Tessitura Analytics - Help me, I'm training people! Aka, what questions have people in your orgs had about it?

Jordan,

I'm very interested in what you come up with.  I, too, am jumping in to the Analytics of Tessi.  Anything you have, training materials, etc.  I'd love if you would/could share them with me. :)  Brian

Hey Brian! 

I will definitely share once I've finished putting them together. Let me know if you think of any Analytics questions that I can head off in my trainings! 

Yep, jumping on the bandwagon here. We're on v15 now, but won't have Analytics "open" to users until mid-April. Jordan, I'd love to see what you create. Sorry I don't have any experiential info to pass along at this point. Dumb question - are there not any basic training materials through the Network yet? We were not able to attend the most recent Tessitura Network conference - I haven't taken a look at the conference archive. We have a handful of users who have worked in T-stats, but no one on our team has seen the Analytics program yet. 

I'm more than happy to share once I've figured out what I'm doing, haha. 

I've searched all over the forums and network for info, but there isn't a lot that is super helpful unless you actually attended the conference last year. There is the documentation, which is primarily what I'm working with for now, but I'm really hoping to find some people who have real world experience using it to help.  There are some presentations from TLCC18, with videos included, but from what I can figure out, they don't have audio too, which makes it kind of difficult to follow along with. There is the Tessitura Analytics and You video, which has been helpful, but its really the only thing outside of documentation that I can find. 

Another useful resource from the Network is the free 45-minute Tessitura Analytics orientation. Once you have Analytics up and running in Live or Test you can schedule time with a member of the team for a guided walkthrough. Details can be found here: https://www.tessituranetwork.com/en/Services/Analytics-Consulting

Best,

Patrick Schley
Support Escalation Specialist

That is great to know, Patrick! Thanks for providing that information!

Great topic, Jordan!

Our consortium beta tested v15 over the summer of 2018 and finally upgraded to v15 on Cyber Monday 2018 (I did all my shopping at the Tessitura Network ).

When we were beta testing, our core team of three consortia staff members dived really deep into Analytics, both learning about the Tessitura pre-builts but also throwing caution to the wind and building our own dashboards from scratch.

Once we had developed a comfort level (and had built some of our own dashboards which were informed by what we thought our consortium member organizations would specifically want to visualize), we actually did an "Analytics Roadshow" where we either visited organizations in person or scheduled GoToMeeting check-ins and walked through some of the fundamentals of Analytics before showing some of the curated dashboards we had built showing their organization's specific data.

I think, if we learned any lessons from this process, we learned that being able to show Analytics with an organization's specific data is what helps make Analytics feel real and actionable (versus seeing dashboards with demo data that may or may not actually represent their own database).

We also recommended that our member organizations schedule their free Analytics consultation (as Patrick Schley) mentions in this comment thread), but only one organization actually followed through and scheduled a call, which happened in January. That was incredibly handy for them, and it's nice because there are different "meeting types" you can specify so that the consulting time can either be a very high-level introductory overview or it can be a much more specific nuts-and-bolts view of Analytics.

Probably the most common "sticking point" has related to people having to remember that Analytics data only gets updated once a day (or however often you schedule your data refreshes for), so they need to be aware that their visualizations represent a fixed point in data time and might not reflect more recent activity they've seen in the course of a given day.

I think it can also be tricky for people to understand the data cubes structure and how that controls the data they see, especially when you start getting more complicated and source multiple data cubes to a single dashboard view. This especially has an impact when people start applying filters (which can be tricky in and of themselves) because once you start sourcing multiple cubes, you have to be specific in referencing a cube when you select the filter values.

We've also had some organizations reach out through our consortium's support ticket desk since the start of this year requesting more directed follow-up about Analytics as they've realized ways that they want to visualize their data, and that has been a really rewarding process to see as well.

I think your plan for training with a split between Fundamentals and then more use-driven areas is great as well, because people do need that fundamental introduction to the tool, its UI, and its functionality before they can be comfortable diving into the process of building their own. And, just speaking from my background as a teacher in my past life, anything you can do to make the room more homogenous in terms of skill level will be a benefit in the follow-up sessions so that you're at least working from a similar baseline of understanding instead of having a really wide skill gap in the same space.

Hope this helps!

Thank you,
Brian

We start training next week for our non-power users. I'm dividing it up by department to start so that we can focus on what each department wants to focus on. In our power user training I haven't gotten many questions, most of them just jumped in and started playing around. The sticking point I've found is that we have users who are heavy T-Stats users and are having a bit of a hard time making the transition to Analytics because it's kind of like T-stats, but not really. To echo Brian, I also have to remind everyone that like T-stats, Analytics only updates once a day. This comes up a lot, which I was surprised by since we use T-stats. The important part that I like to point out is that if people are curious they should just get in and start playing around. They can't break anything so there isn't that fear that they will push a button and delete everything. The Tessitura help docs also have a ton of great information on the standard dashboards and how to build your own. For the more curious and diy-ers you might point them to that after the training.

I haven't had any questions come up over and over because everyone wants something different from the dashboards. I'll tell you what people got the most excited about though; Pulse and being able to email dashboards and widgets out. It's the simple things.

As for your training plan, I would go look at the help docs. That's where I start building my training from; no point in re-inventing the wheel. You might find that it works with the way you've designed your training. Also, I've found that most of the standard dashboards work for 90% of our users. The other 10% are learning to build their own to find out what data questions they want answered.

Hi Jordan,

We're just getting started in Analytics with training for end users this summer.  If you wouldn't mind sharing any materials that would be great.

Thanks,

Chris