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

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

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