If I was a COE of One

The weight of the work on one person

In my last post, I shared the Four Pillars of a COE. That approach will definitely be helpful for organizations that have the resources to staff a COE. What if you're a COE of 1 or you're doing COE-esque work on the side? What should you be doing?  If I were a COE of one, here's what I would do:

1. Understand the landscape. How do people work and what are their pain points?  I talked about this in the Four Pillars post. What's the most important activity that would make their life easier or that they desperately need? 

Outside of what you learn about the landscape, the following are items that will make your life easier and help support, upskill, and maybe even grow your community.

2. Automate onboarding (as much as possible). Set people up for success.  Once they get their license, establish an automated email that includes items like: 

• How to get started (where to go to access Tableau, how to access data, & the publishing process).
• Where to go for Tableau how to questions and/or Tableau logistical questions
• Training resources/hub
• Where to find your internal community

3. Personalized learning. First, assess their Tableau skills. I have a Tableau skills quiz that I can help you collect data on which will then inform how you provide personalized learning.  If you don't have time or money to get instructor-led training or building your own training, my recommendation is to provide curated learning for each skill level. Additionally, if your organization's learning management system (LMS) has this feature, when people complete their learning path, they can automatically receive a badge. The LMS may also be able to send you training reports (or send a link to a Tableau dashboard that has relevant  information to help you measure and monitor training). 

4. Automate aspects of enablement. 

• ​Set up a monthly/quarterly newsletter that goes out to Creators/Explorers at a minimum.  You can write the newsletter and by using groups or segments, you can email a large number of people in a consistent way. 
• Create dashboards or leverage accelerators that measure and monitor usage or impacts usage.  One example is the Dashboard Load Times accelerator where you can you/your community can monitor if dashboards are taking too long to load.  If a dashboard is taking too long to load, that means that people will stop using it or at minimum, have a bad experience.  

Those are just two powerful examples that will help you enable your community. 

If you want to do consulting because you love it or it's an expectation, here's a tried and true way to make the most of your time. 

5. Automate the booking process for consultations or appointments. In this, you can collect information on what they need help on and what your knowledge base is (there's no point in them asking for your time in data engineering when you provide front-end developer expertise).  Based on the results of the form, you can then lead them to your calendar to book an appointment when you're available. 

There are so many different things you can do to support your community. I would start by automating these aspects of enablement and then focus on what the community told me is their pain point.  This means I would spend my time on the issues that matter the most without adversely impacting others in the community.  That's a win-win-win. ?

If enablement isn't your favorite thing or you have too much for one person to do, book a chat to see how Kund Consulting can help you.