Jones Lang LaSalle Gamifies Upskilling with the "Alteryx Adventure"

As was true for many organizations worldwide, the COVID-19 pandemic introduced new disruptions to the international JLL team. Lockdowns impeded collaboration and knowledge sharing between traditionally co-located team members. A high rate of change in commercial real estate markets put pressure on the organization’s ability to make data-driven decisions quickly.

To respond to these new pressures, JLL created a new team: Work Dynamics BI & Performance. Upon investigation, this group determined that different JLL teams were operating at differing levels of analytics maturity, often directly correlating with the size of the given team. It became clear that a primary culprit was inconsistent tooling. Sharing work and knowledge across teams was difficult without a shared framework or language. In addition, team members had to perform low-value manual tasks to translate work across teams, and this had further degraded performance.

Paul Chapman, Head of BI & Performance, recognized that this crisis represented an opportunity to digitally transform, as it revealed the need for greater automation and consistency across JLL's analytics processes. He observed that "it's important to transform and automate, otherwise we'll get left behind."

The Work Dynamics BI & Performance determined to leverage Alteryx as the strategic tool of choice on which to standardize. To JLL, Alteryx offered three major benefits: the ability to share data and workflows effortlessly, the ability to automate monotonous tasks, and the ability to transform data so it's easy to consume. Alteryx's easy to use data preparation and integrated spatial analytics capabilities in particular were game changers for JLL, a major player in global real estate.

Selecting a standard analytics platform was a key step, but another hurdle also had to be overcome: a broad swath of JLL employees across the globe needed to adapt their existing ways of working. The Work Dynamics BI & Performance recognized that these employees needed assistance to make this change quickly and effectively.

Fi Gordon, Global Director BI Strategy & Enablement, and Jon McMillin, BI Specialist, stepped up to make this happen. The two leveraged previous experiences with skills development and curated a gamification program to support and motivate individuals to adopt Alteryx. They called it the "Alteryx Adventure."  The program incorporates training to learn the functions of the platform, challenges to research tools and solve problems, and certification that demonstrates external recognition of capability. There are five levels of achievement, incorporating tasks for people to complete that help them rapidly learn new techniques and use them for their roles.

As an Alteryx ACE and natural educator, Fi Gordon believed the "Alteryx Adventure" needed to be set free on the world, enabling other organizations to take advantage of the same capabilities. Fi Gordon reports that "at JLL we’ve shared our success with the Alteryx community, posting a blog with all collateral, for every other company using Alteryx to implement at zero cost. We are happy to share the secret sauce on the Alteryx Adventure because we believe in building a stronger data community."

Following the launch of the "Alteryx Adventure" program, JLL more than doubled their usage of Alteryx. Teams across the company are now able to collaborate and share analytics workflows easily, which has improved productivity and reduced risk for the broader organization. Even better, the "Alteryx Adventure" program has increased employee engagement, with individuals in the program reporting appreciation with JLL's investment in them and citing their achievement of specific certification levels as career highlights.