If you want go from gut feel to insight inspired, this is the Data Diaries with your hosts from Dexibit, Susan Nguyen and Angie Judge. The best podcast for visitor attraction leaders passionate about data and AI. This episode is brought to you by Dexibit. We provide data analytics and AI software specifically for visitor attractions so you can reduce total time to insight and total cost of ownership while democratizing data and improving your team’s agility. Here comes the show!

Angie: How’s it going Susan? Everybody loves Monday?

Susan: It’s good. It’s good.

We always have a quiet day on Monday, ’cause it’s still Sunday in the US. We get a moment to take a breath. Today we’re always, we’re having a chat about onboarding dos and don’ts and Susan’s amazing hacks for coming into Dexibit as a new customer. I think it’s one of those areas where people always have a thousand questions before they get started. Susan, it would be great. Maybe we could start off with sort of getting into, a bit of an introduction to Dexibit’s onboarding philosophy, the anatomy of our five step process. Can you take us through some, of that?

Susan: Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve got a prescriptive methodology for onboarding at Dexibit. And that involves three workshops plus a user training session. And we work in two week sprints. So we’ll have one workshop. Give you two weeks, give yourselves some time to collate what you need for the next session.

And then we’ll have another workshop followed by the third. And then finally, user training before we shift to our monthly business reviews. And so our onboarding framework is really designed to help you configure and set up your basic support structure for the systems that you want to integrate. So it’s really hyper-focused on connecting all of your core systems and getting everything ready for implementation.

Angie: Sort of years of experiments and experience boiled down into a little bit of a method here that we prescribe.

Susan: Yeah, so we definitely wanna make sure that everyone involved, it’s gonna be including your key stakeholders, so we want IT there, we want OPS there even marketing, so people who have the knowledge around your business roles for each of these systems. And then everyone else that will be using Dexibit can join us a little bit later. So we just wanna keep the audience small and focused to start with.

Angie: And you mentioned the MBR word in there. Can you talk us through what a business review is?

Susan: So a business review is just a time for us to continue to meet once a month. So onboarding very focused on getting everything set up. A business review is allocated time for us to deep dive into your data together. Often when we start our business reviews, there’ll be some carry over from the onboarding process, but we’ll still be spending time together, configuring your roles and diving into insights on any themes or topics that you’re interested in.

Angie: And it seems like sort of doing this in two weekly sprints or cycles feels like quite a long period of time between each of these working sessions, but there is always a little bit of pre-work, a little bit of homework, right? From each one of those workshops.

Susan: Yeah, so after every workshop there will always be some action items for the customer. Whether that’s getting clear on what visitation rules are for some customers that might be already known and already set. For some others, it might be something that they want to revisit and reset. So, just depending on where the customer is at in their journey, yeah, we’ll just set some actions for you to really, really define those so that we can make sure we’re configuring them accurately in the product.

Angie: And so before we do these working sessions, we have a kickoff where we talk about sort of just reviewing overviewing the data program from, for anybody who’s new to the conversation, we can at that stage demo the product if anybody hasn’t seen it already or if you’ve got new people that you’ve just started with, we can set goals and things for the onboarding itself and then talk through the method and sort of get into the details of who’s coming to what and when, and any internal milestones we’re planning around and things like that. What’s your opinion on who should be at the table in that kickoff?

Do you prefer to have a small group of just like the change champions and leaders, or do you like to have everyone and their dog at this session to participate in the conversation? Which one do you think is best?

Susan: Definitely a smaller group, so you want exec sponsorship there. Definitely. And just key players in operations and IT, the people who have access to these systems, the people who have the knowledge, that will help us pull out what we need from these systems that we’re connecting. And then also the people who are forming the strategy for your data program. Because this kickoff session is where we’ll also define your success metrics. So whoever is involved in creating those for the wider team, we definitely want them in that first session.

Angie: Yeah, I tend to agree. I think when you’re involving wider stakeholders in that first kickoff, it can otherwise be quite a long period of time for them in their minds between when they get kickoff and when they do their eventual training, especially if there’s any delays in your onboarding process or whatever. Or if you maybe choose to stagger your training so that maybe you roll out different user groups, different times. And that can feel like a drag to them if they’re waiting. So if you sort of treat their user training as a bit of a kickoff for them, it can, it has a bit more momentum. And has a bit of change impact for those individuals versus the people who you need actually engaged in that onboarding process to get questions and answers out of, to get things, everything configured out.

Susan: Yeah. And we also don’t wanna get too many cooks in the kitchen too early on. Just because as Angie mentioned, we wanna get some answers and have a clear path forward and get things done in a reasonable amount of time. And sometimes we can have a lot of voices in offering their thoughts and ideas, which is really wonderful.

These are workshops and they’re designed to, you know, have that conversation, but we also wanna make sure that it’s not too much to sort of get in the way of our onboarding process.

Angie: Yeah, that’s so true. So maybe we could go through step by step for each of these and sort of talk about what do we need, what are the likely action items gonna be?

Who’s gonna be involved? So, I can start this one off with kickoff. Because that’s sort of often the handover point that we have together. So once you’re, we’ve got all sort of terms cleared and signatured, the big things that I usually suggest to have ready at hand, and this can actually be done as you’re sort of finalizing commercials as well.

Is just start putting together a little bit of a folder of any data that you’ve got sitting around. Often people have spreadsheets on their desktops and things, and that can be helpful to get off the ground fairly quick. The one big thing that we find really useful is particularly if you’ve got some ticketing, point of sale systems that might take a little bit of work to get into or, or whatever the case might be, is really helpful, to have. Visitation if you’ve got daily visitation, maybe for the last year or the last few years at hand, or you can get a quick spreadsheet together on that if it’s possible to send that through. Especially if you’ve got the bandwidth to be able to do that quite well in advance of actually kicking off. That can be really cool to get a little proof of concept up and running ready for kickoff so that when we do that demo to stakeholders, it’s with your actual data versus with demo data. But otherwise being able to have that sort of list of internal champions that you’re going to involve so we can invite them to meetings, some scheduled time slots is great.

And we’ll handle the rest in terms of standing up your account. And provisioning everything, getting things like the weather assorted and almanac and things. But having those couple of things on hand is really useful.

And as Susan mentioned, involving some of these stakeholders of the key people who are going to lead the data strategy, the actual sort of project effort of getting things connected and being involved in the decision making of things like rules that during that onboarding process can be great for that.

For that initial kickoff, Susan, take us through that first workshop, that first working session that would happen a couple of weeks after kickoff. So that first other step of that five step method, that’s a data automation session, right?

Susan: Yeah. So in the data automation session, we will do two things. We’ll list out all of the systems. That we are going to connect with and often we will need to define what kind of integration we’re gonna set up. So that may require us to use some credentials that you have on hand or an introduction to your vendor so that we can work with them to set up that integration. So, whoever on your team has that relationship or that knowledge or access to the credentials or the vendors that we’re gonna work with. Very key to have in this, data automation workshop. We will also use that time to go over your recognition rules for visitation. We’ll record what rules that you have set, how do you define visitation?

Is it the number of redeemed tickets on any given day, or is it the number of people that are measured by your footfall cameras? So that’s where we’ll really get into the details there. If you already have that defined and written down somewhere, definitely a great thing to send through prior to the workshop, but we’ll also just use that time to have that conversation so that when we’re ready to connect, we can set all of those rules exactly as we’ve discussed to make sure that those rules are configured.

Angie: And if you don’t have it written down, don’t worry. ’cause we see that very rarely. It’s not often that we get a customer who’s got their, their recognition rules documented, let alone even a data audit of what systems they’ve got. And that’s totally cool. Like, we’ll dive in there.

It doesn’t matter if we’re finding out some of this stuff along the way It’s just how it is in reality in most places.

Susan: Yeah, and a few actions that come off of that meeting is, one with us. We will get the initial data loaded, configure those rules, and then the action for you is to check that data.

So this is what we call the data integrity checking process, which we outline for you. And it’s just a matter of you looking at the numbers that are based on your visitation rules.

And then checking them against your source system and making sure that you have a match. And this can be an iterative process. As you know, it might be something that you’re revisiting as a team, how you actually want to define visitation.

It’s not uncommon for us to see customers choose to change a few things in here and redefine that. So, yeah, it may just take a few steps, but the data integrity. Process is something that we’ll do for every system because we wanna make sure that everything is accurate, and reflecting the numbers that you expect on your end.

Angie: And then the next one after that, and we can juggle these around depending on what order they make sense for, for your own deadlines or your situation. But usually the next one we do is around forecasting and planning. And

then. or is it reporting? I should know this dashboard and report design. So, what we need is inputs for these ones. It’s useful to have a copy of any reports that you are currently using. And this could be like a spreadsheet or a PDF or even an email that’s being sent around staff. Or if you’ve got an existing dashboard solution, some screenshots, or a share of that. It doesn’t matter how ugly they are. We’ve seen it all.

So don’t be afraid to send them to us. And it doesn’t matter if you don’t like them or you like them a lot. If you like them a lot and you want us to achieve parody, just send them along and we’ll do our best to match. Or you can send us a dashboard and report and say, hey, I hate this for these reasons. And we’ll work from there on some improvements. One of the most common things we see is that most existing dashboards and reports or or emails or spreadsheets or PDFs are just tables. So the, one of the first, enhancements that we make is usually to throw a few visualizations at them, but. People are usually quite attached to tables as well. So, we can keep some of those in there as well. But it’s getting a reference of what you currently have already is a really important starting point. And some great stakeholders to involve in that discussion are the people who are major consumers of these reports.

So it might be some of your leadership who are looking at these sorts of things, or maybe some cis admins who have been producing these sorts of things. So that’s a really great one to have and a good action out of that. One is getting these reports signed off if you do feel like you need an approval process on the design. Because one of the really big key items we like to achieve is get some of those reports even as simple as like a daily visitation report scheduled and automated to go out to everyone. ’cause it’s a great quick win to really starting to help people use data through Dexabit to get that, automated so it’s landing in the inbox every day or every week or whatever the situation is as part of, sort of onboarding with data.

Yeah. What’s the next one? From there, Susan,

Susan: the final onboarding workshop is on goals and forecasting. So ideally before this workshop, you’ve shared your goals or your budgets with us. So that would be around visitation, maybe some admission revenue, retail revenue, anything you’ve got, and that could be one figure for the whole fiscal year or a monthly break down, however it is that you wanna provide that, we’ll upload those so that we can track them against your forecasts. So for this workshop, we will activate forecasting for visitation and we’ll take you through exactly how forecasts work, in Dexabit, and how to use them for strategic planning.

Angie: This is a really interesting conversation when we get to this working session because there’s actually quite a bit of a change involved in this discussion.

People who are going from doing forecasting and planning the hard way by either grinding it out and saying, you know, Easter was here this year and, but the weather was like this and we had this closure here unexpectedly for this reason, and next year we’re expecting these things. Or they’ve just been guessing at a high level or, we’re sort of just picking a number and putting that down as a target. And so that, that’s actually quite a big leap to make for culture and for process and procedure to get to the point where we’re using, forecasting. And then of course we have the complexity of technology to learn about machine learning and develop trust and confidence in that as well.

And so just expect that with this working session, that a lot of that is about that part of the conversation as much it is as it is about the practicalities of it. What are some of the action items that come out of that one? Are there many?

Susan: I think at this stage, by this final onboarding workshop we have, we will want your visitation rules to be set. So as I mentioned before, through the onboarding process, for some customers it might be something that, you know, is calls for an internal discussion. But forecasts are trained on your visitation rules. So anytime you make changes to them once they’ve been configured, the forecasts will need to retrain themselves.

And so it might be a little bit of time before they settle and reflect accurately what your forecasted visitation is because they’re based on your rules. So yeah, we definitely at that stage hope that you have those set, and that’s why visitation is a real priority during the onboarding process.

Angie: And that’s often someone like, finance or assist admin or someone like that who’s doing that data integrity, acceptance and getting that authorization to us that yes, we’ve got the right numbers, both coming outta the system and being recognized on these core metrics.

Then we get into training. What’s your preference? Do you like training everyone all at once or do you like doing it in a staggered fashion?

Susan: I usually recommend splitting this user training into two separate sessions. So one designed for admin users, these are the people who are gonna be in the product the most and who need a little bit more control.

So they’ll be able to decide what changes they wanna make to the data, what transformations, who to invite to the product. And then the second session would be a standard user training session, which you can invite, most stakeholders too. So it would be a basic overview of the product. But normally with user training, I wouldn’t recommend inviting everyone ’cause everyone’s sort of in a different mindset of what they wanna use, Dexibit for, how they wanna use it.

So sometimes it’s good to just split it into two, just to give two different overviews and we record this session so that they can be used as a resource for the team.

Angie: Oh, that’s a good idea. I think, this is often too where we’ll see some deviation between special cases like multi-location portfolios where often we might attack, say, the head office stakeholder group first, and then we might go sort of region by region or franchise by franchise depending on.

How that rollout is planned out for or in the case of a new build often at this point it might be useful just to do that. Cis admin or super user training that, Susan mentioned almost the train the trainer training. And then sort of get into the, everybody else quite close to the time because there’s otherwise can be a little bit of a stand down period between sort of being ready or being at that stage of the onboarding process and the actual build of the visitor attraction opening.

And if that, period of time is too long, then people gonna forget how to do things. So, either combining the original training with a refresher or just holding back on that second training block, until closer to the time when it can be, you know, more appropriate for them and their preparations for opening can be great.

Any sort of other differences that you notice much in multi-location or new build scenarios that can be different

Susan: For multi locations, we might wanna divvy it up by overarching department.

Angie: Mm, that’s a good idea.

Susan: Say you might want to have training for, you know, the retail crowd specifically, or visitor services specifically, or marketing specifically, so we can do that as well.

Angie: And some of the other things you might find different for multi-locations we can sort of have that same phased approach to the whole onboarding. So we don’t necessarily have to do all data all at once. We can go again region by region or we can go franchise by franchise. Sort of thinking about rolling out incrementally across the organization if you feel, that need, and then when it comes to new locations one of the things that we’ve got going on there is that a lot of the dependencies of systems being stood up, like a new ticketing system, new point of sale system, new retail partnership, whatever the case, that’s all in flux as well.

And so what we usually suggest is, first of all, give yourself way more time than you need so that there’s plenty of time for discussions to be had for the first time. Lots more decisions being made. ’cause it’s not just like, how do you recognize visitation? It’s more like how do you want to recognize visitation? And we have to discuss all these things from scratch. But when we get into these systems, it’s like often there’s not actual data in there. Or maybe we are dealing with some sample or test data that we need to flush out. And so just giving yourself more time for these sorts of things to happen and just taking your time through the onboarding process.

It’s a lot more comfortable way of doing things versus rush, rush, rush, getting ready for opening. We have done it. We don’t, don’t like doing it, but it can be done, but ideally , in a perfect world, we can, have lots more time up our sleeves for a new build opening to get all of those sorts of things started.

Any other things to add into new builds for or multi-locations for onboarding?

Susan: No, I think that covers it all. I think, a big part of it is. Just trusting the process and taking your time. But yeah, just sticking with us and aligning ’cause we’re here to guide you and help you make those decisions and help you get everything set up the way that you want to.

And I know sometimes it can feel really overwhelming when you’re just uncovering the answers to a lot of those questions for the first time.

Angie: Yeah, that can be, really intense for a new team. And definitely, you know, if you’re not sure, just let us know and that way we can sort of come up with some suggestions and answers, borrowed from elsewhere.

So I know when you do your kickoff, just changing gears here, you often at the end of it, ask the customer what their goals for onboarding are. And I love the way that you ask this question because it’s usually in quite an open-ended format and it’s always a curiosity for me of what customers say, first of all, because I’ve got to know them over the course of however long before that of all of the discussions that we’ve had that are sort of boiling down to this one point.

But also because the answers are so different that everybody gives how do you encourage a customer to define what onboarding success looks like to them

Susan: Generally I just wanna get down to what’s the first thing they expect as soon as they begin the onboarding process. ’cause what I find is that, that actually you, there’ll be multiple stakeholders on the call and you get a slightly different answer from each of them.

And. By asking that open-ended question, you have everything on the table. And then as a team you can just prioritize what is the most important objective. This is where we also discover if there are any internal deadlines that we need to align on. That’s something we definitely wanna work with you on the customer as we wanna make sure that whatever is on your plate we’re aware of and we can work dynamically to meet those needs.

Angie: Yeah, that’s where we’re, it is helpful to know we’ve got beginning of financial year here and we want this report automated. Ready for that. We’ve got this board meeting here and we want this answer to this question for that, like getting really precise and specific.

Cool. So we are gonna get into some lightning round of dos and don’ts for onboarding. Do we wanna go one after the other on some of these? I imagine Susan’s got a long list of things that she has in mind. I can start us off with one and. That is to actually make some change. If one of the things that quite often comes up for us is people notice that their recognition rules are wrong.

Might be how they count visitors, might be how they recognize revenue. And this is what this process is all about, is kind of fleshing out what these rules are and making the change if they’re incorrect. And so my first thing would be not to waiver not to, dilly dally. Is this , a word outside of New Zealand?

I don’t know how colloquial this is. But not to muck around When you do find that there are things like this that need changing, it takes a big bit of a big breath when this happens. If it does happen to you and you find out you’ve been counting visitors, either too many or too few, or whatever the case might be, the revenue’s recognized incorrectly, but be swift with your change because it can really just hugely slow down the whole process if we can’t get clearance and agreement on how many visitors you’ve got and the team then start to erode their trust in this number because they know that something’s wrong with it, but.

Nobody’s sort of talking about the elephant in the room. And it just really sets a tone for how your organizational culture is going to develop around data. And so if this happens to you and you find a problem and your recognition rules just act fast, make a decision, commit, you know, take the change on head on and move on, rather than sort of, failing to make a decision, failing to take action, and, instead of carrying that with you for months and years afterwards, I need to have it still be a problem.

Susan: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I think in the onboarding process it’s, I think sometimes there’s an expectation of, you know, answers to a lot of these questions are yes and no, and it’s black and white, and business as usual, and that’s not always the case.

There’s always some sort of transformation that comes about, whether that’s with visitation or revenue or how you want to analyze the data that you have available to you. So as you mentioned, I think it’s a really good idea to just get in there early, make a call but also you can lean on us a little bit.

You know, this is where we bring in our industry expertise. We can make recommendations. Based on what we see and other attractions around the world, we can make some suggestions and guide you through that process to make it a little bit easier for you and the team. It doesn’t all have to sort of weigh down on one person in the team or yeah, I think it’s something that we can definitely collaborate on together.

Angie: What would be one of your do’s and don’ts?

Susan: I think for onboarding, a lot of customers understandably get really excited and really eager to jump in there and connect everything all at once and, wanna get everything done, within the first few days. And I. I don’t wanna say that’s not possible, but it’s very hard to accomplish all of that seamlessly if it’s, if we’re rushing into it.

So my recommendation is just to stay on the path that we have laid out for you. Stick to the sprints, the two weeks sprints. We do give and take there based on what’s on your plate, but, I think, you know, staying focused will really, really the outcome, you’ll see a lot more success if we stick to it together. Rather than kind of going to explore other little sidetracks in this process.

Angie: Yeah, I would probably add on another one to that of a very similar line is like, don’t reinvent the process. Like really trust the process. We’ve seen what works and we’ve seen what doesn’t. And nine times out of 10 when.

Somebody wants to do something that’s very alternative to our prescriptive methods. It does go south fairly fast. And then we sort of get to the point where we haven’t achieved what we wanted to achieve and people get disappointed that we haven’t been there. And so we really wanna keep everything on track to hit these big things that we know are the big rocks between you and the data change that you want to accomplish.

And so by all means, like if you’ve got specifics that you want to do and you’ve got some ideas of how you want to customize do voice those with us. But if we guide you back towards that prescriptive method, I would definitely trust in that. It’s there for a reason and it’s there from trial and error and cuts and bruises. So we would definitely encourage you to go with it.

Susan: And in a similar vein I think a common mistake is, you know. Sometimes customers want to really, really project manage the onboarding process. And while we have this framework I don’t really recommend doing that.

Setting strict deadlines each day, each week for your team is that often results in a lot of stress and unnecessary pressure for your team. Because what happens is, customers will underestimate how much input or resource they might need, depending on the size and scale of the onboarding project is for them.

Say for example, you have multiple locations and your ideas, you wanna roll everything out to all locations by the end of it. And so you setting these timelines and KPIs and the reality is the data isn’t as, you know, it’s not as tidy and organized coming out of the vendor system as you were expecting and requires a little bit of work or visitation rules are clear here, not so clear there. So, yeah, I think just noting down your needs and requirements, but not really setting firm, KPIs and deadlines that your team will, eventually burnout trying to meet, because the expectations are, a little bit high.

Angie: Wow, that’s such a good point. I think so many organizations, so many visitor attractions, gone to data programs, wanting to be more agile and then try and bring all of these like traditional waterfall project planning processes with them and that journey to agility. It’s, . It’s very difficult when you come at that from a very traditional place of project planning and waterfall kind of rollouts.

And when you go into data, it is. Naturally, especially if you’re doing it for the first time, a very messy place. There’s a lot of unknown unknowns and you’ve gotta give yourself and your team the time to run into those and discover as you go. And it’s really hard to do that when it’s like, on this day we’re going to be doing this task and this deliverable is due on this deadline.

I would encourage people if they feel the need to do some more planning, than what we usually are on the side of is just stick to the approach and talk about who’s going to be involved and what the inputs are, and pick out a couple of milestones that you feel you need to deadline for whatever reason, and just leave it at that.

When we get into like these really big Microsoft project plans of every single activity that’s gonna have, you’re just putting a huge amount of work and administration and overhead into things that are going to be rewritten, eventually because it’s just impossible in the data space to have that much foresight to know what problems are going to involve what’s encounter with what systems or how long it’s gonna take someone to do a data integrity check. And putting that amount of pressure on your TA team just for the sake of having a plan in the first place, we’ve gotta question what the value in that is. So, I’m so glad you mentioned that. That’s a fantastic one.

Does that mean I have to go with the next one? Oh goodness. I would say, don’t just think about onboarding as the IT setup. Capturing knowledge out of the team and using that knowledge to configure, um, that knowledge into a data product so that it’s not sitting in people’s heads and on people’s desktops.

It’s about shifting culture and, getting started with data literacy. It’s about, getting some quick wins underway. It’s about changing some of your policies potentially and your processes or procedures for things like reporting or planning. It’s not about just the IT side, so don’t just treat it as an IT project.

Susan: Yeah. I think, just to add on to that, you know, if sometimes, it seems like it might just live with the technical people on your team configuring Dexibit, but often they need, you know, the team’s input to understand how are they gonna configure all the technical bits, based on that knowledge that is shared across department to department.

So again, it’s not just a collaborative effort with, the customer and us at Dexabit but your whole team, within your organization and us. One thing, that I really encourage is if you are hitting any roadblocks or things are taking longer than expected, internally, is to just communicate that to us.

We definitely don’t want to rush you through the onboarding process, so just giving us a little bit of visibility on what might be going on, what barriers you might be facing. We might help solve for those. And we can also just sort of work dynamically and reshape that onboarding timeframe or, structure based on your, your current needs.

Angie: My next one would be celebrating quick wins. I think this is great with any, organizational change that you’re going through. And there’s a great book of who, what’s it called? Something about penguins. My iceberg is melting or something like that by, what’s it? John Kotter, and he talks about quick wins being one of the, the hallmarks of great change leadership. And I think the value in this is that onboarding takes, you know, a few months. You don’t wanna wait until the very end before anybody’s got any value. Ideally, you get some of that on day one or week one or month one or whatever that looks like for you.

And so getting a quick win and being hyper-focused on that is great. Don’t let it derail your whole thing. And it all becomes about chasing this one thing. But if we can like, go, oh look, this is the impact of weather or. Oh, look, we’ve finally got, you know, a graph of our visitation compound annual, your growth rate for the last three years that we’ve never had before.

Whatever it is, just pick one thing and enjoy it. Celebrate the moment with the team. Repeat that celebration, you know, really, emphasize the win with everyone. That is the kind of momentum that, generates change and commitment and buy-in. And all of those soft aspects of, bringing a team through, through a change like this.

And I think they, they go a long way.

Susan: Yeah, I mean the way some quick wins can be achieved is by uploading your existing data. So we’ve been talking a lot about connecting data and by that I mean connecting to. Live data coming directly from your source system, whether that’s ticketing or retail. But I know sometimes it’s fun to just get working with some historical data so we can upload those spreadsheets where you may have that recorded, so that you can look at those year and year growth rate.

And you can get it all set up to look at that for the current date. But yeah, that’s something that we can do in the interim. We just don’t want it to take the core focus off of what we’re trying to achieve in the onboarding process. But, definitely a solution that we can provide during that process.

Angie: And a couple of don’ts. I would say, don’t wait until it’s time to integrate your third party partners or vendors to give the vendor the head up heads up. I think it’s a really helpful thing as you. Like on day one as you get started, just to give them the heads up, Hey, this is coming. We might not be asking for anything yet.

We might not be, getting going with any integration yet, or whatever that looks like on your plan. But just give them the heads up that it’s coming. Sometimes they have their own things that they want to plan for, and their own roadmaps or service request queues or whatever that looks like. And it just really is really helpful.

I think it’s. Gets that partnership off on the right foot if they’ve got some advanced notice on that. So just sending them a quick email, CS on the introduction, if you need to. And, and just let them know that this is what you’re doing. I think sort of expanding that communication, this is turning into more of a do than a don’t, expanding that communication, a little bit more broadly than your team when you kick off can be really good.

Do you have any, don’t Susan?

Susan: Yeah, I think maybe, don’t try to compete with the old way of doing things, so you might be transitioning away from some legacy reporting or legacy tools and, they’re comfortable and familiar. And so, you might have some stakeholders that have a tight grip on those, but, I guess, you know.

Recommend just being open and seeing what we can do and what we could possibly do better for you. So what we don’t wanna do is be running two systems in parallel, so your legacy reports, and then this new reporting tool. We wanna make sure that we’re, having a somewhat seamless transition into, the new way.

Angie: Such a good one.

And what about. Your hack, do you have any hacks for onboarding hacks?

Susan: I think the key thing to onboarding is being open. Yeah. It’s not the super rigid, strict project that we’re working on together. There’s so much that comes out of onboarding and defining these roles and looking at the data that is unexpected. ‘Cause we, we don’t know what we don’t know. And often we find some really interesting things in your data from the get go or from your processes that we’re discussing. And so if we’re open when we’re going over all of this, you know, this really a lot of room for new ideas and new ways of working that can really benefit, you.

So that’s my, I don’t know if that’s a hack.

Angie: A growth mindset. Yeah. That’s awesome. I think your, your last one as well. That’s my, usually my hack I suggest to people like upload it and, it gives you that quick win. And it helps get you to value, get you to insight faster. And sometimes, you get there and find an upload as all you need.

And then you avoid having to go through integration, which is, always a good one when, when you can. And I remember before, before we started recording, Susan and I were chatting about onboarding and our experiences over the while. And you mentioned some good ones about this good philosophy between like onboarding and implementation.

Can you talk about that?

Susan: Yeah, so onboarding is really, just the period in which, you’re being exposed to the product, getting familiar with the product. And the way that we define the completion of onboarding is when we’ve successfully achieved that. So all of the key stakeholders have been introduced to Dexabit

We are focusing on integrating your core systems and configuring. Things for your core needs. And then we’ll transition into implementation. So implementation is really a carry over from onboarding. It’s where we’re really establishing everything. And I think just the differences that, onboarding is like that first intro to Dexabit how we’re gonna get this going.

It’s an introduction to the structure of how we’re gonna get everything set up. And then implementation is when we, get everything, absolutely everything set up. And then rolling so that it’s usable, for all stakeholders.

Angie: Yeah, that’s such an amazing way of looking at it. I think, it also gives you that com comfort.

Like some people, when we transition from onboarding into the business reviews, there’s that feeling of everything has to be perfect and complete, and it might not be. And it might be that. I don’t know. You’ve changing out the system over here and went, so we haven’t integrated it yet, or we’ve still got these questions around this data integrity on this point here or so and so hasn’t given over the credentials.

We haven’t begun this thing yet. The idea is not necessarily that everything is done imperfect because, it may never be if you’re changing out systems or going through other kind of procedural or policy changes that there’ll always be some stuff that’s in flux. Onboarding is about. The special equation of things that we’ve found leads to success with data change.

Have we ticked those boxes? Have we, got our governance in place that we understand we how data should be transformed and recognized? Have we got some basic designs so that people can get into the product and look at some stuff? Be more to come. Have we got some forecasts stood up? And a plan uploaded if you use one already.

Have we talked about. What that change looks like between the two. And have we introduced our stakeholders to some training? It’s those core ingredients. Doesn’t necessarily mean that every single loose end is, chased down and, and tied off. And there will always be sort of a roadmap of carry that you have in the data space.

Data is never done. You always sort of have this ongoing, bits and pieces that you’re doing here and there as your going through changes yourselves and different systems or restructures or admission policy changes, or whatever the case might be.

Well, Susan, I think that’s a pretty good list. If you want some more details on the Dexabit onboarding, method, you can head over to our website where Susan’s written some great materials to prompt everybody and, on what to expect from the onboarding process to dive in. And thanks for sharing your knowledge with us today, Susan.

Susan: Thanks, Angie.

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