Strategies for organizing content (Looks/Dashboards) in folders

Hello,

So my organization has built up a bit of content (Looks and Dashboards) and for the most part we’ve been creating folders for Teams and Departments.  I think this works well for reports/dashboards that are primarily used by the given team that a given folder relates to, Customer Service folder for example.

I think a problem arises when you have content that can be used by multiple teams.  Several questions arise of how to go about this:

  1. Do we just train people where the ‘cross functional’ reports are located?
  2. Do we create the same content in multiple places?  Seems like this would duplicate maintenance efforts.
  3. Should we revamp how we organize content into folders representing the content subject matter:
    • Overall Company Metrics
    • Sales
    • Operations
    • Client / Product Engagement
    • Jira Tickets
      • Data Feeds
      • Engineering
      • IT Support
      • Projects
    • Client Support

I dont’ have a super strong opinion yet on any direction but I am growing on option 3.  To me it sounds like a way to scale better, especially as different teams might change, new teams arise, teams merge, etc.  One thing that should not change as often are the data entities or product areas such as Company Metrics, Sales, Ops, Tickets.  I admit these sound like teams but I’m thinking of them more as functional areas that will be at my company for a long time no matter what the underlying teams are that execute those functions.

Very open to opinions and would love to hear how others are organizing content at their firms with an emphasis on scaling!!

Thanks!

CK

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IanT
Participant V

Watching this thread closely, as we’re currently in a similar boat.

We’ve been using Looker for around 4 years at this point, and initially we organized by function/department, which worked well for a time, especially as our organization was smaller.

However, as the company matures and metrics are being shared cross-functionally more and more, it becomes more difficult to train new users how to navigate, leading to frustration with the tool, in addition to frustration when a look/dashboard isn’t quite right because of subtle differences in how the function views the metric - this has lead to a fair amount of duplication of work and raising the chance of confusion in the end-user.

The direction we are leaning towards is your option 3, as regardless of what functions are using the metrics or what the highest level initiatives are that year, we always boil down to the same base metrics, just arranged in different ways. Those can be organized using the board feature for high-level reporting, and can be very easily swapped out if we change direction or focus, in addition to being easy to find for our lighter users.

I’d love to hear how other people have managed this issue, as outside of Looker users the solution seems to come back to searchable tags, which unfortunately isn’t something that we can leverage at this time.

I believe boards should be the really good way to navigate around when you have a lot of content in multiple folders. 

You can have personal boards, when people will be pinning content they personally need the most, team boards for small teams, where team members and team lead can add (and remove) content for their specific needs at the moment, and finally department boards with more content on them which can be managed by admins and be like starting points for creating the rest of boards

I’ve just started to take a look at boards but really like the possibilities in having a board and ability to have different sections.

For my personal board that I’ve been experimenting with, I have a section with ‘high touch’ dashboards, basically a few dashboards that I check daily to ensure they are updated and functioning as expected.  These dashboards are viewed by top stakeholders.

I also have an “In Development” section with dashboards I’m currently working on.  I could probably have Review and Approved sections just so I can keep track of dashboards in different stages.  

Still need to brainstorm how to use these to organize team/department related content.

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