Running a Low Budget Data Enablement Programme
The Three Pillars of Data Enablement on a shoestring
Today we’re going to talk about data enablement. I’ve been working on data enablement programmes for a long time, usually centred around the delivery of self-serve BI tools.
Enabling a business with data is essential; it drives decision-making based on data, rather than gut feel. It also drives value. I won’t give you the stats - they’re well documented, and if you’re reading this then I’m likely preaching to the converted.
So if we know why we need to enable our business users and analyst teams with data then why are we so bad at it? It’s not that we mean to be, our intentions start off well. We’ll implement a BI tool (be it reporting / dashboarding or more analytics-focussed) and we’ll do some training, perhaps the vendor does some sessions, perhaps a partner helps. We’ll also put the first batch of users through a few days’ worth of paid training to supplement the free hour sessions. The results are good.
We have a core group of users all trained well and they pick up training with others, perhaps supplemented with some paid training as we roll out the platform. We build a small team to support the platform and they help people because everything’s new. However, the excitement fades and soon, as new people join, they’re relying on a handful of online free training sessions. Gradually, your better people leave and their replacements don’t quite make their mark. Things drift…soon you hear one of your business teams have deployed a shadow BI platform they love. They are creating some great content that suits them and you wonder where it all went wrong…
The problem is your enablement programme didn’t go beyond the first few weeks. Relying on teams to fit in enablement of the wider business alongside BAU and new projects isn’t enough, and understandably it got left behind.
Now we could pitch this article at the best in class implementation, however budgets for Self-Serve tools are stretched to the limit, so let’s talk about how to do enablement on a budget. However, before we do, let’s talk about best practice and ignore budget for the moment.
The Three Pillars of Enablement
When we talk about enablement it’s really easy to simply focus on one aspect, classroom training (online or remote). This is where most users minds go when we ask them if they’ve been enabled in a tool or platform…if they’ve been on a course they’ll say they have, otherwise no. However, classroom based training is just one aspect of a successful enablement program. Let’s walk through what I call the “three pillars”.
Pillar 1: Classroom Based Learning
This is the central pillar and, as we’ve already mentioned, it’s the pillar that most people implement at Day 0. It’s almost always essential in any enablement program to pull people out their day-to-day and give them some time in a classroom together to learn the fundamentals.
Without doing this then many people simply won’t take the time to learn in any kind of structured way. Instead, they’ll do what I did recently when I started picking up a new platform, they just dive in out of necessity one day. As such they pick up bad habits and they miss important features. They struggle through, if they’re bright, and they research on the internet when they’re stuck.
Taking the time out to learn together in a classroom does several things though. Firstly, and most importantly, it establishes a learning cohort - a group bonded by their learning experience. In this cohort there will be some people who are slower, and some who are faster. Among the group then those faster more established people become known, and soon, back at the office, their group will seek them out to help answer questions. This helps the group, but also reinforces the learning and experience of our burgeoning expert. It gives them confidence and a raison d’être. The same person, left to learn in isolation, would have coped fine, but would never have found their calling as an expert.
Classrooms do another thing too, they put these cohorts in touch with experts, perhaps from vendors, or partners, or perhaps an internal expert. These experts bring their own war stories, and expertise. They answer questions and concerns, they compare with other tools, and help people understand where their learning fits in a longer journey.
Classrooms also simply show an investment in people and the tool, they remind people that this tool is worth learning. They’re an opportunity to reward people with some knowledge and a new line on their CV. At a time when it’s difficult to issue pay rises and promotions, believe it or not staff do feel rewarded with a course and a little bit of time away from their day to day.
Classroom training can take on the fundamentals, helping embed best practice at the start of a users’ journey, or can be used as a reward for people who invest time in learning the platform for themselves and show promise; rewarding them with a consolidation of their learning and extra skills.
A word on online vs physical classroom based training - please please try to avoid online classroom training where you can. I appreciate in large geographies like the US it can be necessary, but somewhere like the UK, or even Europe, getting people into a classroom is worth the travel and hotels. If you do run an online classroom, don’t run it for more than a half a day. Ensure the instructor forces all cameras to be on, and they are happy to drive an online learning environment. I’ve seen too many online courses that turn into lectures with the participants losing interest and flicking through emails. Online classrooms need to be highly interactive.
Pillar 2: Self-Paced Learning
Our second pillar is just as important, it helps other learning styles who made need more support away from the classroom and help them learn, and reinforce their learning, at their own pace.
Self-paced learning can be free online-videos, or perhaps covered by a company subscription to Data Camp or Coursera, or another online platform. Also, you shouldn’t discount the power of a small library of books in the office for people to reference - my advice would be to avoid overly verbose books that people won’t read, and buy cookbook style books that show the recipes or inspiration people may need to learn and improve.
It’s really important though to not see online / self-paced course material as a replacement for classroom courses. I’ve been part of the roll out of Coursera type platforms, and honestly people simply don’t use them. They get wrapped up in their day to day, they have good intentions but they forget to log in and months go by without them running the course. If they are mandated to do the course then often they’ll often rush through.
One good way to use these courses can be to run them as a cohort and book a room, encouraging all participants to do exercises and projecting any content. This recreates the classroom environment and promotes discussion. Encouraging your teams, or an individual in your team, to pick this up and run is a great way to drive self-paced learning.
Pillar 3: Supported Learning
Oh, I’ve lots to say here :-) Supported learning is often the most neglected of the three pillars. What do we mean by supported learning though? Here we’re talking about all the pieces of learning that should happen organically through someone’s journey into data. Things like:
expert-led “doctor” sessions where people can bring challenges and issues and get help
group sessions to share use-cases and knowledge around how people are using data and building tools
coaching for beginner users helping support them through their learning
support type help via Teams / Slack channels
proactive Centre of Enablement / Excellence outreach, perhaps based on performance or usage metrics (this can really help optimise well used, slow dashboards)
certification coaching and support - plus celebration of those gaining certifications
a champions programme to help find champions within the wider business who are building great reports and dashboards
input from Vendors and VAR Partners / External Experts with lunch and learn sessions and short training sessions to help people see the art of the possible and what’s happening outside the organisation.
It’s neglected because all this requires the support of your users, it takes time and effort to build, and a lot of energy to build things like slack channels.
The Foundations
Underpinning all these pillars are the foundations, the governance that lets people know how to interact with the platform. This is important because it tells users where to share their content, how to share it while it’s being tested and how to promote it. It tells users where they can find trusted data, and what to do when they use their own data which may not be trusted by others.
These foundations are hugely important because they give users the trust in the environment. Making sure new users know the “rules of engagement” helps them understand your aims in delivering data, and avoids the growth of a free for all environment and the resulting chaos.
The Reality
So we’d all love a full-time team running all the above. We’d employ a Head of BI Enablement who’d have a Centre of Excellence Team of 3 or 4 driving enablement across the business. They’d run training sessions, Doctor sessions. They’d build best practice content and drive adoption through the business…The reality is that this is a little bit of a pipe dream in all but the biggest businesses. Instead, we have a small adoption window to grab a small amount of budget, and after that we need to settle for enablement on a shoe string. So how do you set up? How do you get the biggest bang for your buck?
Pre-Implementation
If you’re implementing a new piece of BI software then you have a small window where you may have the vendors attention. This is less true with Microsoft, so any advice about engaging the vendor below doesn’t apply to Microsoft, you’re on your own there (please message me to correct this if I’m wrong), but generally other vendors will engage with you to help sell their product. Make the most of this time to get some enablement sessions - perhaps some lunch and learns for your team and some free trial time.
Working with a Partner will also bring in another interested party who’s happy to invest some time enabling your team [full disclosure, I work for such a partner] and generally will be a little more engaged in the long term post-implementation if you find the right one (get some recommendations from other users if you can). Generally, in my experience, customers don’t use the free resources at their disposal at this early stage anywhere like enough.
Use this period to upskill a small core team and test the enablement options available to you, take any free sessions offered by the vendor partner. At this stage you are essentially testing your team to see how quickly they can go with the free enablement and self-learning on offer at this stage. Enablement at this stage will mostly be self-paced learning from Pillar 2. Use the time to assess the options available and which free options give the most return on time invested - have the team track the learning resources they use and rate them based on effectiveness.
Day 0 - Day 60
It’s likely you will be able to build in a small amount of budget for enablement as you purchased licences and got things moving. How do you best use this budget to get things moving?
A lot depends on your team, and how quickly they picked things up in the initial period of free enablement. Assuming you have some self-starters (and picked the right tool) then you’ll have some of the team who are progressing well. If so then my best choice for investment of training budget at this stage is an intermediate to advanced level classroom course to help cement their knowledge and push them forward. If there are free or cheap lower level certifications it may be worth pushing the team towards these to try and cement their confidence and reward their early effort.
If, however, the team is struggling with foundational knowledge, then it’s important to quickly get back to basics and provide a foundational course for the central data team that can give them confidence and fill any holes in their knowledge.
From here, you can start to use you most proficient users to start to build out training content for other users. Initially, have them hold doctor sessions to help triage the trickiest problems from other users, can they solve them, or do you need support from the vendor / partner (here I hope you picked a good partner who will still lean in after the cheque has been paid!). This is the foundations of your Pillar 3 Support.
At this point you will have started to understand the self-paced learning options you have at your disposal; what are good options for learning quickly? Start to build these into a “must-read” starters guide for users first 20 days using the product (there are some of these types of guides already available - and vendors / partners pay have them to hand).
Encourage your users to start a small Teams channel / page to keep these resources. I’d love to say encourage them to share their journey - if you do have people that will do this and engage then it’s great, but in my experience people that will do this are as rare as hen’s teeth [if you find someone who’s happy to share on socials, internally and externally protect them at all costs - they are worth their weight in gold].
A word on enabling content consumers - so far we’ve been discussing enablement for content creators, but it’s important to cover your consumers with some regular enablement.
A launch event for your platform is a great way to engage a large audience easily, I've seen people grab a TV and a table and stand in the canteen showing content (assuming you still have an office and a canteen!). Otherwise a remote event, for an hour describing the platform, your aims and how to access data and dashboards will drive people to the content.
Repeat this semi-regularly, and if you can see if you can get a short introduction included in any induction content (or run an induction for new starters in key teams semi-regularly).
Day 60-120
At this stage your central team will be starting to build out their content and publishing it to the platform content, having had their knowledge boosted by a classroom course. It’s now time to start to worry about your foundations. Sit down with your vendor, partner and skilled users and talk about best practice. You will need to build governance to set yourself up for best practice, so also take the best advice online and if you can use some of the free user groups available in big cities to meet other companies at a more advanced stage (or ask the vendor for introductions) and chat about their governance structure and the mistakes they made early on. Other companies / contacts using the software are an undervalued source of knowledge and those who aren’t direct competitors will make time to chat and help if you reach out.
Write down this governance and ensure it’s one of the first things new users are taught. Create a page to describe the governance rules and drum it into your most experienced users.
As you start to roll out the tool wider into the business then you have a choice: push the foundations out using self-paced learning from Pillar 2, or opt to spend budget and get people out of the office. This is a tricky decision and will depend on the individuals and their learning style, and the culture of your business. Whichever option you choose, then my advice is to spend some time formalising the training and turning it into a “thing”. Some individuals and cultures have an “expectation” of training, and struggle to move onwards with tools without providing a formalised “here' is your training”. If you don’t provide that some users will still move forward in an informal setting, but others will be left behind.
By now you should have built some shared data sources that can easily be accessed by users for training with data that means something, And so, without too much effort, you can create cohorts of learners (aim to bring people from different parts of the business together), and a formalised programme via email and some meetups:
Day -7: Welcome Email, invite to the programme and explanation of what to expect. Here it’s important to set an expectation of the length of the programme and what you expect of the participants during that time (in terms of commitment). 60 days is a good amount of time.
Day 0: In-person, or video call, introducing the cohort to each other, explain how they can work together to learn and encourage them to self-organise. Introduce the programme, and any classroom training, and encourage the group to nominate a group lead (not necessarily the most senior role in the meeting) to organise further meetings and save you driving the programme on your own.
Day 14: Meet to discuss the governance rules and explain why governance exists. These foundations are essential to ensure users know how to use the platform.
Weekly: group should meet to review progress, or ideally sit down and do some learning together. Discuss any learning, have an experienced user sit in to help answer any questions and/or provide a tips session.
Day 30: check in with each individual via a survey or one to one calls to check progress towards their aims. Also, check if they have created content (you can check this on any servers with most products via admin / usage reports). Are users finding time to commit? At this stage if users simply haven’t found time then it’s wise to suggest they come back for a future cohort.
At the half way stage bring in a speaker from outside the cohort, perhaps a more experienced user, and have them talk about their success with the platform.
Bringing the cohorts journey to an end is important, not because it’s an end to their learning journey but because it helps keep momentum up without things fizzling out. Whether you’ve personally been driving that momentum or you’ve delegated it to the group then it’s important there’s an end in sight.
Review and celebrate progress as a group, ideally in person, if there’s a way to do this to a wider group via a company newsletter or intranet it’s a great idea. Particularly if an aim was towards certification of some kind.
As cohorts progress encourage all questions to be posted on an internal Teams / Slack channel. Ensure these conversations happen in front of all users if you can. Do what you can to encourage usage of this channel for questions and sharing, even if it’s forced. These channels are hard to drive, and will take some forcing, but if you’re successful they can be rewarding.
Be careful with this though, without a level of engagement, even if it’s forced, you can get burned and demotivated by trying to push engagement if it’s not there. Find 4 or 5 individuals with shared motivation and agree to push it together, with that threshold “activation energy” and effort you can launch these type of channels, but make sure you have it before starting.
Day 120+
Review where you’ve got to, what’s working and what’s not. By now you should have built:
a handful of content that reflects “what good looks like” to demonstrate best practice that’s accessible to all users
a repository / guide of self-learning content for users first 60 days
a handful of experience users who lead regular drop-in sessions and channels and act as champions across the business
a foundational classroom course for all, or an advance course to reward more experienced users
a regular cadence to review progress with partners / vendors
an external network of contacts to learn from
a governance framework that helps guide users and stops too much chaos and prevents ungoverned, untrusted content
Encourage your most passionate users via certification, and get them out to a conference or user group once a year (more if they can commit their evenings and are in a suitable location).
It’s important now to focus on enabling new users at this stage, as they’re easy to get left behind. Depending on the size of your business, it’s likely your initial cohorts are winding down, so run one every quarter to mop up any new starters in roles that need to create content.
From here you could look to create an advanced training cohort, picking up and running users through more advanced content and giving them a reward for engaging with the platform. This can take the same form as the first but with different content, but be sure to be deliberate in how it’s run.
Champions and Continuous Learning
By now you’ll have a good idea who your champions are across the business and in different departments, they can be different levels of experience and seniority but they all should share some kind of passion for driving data in the business, or for your tool.
You can use this group as an informal (or formal) group of champions to help guide and organise future enablement and events. It’s a good idea to hold some kind of lunch and learn, or drop in session, for your users every month if you can to help promote continuous learning. Use this group to help organise these and encourage attendance from their BU.
The key is to make sure they are useful and provide learnings for people, organising a user group where people sit around and all discuss what they should do at a future user group is a sure fire way to disengage people. Ensure any meetings offer practical tips and are supported by experts in the business to help drive best practice.
It’s in this continuous learning effort from here, and so keep up energy yourself and invest in a group to ensure that as you roll this out you keep each other motivated. Regularly get your head up, review where your deployment is and review where enablement is needed most - and focus on that.
Enablement doesn’t have to cost a lot but it does take effort
Hopefully, I’ve been able to describe how you can create an enablement programme for your BI platform on a low budget. However, what’s clear is that this isn’t something that’s easy and low attention. Your strides in this area will need to be deliberate, but if you take time to build something and put effort into delivering, the rewards will come with a return on investment many times greater than it’s taken as your efforts multiply through your users.