the credit for this. An Analyst who joined my team about ten years ago (and has since moved on) brought this from his previous job. It was so obvious when he suggested it!

It helps so much when people are talking about a certain report. We can make sure we are all talking about the same report. It makes our ad-hoc reporting process easier too. If someone wants a refresh of an ad-hoc that has been requested 6 months earlier we will ask them for the ad-hoc ID and we can quickly find the report they are referring to plus the query that had been written to support it. This has massively streamlined the ad-hoc process, and reduced the need to recreate something from scratch. We have different prefixes depending on the type of report (ad-hoc, statutory report etc), and it made our folder structure more organised too.

Over the last decade pretty much everything we do has been given a unique reference identifier; datasets, data warehouse fact and dimension tables, key performance indicators, procedures etc. It make things so much easier to find, and ensures that we are always talking about the same thing!

Moving forward to the implementation of Tableau in 2016, although we have a Tableau report log which allocates each workbook with a unique reference identifier (TABxxxx) I wasn’t keen to put these IDs on the Tableau server for our consumers to see. I wanted it to seem less formal for our dashboard consumers, and I never thought there would be that many dashboards in each area that would mean we would get confused about what dashboards we were referring to! During the implementation a few of my team disagreed with me, and kept pushing for IDs being published in the names of our dashboards. I finally lost this battle which was made easier to lose as I was soon off on maternity leave and had other things to worry about!

3 years on and I still get reminded of my bad decision by at least one of my team! I will admit that I was wrong (and this is rare occasion for anyone who knows me…). There are now over a 1000 dashboards across our Tableau server site, and most of the dashboards have their unique ID in the title of the workbook. The ones that don’t are generally the ones that I published during implementation (sorry!). We will definitely be fixing these in our next upgrade.

Like everything else we did prior to this, the IDs make it so much easier to support our Tableau consumers. When someone contacts us with issues or changes to a dashboard we can simply ask them to tell us the ID, and we can make sure we respond to their request quickly and effectively. For those that don’t have IDs we have to ask for a link, or try and find it, which isn’t as effective especially if the request has been emailed over. Plus it is then not as easy to record the info about the issue on our Information request database for someone to action later. We don’t use Tags on Tableau (though it is something we are thinking about), but the search area of Tableau works really well with the IDs.

I have learnt my lesson about IDs, and recently created some new committee reports which contained a lot of key performance indicators (40+). Whilst creating these I decided to add an ID next to each indicator, and page number on each tab of the report so that when the committee were talking about a certain key performance indicator they could reference the page and ID allowing everyone to turn to that indicator quickly. It went down well, and will really help when changes are needed too.

So if you are just about to implement Tableau server (or re-looking at the way you navigate around Tableau or in fact navigating anything similar) I would absolutely recommend adding unique reference identifiers to each of your workbooks. It makes life so much easier – it’s a real no brainer!

Hope you enjoyed reading my blog!