[Abesoutheast] Intro to Cognos workshop 10/12

[Chisholm, Daniel]

Attached you'll find two documents: one is the flyer for the 10/12 Intro
to Cognos Workshop. The other is a handout that will be given to
Directors who attend the 'Using the Performance Standards Reports'
workshop at the 9/26-27 Director's Conference in Falmouth. This handout
is the outcome of a project, funded by Annemarie for the southeast, that
Luanne Teller, Suzanne Martin and I worked on this summer to help
simplify getting the information you need from Cognos. If you don't have
time to read through this entire novel, skip to the last
paragraph.......

 

Our initial goal was to create a couple of simple views in Cognos that
would be exported to Excel where we would then build some pretty
spreadsheets that you could then print from. A secondary goal was to get
to know Cognos 8 better to update our training documentation. Let me
tell you, that ain't what happened!!  You put Luanne and Suzanne in a
room and let them start brainstormin', well, you better be prepared to
make adjustments to your goals.........:-)

 

One of the first things we discovered was that Cognos 8 had some very
good features that weren't in Cognos 7...... so we did some poking and
prodding and found that C8 ( Cognos 8 ) could print out reports we
thought we had to do in Excel........not as pretty, but certainly
functional. So we made an adjustment: we would do everything in C8, not
Excel, if possible. No exporting.......

 

The next shift in our goals came when we started trying to decide which
views ( you'd probably call them reports, but they're really views ) we
should make first. Luanne was on the PPI Workshop Development Team (
Planning for Program Improvement ) and showed us a list of questions
that is handed out at that workshop for Directors to answer. We realized
the value of working on views that were needed for Performance Standards
( Attendance %, Avg Attended Hours, Goals Set/Met,...... ) but also
views that would help answer the questions about the health of a program
as used in the PPI workshop. Luanne then added additional questions (
lots!! :-( ) to the initial list and we realized we ( as in Luanne &
Suzanne ) should be tying our Cognos trainings to these
questions.......AND, Luanne started going off on how we should
incorporate Cognos training into the PPI workshop because they talk a
lot about how to use the data and could benefit from seeing how Cognos
can get that data EASILY for them..........phhheeewwwww....

 

So all of a sudden the couple of views and spreadsheets we were going to
initially create became redesigning the SE Cognos Training, possibly
redesigning the PPI training, and no longer even used EXCEL......

 

So here it is in a nutshell: I am in the process of redesigning how
Cognos is trained here in the southeast; the first is 'Intro to Cognos'.
The workshops will be closely tied to answering the list of questions on
the second page of the handout. We have tentatively tied which questions
will be answered at which Cognos session ( last page of handout ). The
three graphs on page four of the handout are views that we have created
for you. When you leave the Intro to Cognos workshop, these three views
will have been saved in your personal folder in Cognos where you can run
them anytime you want and they will show the latest, up-to-date data in
Smartt for your site ( it gets updated nightly ). I like to use the
'Easy Button' scenario as Staples uses it in their advertising campaing;
we have created 'Easy Button's for you. You don't need to be Cognos
experts to use them; no zero suppression, no hiding/showing columns, no
swapping,...........just select the 'Easy Button'. I realize this is
kind of late notice, but I would highly suggest you get someone to this
first 'Intro to Cognos' workshop.........:-)

 

Daniel Chisholm

Regional Technologist for Southeastern SABES

SABES: Training Leaders in Adult Basic Education

508-678-2811 x2731

dchishol at bristol.mass.edu <mailto:dchishol at bristol.mass.edu> 

 

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