The Start of my journey at the Tableau Center of Excellence :

on

Skillbelts, Visualization challenges and Trainings


I recently joined a new company as the Tableau CEO lead. CEO standing for Center of Excellence, but maybe I should say Center of Enablement. Because my objective is not to hold in my hands the conception and realization of the company’s visuals, but to enable my colleagues, to give them the knowledge and the means to grow and do a good job. The objective is not for me to shine but make them shine.

With that in mind, I worked these past months on my strategy to enable a visual analytics culture; which includes setting up the correct trainings, monitor the Server to detect what is going on (performance issues, extract failings, audiences…) and be able to adopt a proactive approach and of course evaluate the level of adoption. My strategy follows the steps of the Tableau blueprint to enable a data driven culture, No need to reinvent the wheel here  link

Internal Viz challenges


After my first internal Tableau community meeting it was clear to me that our users were motivated, but still a little shy. How to overpass it ?
For the following monthly meeting, we organized an internal visualization challenge, I just downloaded a dataset on Games of Thrones and I found a nice title “Winter is coming” to catch their attention. 
 Giphy : https://gph.is/2qSjUlz

 The idea was to perform a visualization using at least 2 out of the 3 new features at that time (show/hide button, set action or parameter action). Nothing new, right? We can see similar visualization challenges every week. But into a company, not everyone is willing to show his/her own work, they are shy and afraid not to do a good job in front of their colleagues. 

 Part of my job consists exactly on creating a safe environment for them. If I would have just given them a fun viz to do, they will not have done it, because they are serious bankers. But giving them an excuse to learn new features, that triggered their interest. And I have to say that we received great submissions. 
The feedback session was then a perfect moment to praise them and also give some visuals best practices advices when needed. And yes they all received a prize…

Trainings and Support

In addition to the technical support we regularly give to our users, we are in discussion with HR to implement internal classroom trainings for Desktop 1 and 2 (I finally achieved my tableau trainer certification hourra !) and we will request an external trainer for D3 and Visuals Best practices. 

Having an internal trainer guarantees a higher flexibility, the plan is currently to propose D1 and D2 in 4 half days for them not to be distract by their emails.
But a classroom training doesn’t answer all the needs, some of the users manage to reach alone a good level where they can work independently but some of the basics concepts are missing : it is often the case when you learn alone (it was also my case). Other users don’t like to sit on a classroom and prefer to learn following their own pace.   That is why we want also to implement the Tableau e-learning for our users at every level of the organization. click here. That will bring awareness about visual analytics and a deeper Tableau knowledge.

Skills Belts


What are the skillbelts ?

The idea is to provide self-learning materials and exercises to employees with different level of expertise. To access the following level, the users have to pass a test, do a presentation and help others. Of course, depending of your company, it will may not be possible to help others for data secrecy reasons.

Finding content is not the most difficult part, there is a lot of hand-on dashboards on line, for instance in the previous Tableau Conference website. 


Here is the link to a very good presentation during TC2018 by Michael Holcomb link. This presentation refers to an essential part of the Skillbelts: the gaming appeal.  I was thinking that it is a must have but I do not have an internal programmer, who can create a gaming application for me (neither do I have the skills). But I soon realized that I can simulate a game using Tableau Server. Here is the way I did it.


On our global site I created a project “skillbelt” and subprojects for each level :
  • Newbie 
  •  Apprentice 
  •  Padawan
  •  All Star
  •  Wizard
  • Zen Master


Each level is protected by its own AD group. If the first AD group for newbie has been published on our internal tableau community, the following AD groups are communicated when the users achieve the materials and challenges associated at each level.


To give a fun touch, I designed badges for each level, used to illustrate all the subprojects in Tableau Server and the gaming Dashboard. I used some internet free ressources ( www.flaticon and I do not forget to give credits).


Here a snapshot of the testing Dashboard : that is why there is why there is not so many users yet... :)


Each level contains challenges dashboards and skillbelt (containing videos et whitepapers), the idea behind this gaming dashboard is to track the users’ activity. I decided to give a point per user when he/she download a challenge dashboard (you need to download it to do the exercises) and a point when he opens the associated skillbelt dashboard.

I know that it is not optimal, but we need to trust our users, who will surely do the best for themselves and review all the materials before asking for the following level.



How do you do that?



By using the Tableau Server log files! If you do not want to bother yourself with modeling the Tableau Server Postgres Tables, you can download one of the monitoring dashboard already implemented and perform the following calculations.


Here it is the data model that I used for my monitoring dashboard (but not all the tables are needed to generate the view below), so you can simplify it.


Displaying specific information :


I want to be able to display several information in my dashboard. One being the highest level reaches by an user, one way to do it is to use the logging information into the specific subfolders. When I told before that I used the following names as subfolders ( Newbie, Apprentice, Padawan..) I forgot to mentioned that I named them in reality 01- Newbie, 02-Apprentice…and so on.

I created them the following calculations


1. To display the highest level reached by an user(top right of the gaming dashboard)
Highest level

 { FIXED [Friendly Name]:

max(int(LEFT([name (hist_projects)],2)))}
2. To display the friendly name as for instance Annabelle.R

Players
SPLIT([Friendly Name],' ',2)+"."+LEFT([Friendly Name],1)


 3. To display a check mark or a cross on every level, when the job has been done ( on the bottom right of the dashboard).


Checks :

 IF CONTAINS([Name (Hist Workbooks)],"Challenge") and [Action]="Download Workbook" then 1

ELSEIF NOT CONTAINS([Name (Hist Workbooks)],"Challenge") and [Action]="Access View"

then 1 ELSE 0

END
The action field is given by the historical_event table 

4. For the title showing the name of the player when entering the dashboard, I use the username() function.

5. Then I wanted to give some advices on the tooltip to encourage our users
So I created a field :

Advices



IF MIN(CONTAINS([Name (Hist Workbooks)],"Challenge")) and MAX([Checks])=0

then "Download the dashboard and do the exercices"
ELSEIF NOT MIN(CONTAINS([Name (Hist Workbooks)],"Challenge")) and MAX([Checks])=0
then "Have a look at the materials"

else " Good Job! Continue like this!"

END


And now, what?


I really hope I am taking the correct steps to enhance and empower the users, so the Tableau adoption grows in my company... I will write some updates soon... Stay tune :)


Annabelle
22.02.2020