Some of our clients ask what they can do to get started as we work through the onboarding and procurement process with their company so they can hit the ground running with their project. Below are five ways Coefficient clients can prepare ahead of a project kickoff to ensure discovery can go as efficiently as possible.
Gathering all your current resources
Our team spends time at the top of every project with a decent amount of time in discovery. We do this since it's really important for us to understand the full vision.
Since it can often be time consuming for teams’ to gather materials they can share with our team to walk us through the current process when we are kicking off discovery; however, even when the materials are gathered, it is quite common for there to be issues with the correct permissions to share them with our team as external contacts. It is also common for key resources to inadvertently be omitted which is the most common cause for delays within projects once they get started due to the discovery of new information.
Things can always be added to Airtable later, but sometime when teams ask for things later without us planning for them from the start it can be a significant lift to make the change. On the other hand, when our team understands your holistic vision from the start we are able to ensure the design developed will work with future enhancements you might like to make.
Please note: If your team is already operating in Airtable and Coefficient will be reviewing, optimizing, rebuilding or connecting to that data we will need creator access to that base (or workspace) in order to access the automations, formulas and overall schema. In order to provide us with creator access a creator or owner must provide access.
<aside> 💡 Action: We recommend getting started by creating a list (Airtable is always helpful!) of all the team's current resources. You can link or upload sample documents and add a long text field to describe what each one is currently being used for. You can also add notes about who is the best point person to answer questions related to each document and what enhancements you would like to make to your current process shown in the document once you move into Airtable.
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Gathering key data sets
One thing that can often slow down a build process for teams is a prolonged conversation regarding centralized datasets and gaining access. It very common for new Airtable users to begin building out the structure directly in Airtable without thinking about where the source of truth data lives.
One really common example for this is around people information. When you create a people table of employees in Airtable, someone needs to maintain that list of data and keep it up to date when people leave, change roles or new people start, but typically that data already exists somewhere internal. Maybe it's ADP, Workday, or a similar HRIS- what if your people data could come directly from the central source of truth HR keeps and maintains to power your people list? What if their departmental list is also something that could be leveraged and not something that needs to be owned and maintained by your team when you want to see utilization by role type or by team?
While you can always build with a manually maintained data set in Airtable, it can be complex to later switch a manually maintained data set to a centralized dataset. Unfortunately, it’s not an extremely easy and quick switch. Planning for what central datasets you can use and would like to include and using them from the start makes a world of a difference in your final design.