Tableau Blueprint help

With peer-to-peer assistance, you encourage others to share and transfer their Tableau knowledge. This allows your user community to leverage the collective brainpower of the entire organisation. A peer-to-peer assistance programme will help develop talent and encourage sharing within your organisation. By sharing knowledge and leveraging technical skills in a faster way, a peer-to-peer assistance programme builds trust among peers, in the programme used to enable them and in Tableau products. Additionally, it provides a social learning experience with relevant topics and examples, and encourages collaboration, hive mind engagement and internal problem solving. An organisation that enables peer-to-peer assistance fosters continuous learning and shows a commitment to data culture, reduces the dependency on the core project team and deflects the number of tickets opened with IT.

This section outlines mentoring, discussion forums and chat, and Tableau Data Doctor.

Mentoring

With mentoring, experienced Tableau users share their knowledge with others. Champions should take a lead role in onboarding within their teams or departments by mentoring new Tableau users, introducing available data sources and providing informal check-ins to grow the analytical skills of their team members. Using data from Measurement of Tableau user engagement and adoption, champions can partner with server or site administrators to see which users are creating and consuming content and to determine who might need more encouragement.

Tableau discussion forums & chat

Discussion forums and other chat-based communications can provide users with information in real time. These methods can also become a knowledge base, as archived chats can answer questions that will arise in the future. Set up a Tableau discussion forum, chat room and/or channel (Slack, Yammer, HipChat) and invite all your Tableau users to join.

Tableau Data Doctor

Tableau Data Doctor fosters engagement and enablement by connecting your Tableau experts with their colleagues who have questions or need help using Tableau. Data Doctors teach fellow employees how to use Tableau and provide one-on-one and/or one-to-many support across the globe via chat channels, or live one-on-one sessions by listening to the “symptoms” and researching or testing for solutions. Whether they are in a dedicated role or volunteering their time, they are essential to Data Doctor programmes of all sizes.

Before getting started

We recommend having the following foundations in place before getting started with your Data Doctor programme enablement.

Sponsorship. Identify a sponsor who will be a strong advocate to support and promote Data Doctor in your organisation and help you recruit volunteers. Having sponsorship support will help you gain budget approval if you want to invest in technology or secure incentives to reward your volunteers.

Work with your sponsor or your leadership team to confirm Data Doctor is the right solution for your organisation to answer your employees’ Tableau technical questions. Ensure your enablement programme is aligned with your organisation’s business needs, goals and metrics. For example, if your many individuals at your organisation have access to Tableau but are not using it or users generally feel frustrated when they get stuck, then your business case should address data-driven goals like:

• Use the Data Doctor programme to increase internal engagement with the product by 10%.
• Leverage internal expertise to reduce IT tickets about Tableau products by 15%.

Invite your sponsor to be a part of your Internal Tableau activities such as Tableau Days, lunch and learns, etc. so that they can reward, acknowledge and appreciate the work and efforts made by all individual contributors.

Education. Your internal data community needs to gain Tableau skills and knowledge to reach their full potential and eliminate basic Tableau “how to” questions. For more information about how to train and upskill your organisation, please see Tableau education and Developing a Tableau education plan.

If there is already an enablement plan in place in your organisation, there may be a need to re-align all individuals who may be answering siloed questions. All Tableau product issues should be raised on a single platform (chat, office hours or appointments), and siloed team members should be educated to redirect all individual questions to the correct platform/channel.

Centralising Tableau questions in a single channel could also help reduce reliance on specific Data Doctors and allow more effective knowledge sharing. Wherever you are, make sure to evaluate the programme at regular intervals to find opportunities to change, improve or scale it.

Recruitment. At least one Tableau expert must be identified or hired to answer technical Tableau questions. Set the right expectation about the role, qualifications, the time commitment needed and goals for their specific involvement.

For example, your Data Doctor might already have a Tableau Desktop Associate certification and volunteer two hours per week. To track their success, you would analyse month-over-month changes of licence usage and the number of IT tickets created.

Data Doctor benefits

There are many benefits of implementing a Data Doctor programme in your organisation.

Enable peer-to-peer issue resolution. Leverage the expertise of your Tableau champions and experts to help their peers via chat, office hours, appointments or a practice/clinic.

Discover knowledge or skills gaps. Have your team, department or organisation take a skills assessment to evaluate and address the pain points and the training and knowledge gaps in your organisation.

Grow data culture. Data Doctor underpins data culture, where users in your organisation are able to support, govern, and see and understand their own data.

Reduce the number of IT tickets. Enable self-sufficiency and empower your Tableau users to help others instead of relying on your IT resources.

Data Doctor toolkit overview

The Data Doctor toolkit is a collection of resources to organise and host your own Data Doctor programme. It includes detailed information on the following options: