Feature Adoption – Project Leader

If you feel that you did not understand what Tableau project leaders can do, you are not alone.  Hope this blog will give you some clarity on what project’s privileges are and how to leverage them to enable more self-service.

Project leader’s  privileges  for the workbooks and data sourced published to  the project and all its sub-projects:

  1. Change extract refresh schedule
  2. Modify any workbooks (web edit or re-publish)
  3. Change workbook owner
  4. Change data source owner
  5. Change data source user/password
  6. Delete workbooks
  7. Change workbook or data source permissions
  8. Move workbook from one project to  another if the user is project leader for both source and target projects.
  9. Lock or unlock project permission
  10. Certify or uncertified data sources (10.4 and above)
  11. Create or delete sub project folder(10.5 and above)

Although one project can have more than one project leader, you may not want to have too many project leaders for a project since project leader  can do almost anything for any contents within the project.

How to use Project Leader for more self-service?  A few examples:

  • Someone in your team left your the company. Unfortunately workbook owner was not transferred to others before he left. Do you have to go to site or server admins to get content ownership changed? If the project has project leaders who are likely business  people in your team, the project leaders can get the workbook ownership transferred to others in the team self-service.
  • Someone in your team is on vacation and his extract failed. You do not have to go to server or site admin either. Project leader can change the data source owner and do all necessary fixes for the data sources.
  • Your management asks an urgent change for a workbook but workbook owner is not available (vacation, etc). Project leader can change workbook owner and update the workbook, or project leader can change the workbook permission with SAVE allowed to himself, then project lead can update the workbooks (web edit & save, or re-publish)

What is difference between project owner and project leader:

  • A project can have one owner but can have multiple project leaders
  • Project owner can only be an user while project leader can be either users or groups
  • Project owner can only be site or server admin while project leader can be any site user

Does project leader have to be site role as publisher or above?

  • No. Project leader does not have to have site role as publisher although most project leaders are publishers.
  • What it means of having interactor site role as a project leader? One use case is for a large project to have something more like project admin role in your org. This project admin does not have to know Desktop or publishing but the project admin is to manage and maintain the project contents/permissions per defined process. This project admin can have project leader permission.
  • Another use case is for Separation of  Duty purpose by having interactor (who can’t publish contents) to be project leader

Read more about topic at my Webinar Summary, slides and recordings (from 40 mins).