Mico Yuk, fellow SAP Mentor, recruited me to assist a pilot for the SAP University Alliance Student Dashboarding Club. I explained to both her and Kirby Leong that I am new to Xcelsius, but they encouraged me anyway.
Last week I attended Mico's orientation with graduate and undergraduate students from University of Texas-Dallas and University of British Columbia, and then as Mentors we received our assignments. Because I am new, I was assigned the first lecture, "XCelsius Dashboard Design Basic Concepts".
The SAP University Alliance prepared the slides, I just needed to prepare for the lecture. I just found out last Thursday (9/23) from Kirby that he wanted me to lecture today (9/25)...so off to work I went. I needed to come back up to speed on Stephen Few's Dashboard design concepts, and even though I knew how to use what we were discussing in today's session, it's one thing to know something, and yet another thing to explain it.
Here's what I did to prepare:
1) Reviewed Ingo Hilgefort's Dashboarding chapter in Reporting & Analytics using SAP BusinessObjects; it has general best practices in this book
2) Reviewed Stephen Few's book on Information Dashboard Design
3) Reviewed Wayne Eckerson's book on Performance Dashboards
The topics I covered in today's lecture/session were dashboard design, designing spreadsheet models, basic components, alerts, selector components, and dashboard layout.
I haven't officially "taught" a college class since my senior year at the University of Kansas when I was an accounting undergraduate teaching assistant! I forgot that teaching is a great deal of preparation and work. "Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance". So how did I do? Here's an e-mail I received after the session: "I liked your presentation. Excellent. Very crisp and clear.... "
Before I forget, I want to thank the students for giving up part of their Saturday to participate, Kumar Subramanian, EverythingXcelsius, for being there to demo and Kirby Leong for being so encouraging and flexible with our schedules.
I look forward to Kumar's session next week on "What-if" Analysis. I am glad SAP is sponsoring this, we really need college students who come into the workforce with the needed SAP skills, and it is a great item on the students' resume to be a member of the Student Dashboarding club.
Tammy
