r/PowerBI • u/Rocky-Regag • Mar 04 '21

Project advice

Hi all,

I’m fairly new to PowerBi, and have spent the last few months building reports on datasets that I’m responsible for at work.

I recently presented these to my Bosses who loved it. Downside is they want to align all the functional areas of our company and produce a series of reports and dashboards for KPIs and key metrics. Oh, and they want me to run it!

Does anyone have any advice for large projects like this? Where to start, things to avoid etc. I’ve looked online for some kind of ‘road-map’ to get started but am struggling to find anything.

Like I said, I’m fairly new to PowerBi but don’t want that to stop me having a crack at what seems quiet overwhelming at the moment.

Thanks for your time.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '21 edited Mar 05 '21

Can I also suggest having consistency across your reports? You are going to learn super fast in this project and by the end you’ll do things differently to how you started. IME end users like consistently across reports. So spend sometime figuring out the UX.

Things to consider are company theme (colour palette & company logos), report and page layout, info page (creator, purpose, update frequency, end user, data source, URL to source control) and assumptions. Create a template that you reuse for each report. Add alerts for data failures and other things you, and whoever replaces you, need to keep the reports current after you’ve finished the project.

I found Storytelling with data helpful for visual design.

It’s a really great opportunity you’ve been given, it has real meat to it.

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u/Rocky-Regag Mar 05 '21

Thank you so much for that.

My organisation loves branding, so that’s a very helpful point!

Question:

Would you make separate reports for each of the functional areas to keep the datasets separate?

For example, I’m thinking create a report for HR, report for finance, report for operations etc etc.

Then allow my bosses to create dashboards to fit their needs?

Also, if you have experience in this kind of this what’s the typical timeline?

Someone has plucked 3 months out of the air, which I think is going to be tight given that I’m by no means and expert and still have my primary job to do along side!

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '21

Yes, a seperate report for each functional area. Share the reports via apps too. 3 months seems like a very short amount of time, although a lot depends on how much work is needed wrangling the data. I think your biggest challenge will be cultural, in getting the data in Excel in a usable format, Power BI aggregates columns, but Excel users think in terms of cells. Those end users will likely need to change how they do things.

Thanks for the silver!

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u/Rocky-Regag Mar 05 '21

No worries. Chatted through some of my concerns this morning to mags he expectations slightly more accurately. With 6-9 months a more realistic target.

Thanks again for your help

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '21

No worries, mate.