By: Kirk Olson
Kirk Olson is a founding member of OneNumber. After many years of working with NCR and HP as well as starting several of his own smaller companies, Kirk brings a variety of insights to organizations looking to launch new products and overhaul processes. He lives in Seattle and can be found running marathons and cheering on his favorite baseball teams in his downtime.
“Just make a typical sales dashboard!”
I’m sure you have heard something similar to that. We sure have!
Or…”We have hundreds of great unused vizzes! What is wrong with these, why don’t they use them?”
Through trial and error, we have found successful approaches to creating useful, actionable and valuable Tableau dashboards through our Design Sprint workshop process. Today we’ll break down the “Whiteboarding” step.
The Five Keys to Successful Tableau Whiteboarding Workshops:
● Broad Stakeholder Engagement
● Tools Ready to Go
● Bring Questions to Ask
● Neutral Facilitator
● Approach and Mindset
Broad Stakeholder Engagement
We often see situations where key stakeholders are missing from the Design Sprint (and therefore the whiteboarding session) for various reasons. This requires making guesses as to their needs. Guesses might work but they eliminate stakeholder buy-in and input.
Getting everyone together at once can be challenging. At least run the whiteboard session results by your stakeholders before investing lots of development time.
Key stakeholders are:
● Executives or stakeholders that need the info
● Other representative users of the data
● Project managers that will see the new visualizations through
● Data experts that know where the data lives and how to access it securely
● Tableau expert who knows what is possible in the tool
● Scribe for note taking (optional)
Tools Ready to Go
We love to have everything ready to go for whiteboarding!
● Have a big, old fashioned whiteboard if possible. Electronic whiteboards are okay, just not as dynamic as analog.
● Lots of working, colored, erasable markers. Test them!
● Take photos of the whiteboards and...
● Copious note taking. A shared document (like Google Docs) is helpful for documentation and collaboration.
Questions to Ask
Many of these questions may be answered in other parts of the Design Sprint. If they haven’t been addressed, whiteboarding can be used to spur on more definitive answers.
Here are good starting-point questions to ask stakeholders that will actually use the dashboards.
● What do they need to know?
● Who needs to know it?
● When do they need to know it?
● How often do they need to know?
● What happens if they don’t get the information?
● What kinds of decisions will this data inform?
● How do they find out now?
● How well does the current method (if there is one) work?
● Has anything changed to make the current method less useful?
● What do you want to happen when someone uses the visualizations?
● What kinds of actions will people take with this data?
● What is the return on investment for this dashboard effort?
● Where is the data?
● Who is authorized to use the data?
● What transformations do we need to do to the data?
● What data is missing, not being collected?
Facilitator
A facilitator can make or break a whiteboarding session. Some facilitator attributes we have seen work:
● No hidden agendas.
● Curiosity to ask innocent questions.
● Neutral party, not invested in a particular outcome.
● Comes prepared.
● Experienced in facilitating, not necessarily experts in your field.
● Tableau expertise is not necessary.
Approach:
These approaches work for facilitators and participants.
● Enough time for talking and listening: one to four hours for the session.
● More listening.
● More open-ended questions.
● Less “this is the way we always have done it.”
● Feel free to go outside of the bounds of Tableau (maybe Tableau isn’t the answer).
● Bring examples of others’ approaches. Screenshots, drawings and stories are all helpful.
● Don’t start making visualizations until the whiteboards are completed.
Of course, there are more details that you get into as the session progresses. In another post, we will go over those.
Please let us know in the comments other techniques that have worked for you. After all, you are key stakeholders in our world!