How to Plan a Borealis Boot Camp
Depending on your team and circumstances, you’ll need to think about some practical considerations.
- Will you hold the session in person, virtually, or a combination of the two?
- Will participation be mandatory? Who will need to attend? Who else will be invited?
- How much material do you need to cover? Can you get through everything in one session, or would it be easier to schedule a few short sessions to address different topics? Will you meet with different user groups separately to focus on their specific needs, or would it be better to meet with everyone together?
- What specific challenges or needs will you focus on?
- Are there any goals you’d like to accomplish during the session (e.g., manage duplicates, clean up data, implement a stakeholder verification process, create or update reports and dashboards)?
- Will you provide prizes, certification, or other incentives?
- How will you evaluate the outcomes (e.g., user surveys, tests, increases in communications entered or general system usage)?
Ideas for your Borealis Boot Camp
- A brief formal presentation is a great opportunity to reintroduce your team to Borealis. Explaining what it’s used for and how it benefits your organization can help users understand why it’s so important to enter information as accurately and completely as possible. This can really help improve data quality and increase user adoption.
- Address ‘little things’ with the interface or user experience that can help users avoid frustration. (Adding or updating profile picture, setting language preference, activating dark mode/high contrast mode, etc.)
- Review the basic concepts. (Our YouTube Channel, Borealis Academy, is a great resource. Be sure to check out our videos on basic navigation in Borealis, creating an individual, creating an organization, and more!) Show users how they can work more efficiently and help them feel more confident using the system. Keep an eye out for anyone who is struggling and follow up to see if they might need some individual attention or additional training after the session.
- Make it interactive! Many users retain more information from a hands-on experience than they do from a lecture. It can be incredibly helpful to let them apply what they’re learning. Repetition is key, so you might want to follow up with individual or group exercises.
- Encourage participants to share their screens with the group. This can help identify more efficient ways of doing things, or find ways of working more logically. Users don’t always perform tasks in the system the same way, so this is a great way to share tips and techniques with each other, and share those good practices between teams.
- Create a usage report to share with your team. Help your users create a report for their own home page to monitor their personal progress over time.
- Gather feedback from your team about what works well and what could be better. Reflect on your internal processes and how they are represented in the system. Do users regularly encounter situations where they’re not sure what to do? How should those be addressed? Are all of the visible fields useful? Should some be merged or removed? Do new fields or options need to be added? (You may also want to review other items listed in the Best Practices for Borealis Superusers.)
- Use system reports to review data quality. Two system reports you can find in Analytics can be particularly helpful in evaluating data quality. These are Data Management - Suggestions and Quality and SE - Overall Data quality follow-up.
- If you’re working on data quality, display reports and widgets to gamify the process. Data quality can be a long and boring process, but showing how the numbers are moving can help keep your team motivated and engaged.
- It might be nice to plan a group lunch, or add some team building activities into the schedule to make it fun.