Karl outlines several key steps to maximizing your success in an analytics deployment. He shares practical steps toward analytics adoption throughout your organization, as well as some personal illustrations from his family's own adoption journey.

Welcome back for the next post in our  adoption series about getting maximum success from your analytics strategy. In the first part, I introduced you to my adopted daughter, Tori, and this concept. In the second post, we discussed following a thorough vetting process. Next, we discussed how to commit to your decision. Today, we are on the fourth step of getting help.

To review, the five steps to adoption are listed below:

• Build excitement
• Follow a thorough vetting process
• Commit to your decision
• Get help!
• Replace the old with the new

If you missed any of the previous blogs in this series, you can find them at the links above.

There Is No Expert on Day One

When Tori boarded the bus for her first day of pre-K, she was not even four years old. Our school district offered special needs pre-K and transportation for her. The idea was to slowly get her ready—physically, emotionally and mentally—for a school environment. She would only be in the classroom a few hours a day, but she had a long bus ride since there were only a couple of schools that offered these services for children like her with vision deficiencies and developmental disabilities.

In addition to this, we found we could get help in many other ways. Some services were included with our medical benefits or from the state of Georgia; others we had to pay for out of pocket. In just her first five years of life, Tori participated in:

• Occupational therapy
• Speech therapy
• Play therapy (counseling for children)
• Physical therapy
• Center for the Visually Impaired
• Many, many others, too

Without this critical help, we wouldn’t have made it through her early childhood. One of the things I’ve learned is how important it is to talk with others who have been through the same scary or stressful thing you might be going through. These methods of support also led us to meet people along the way that could encourage us, people who had been there before and made it to the other side.

Above: Tori needed special services as early as her first day of pre-K.

Building a Network of Support

Today, Tori still gets help in other ways for her special needs. We are grateful we have professionals out there to help us, and we also have an amazing loving family and community surrounding us.

In similar ways, you WILL need help in your analytics journey. It might be in the area of skillset for you and your team, or it might be in navigating major culture change in an organization that lends itself to more traditional thinking and operation. You may need help with underlying infrastructure or the database technology our team is using. You may need help with making a visualization that pops or understanding how trend lines and box plots are most useful.

Get into the habit of asking for help, early and often. You will be more successful because of it, and your organization likely will be, too. If you don’t get help when you need it, you’ll either waste a lot of energy, time and emotion throughout your journey, never getting to that end vision you had early on, or (even worse) the project could fail, leaving everyone scratching their heads.

Help Is Everywhere

Yes, we can help you. We would love to help you! There are countless ways that InterWorks can support you, but in the Tableau community, also, help is everywhere. In my life prior to being a consultant, I combined help from the community with a great partner like InterWorks. Some of the ways you can leverage free help are:

• Attend your local Tableau User Group
• Get involved online with the Tableau community (Twitter, LinkedIn, Tableau Community on Tableau.com)
• Have regular calls with your Tableau rep because your success is their success, too
• Attend Tableau Conference yearly
• Get involved in online visualization discussions like Makeover Monday and Viz For Social Good, among others
• Network with others in your industry

How InterWorks Can Help You

There came a time where my team needed the professionals. We didn’t have enough staffing for the project we needed to get done. We didn’t have time to do it on our own. We needed a fresh visual look and feel with our content. We needed new ideas because ours weren’t working well. Some of the ways I leveraged partners (specifically InterWorks) in the past include:

• Develop dashboards to replace legacy systems
• Improve UI/UX of current dashboards
• Build a portal to help maximize usage for our execs and front-line employees
• Empower our team with official training classes
• Build high-performance analytics databases in technology that was new to our team and training us on that technology
• Speak at internal analytics meetings to generate enthusiasm and build credibility
• Offer strategic ideas and new ways to solve problems we couldn’t solve on our own

We can help. We’ve been there ourselves, or we’ve been there with our clients. Just like my family and I found people who had been there and lived to tell about it with Tori, the InterWorks team has been there and lived to tell about it with our clients whom we love. Let us help you, too.

Stay tuned for the fifth and final post in this series!