A repeatable process for Tableau Blueprint

Tableau Blueprint is a step-by-step guide to becoming a data-driven organisation. It provides concrete plans, recommendations and guidelines across critical foundational work, and three primary workstreams that will turn repeatable processes into core capabilities. These topics will guide you through key decision points with a proven, repeatable, four-step process:

1. Discover – Gather information and perspectives from sponsors and multiple stakeholders about your enterprise architecture, the use of data and analytics among business teams, and analytical skills both present and needed.
2. Govern – Define controls, roles and repeatable processes to make the appropriate data and content available to the corresponding audience. 
3. Deploy – Establish the iterative, repeatable processes across the three major workstreams to install and configure software, educate users and enable communications.
4. Evolve – Monitor platform utilisation, measure user engagement and host engagement activities to promote and support the growing use of data and analytics.

For existing deployments, use this blueprint to assess your current capabilities – including where you are excelling and where there are areas for growth and improvement.

Step 1: Discover

Tableau Blueprint includes the Tableau Blueprint Planner, a comprehensive planning asset that will help you systematically gather the right information needed to link data with your strategic initiatives, define your analytics strategy, discover analytics and predictions use cases, and assemble the Executive sponsor roles and responsibilities and Tableau project team roles and responsibilities. This will ensure you are evaluating the needs of the organisation holistically, so you can scope a vision and strategy that will suit your entire organisation and grow with you over time. After completing discovery, you should have a greater sense of the direction you are heading in with your analytics strategy and the roles needed to execute on it. Discovery should be revisited as you expand to new users and use cases, but having a clear view of the future state will help you make decisions as you move forward.

Step 2: Govern

As mentioned above, a clear approach to governance is a pivotal point in the process and must be addressed early. Governance is pervasive throughout every workstream. The time invested up front to collaboratively define governance gives people confidence to trust the data, use it responsibly and participate in the processes that surround it. Tableau governance covers all aspects of governance in Tableau and helps you determine the best approach for your teams, data and content. Working through the areas within data and content governance, you will define standards, policies and roles which perform the corresponding actions and processes in the governance models.

Step 3: Deploy

To scale analytics across the organisation with confidence, you need repeatable, iterative processes in the deploy stage as you execute on your analytics strategy. During the initial deployment, there needs to be coordination among the cross-functional team members to install, integrate and configure the Tableau platform, educate users and provide organisation-specific enablement resources. After the initial deployment, you will onboard new teams and use cases with education and communication.

Step 4: Evolve

Your analytics strategy needs to keep pace with the growth of users, skillsets and use cases across the organisation. As processes evolve into capabilities, your users will adopt modern analytics, and you will adapt your operating models by delegating more responsibilities over time. The project team has access to several sources of information and data to tailor and tune your analytics environment to changing business needs. The project team will be responsive to the growing use of data and analytics among a diverse set of users by establishing a feedback loop to monitor and measure key metrics, including the business value achieved.