When you have multiple admins managing graphs in LeanData, there are several tools at your disposal that can make collaboration easier. Here are some best practices for collaborating with multiple admins in your LeanData instance.

General Best Practices

• Cloning Graphs: It's best to clone a graph prior to making any edits. This ensures that the original graph is preserved should you need to undo any changes. 
• Sandboxes: While changes to your graph can be made directly in production, it is recommended that you make changes in a sandbox environment first so you can test the changes before deploying to production.
• Comments: Comments allow you to annotate your graph with notes and questions to add insights, flag outstanding issues, and tag colleagues for input.  You can tag comments to nodes or simply place it on an area of the graph. Adding annotations to nodes helps your colleagues easily understand the logic behind each portion of the graph.
• Color Coding: You can give your nodes different colors to help you organize your Routing graph, and more easily delineate different sections or functions within your Routing Graph. The color of a node will have no bearing on the functionality of the node and is only used to visibly distinguish nodes.

• Graph Organizer: You can use colors to collapse and expand sections on your graph that have the same color to reduce visual complexity to more easily understand the portion of the graph you're working on and view different sections of your graph at one time.

• Naming Conventions: When naming your graphs,  It’s often helpful to follow a naming convention similar to this: “Object + General outcome of Graph + Date Last Modified”.

Making Edits

• Graph Locking: When you have a graph open for editing, the graph will be locked to others so that two people cannot edit a graph at the same time. If there is no activity for 2 hours on the locked graph, it will automatically be released so that it can be edited by anyone with access to the graph.
• Adding and Editing Graphs: You can create a new graph by clicking the Create Graph button on the main FlowBuilder page, or you can edit an existing graph by hovering over its tile and clicking the “Edit” button that appears on the tile.
• Copying Sections: Because you can copy nodes to be pasted into other graphs, you can make edits in a separate graph to be moved to a centralized graph before deployment. 

Additional Tips

• If you're working with a large ops team, you might consider designating one person to be responsible for pushing the graphs live.
• You may want to assign a specific day & time that changes get pushed live each week.
• Create a log (within a ticketing tool) to capture requests, dates, and deployment status. This allows you to keep a record of when changes were made and why to aid in troubleshooting and ongoing maintenance.
• Set up a scrum meeting to talk about change requests, discuss potential impact, and align across orgs.
• Announce all upcoming & deployed changes weekly to impacted teams so they can monitor for disruptions and quickly report them.

More Resources

Check out our Graph Optimization Toolkit for more guidance on how to effective make and manage graphs.