Staffing

Formal training or review is a must, especially in environments where there is a large development staff or high turnover

When there is a large development staff, and particularly in companies where there may be a higher turnover rate, it is important to get formal training or a formal review to ensure best practices are followed. We have seen companies where developers train other developers on an ad hoc basis. When this happens, we have seen less than optimal results as development progresses.

We encourage our customers to reach out to us for formal reviews and, if necessary, remedial training. We now have online training, including a capability for online hands-on labs, to assist in the training process.

Find a Dodeca mentor

A Dodeca mentor, whether inside or outside your company, can help developers make decisions on how to approach implementation of a new functionality by sharing experiences. If your company does not have a number of Dodeca developers, you can meet other Dodeca developers during online events, such as our user group meetings, or at in-person events such as Kscope or the Dodeca Summit.

Note that Dodeca technical support is also available to assist at any time.

Implement a plan for internal escalation and escalation to Applied OLAP Support

Our technical support team sometimes receives support requests from Dodeca end users in a company, but our support is oriented to the development teams at our customers. We often don’t see the views that are presented to the end users and thus cannot answer questions from end users. Instead, create an internal escalation plan for your application and, once the internal escalation has occurred, our support team is always ready to assist the customer’s Dodeca developers.

Create and enforce team development standards

Start the creation of internal development standards as you start implementation. The benefits of having development standards is that it will help maintenance of a view by any team member as the view will be familiar even if the view had been developed by another team member. Items to consider in your standards include:

  • Object names

  • Range names

  • Business logic layout

  • Essbase layout

  • Date calculations for rolling date templates

  • Formatting and colors including:

    • Label (member) cells

    • Read-only data cells

    • Writable data cells

    • Cells containing tokens or token calculations

    • Hidden row/column colors

  • Workbook Script documentation

  • Workbook Script Utility scripts

Beginning in Dodeca version 8.0, Workbook Script Utility scripts can be self-contained with their own events that are guaranteed to fire in the order specified by the developer with the new WorkbookScriptLists feature.