‘If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.’ Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote has stood the test of time because it holds true in virtually every important aspect of life—including Power BI implementation.
We have delivered 1000+ Power BI dashboards for 600+ international clients. Over the years of our practice we have met many SMBs that make the same Power BI implementation mistakes. These mistakes costed them valuable insights, eroded trust in their systems, and required expensive overhauls to fix.
Whenever they reach out to our Power BI consultancy, we always trace the root of the problem back to poor Power BI implementation planning.
The issue with poor power BI implementation is that they not only drain your budget but also delay the full potential payback of your BI investment.
On top of that, you may spend more money fixing mistakes that could have been easily avoided if you knew:
That’s why we’ve come up with this Power BI Implementation Guide to help businesses like yours get it right the first time.
In addition, a good Power BI implementation plan has a potential to become your project documentation once the project is delivered!
Before we start, it is worth saying that it is only worth creating Power BI implementation plans for large projects that take multiple months. Creating those for a week-long project is a bit of an overkill and this time could be better spent on doing one round of revisions.
Reach out to Vidi Corp if your business is facing challenges with Power BI implementation, usage, or optimization.
And if you need expert consultation or are already a victim of some of the pitfalls discussed in this article, we’re here to help.
Power BI starts and ends with stunning dashboards and reports like this one:
Right?
Actually, not quite.
Yes, the end goal of many Power BI projects is to create simple, clear, and pretty reports that teams will use to understand data.
But the journey to get there involves several vital steps that lay the groundwork for success. These steps are what we will call the phases of Power BI implementation.
Snippets of best practices will be chipped into every phase.
Where does the value of Power BI reports come from? In my opinion it comes from 3 potential project benefits:
As you see, it is not Power BI itself, nor the hype around it that will make your business successful. Rather, it’s how you use Power BI to solve your business’s unique needs.
So, before investing into Power BI implementation, you need to understand what benefit you would get from the investment.
At this stage, you should ask yourself:
Your answers to these questions will guide the rest of your Power BI implementation.
Now that you know what business processes you want to optimize with Power BI dashboards, the question is “how?”.
The answer can be one or more of the following:
As you can see, this part of Power BI implementation has a lot to do with identifying what insights you need and how to communicate them clearly.
We plan for communication through our dashboards through creating documents like the one you see below.
You start by listing the business questions you want to answer. You then group those questions logically and create a separate Power BI page for every group.
The next step is to specify the data that helps you answer every business question. This is where you identify the dataset to use and the formula for calculating the answer.
Finally, you need to specify the chart type you are planning to use and add a screenshot. This would allow you to ask a very simple question to your users: “If the dashboard looked like this would you use it?”.
Once you’ve defined your business needs, it’s time to set up your Power BI environment. This categorically involves two steps.
First things first, you need to choose the right Power BI license for your business. This will determine what features you get, how you can share reports, and how much data you can process in your Power BI environment.
Most commonly you would use the free Power BI license to build your reports and then Power BI Pro license to share them with your audience.
A newer licensing option is to get a Microsoft Fabric package, which integrates multiple data and analytics services under one platform.
Microsoft Fabric could be an appealing option if your business is looking for advanced data engineering and analytics capabilities alongside Power BI features. Learn more about Microsoft Fabric and pricing.
If Power BI independently meets all your business needs, you can choose from one of its license options:
To get the most out of Power BI, set up these:
At this point, your business needs are well understood and you’ve set up the Power BI tools you need to create data models based on your business needs.
This phase encapsulates the entire process of connecting to your data sources (i.e. Excel, SQL server), cleaning and transforming your data, defining relationships between tables, creating calculated columns and measures.
There are 2 things that you want to ensure at this stage of your Power BI implementation:
Imagine you complete your technical Power BI implementation and then the dashboard works painfully slow. This would harm user adoption and if the dashboard isn’t used, it will not generate a return on your investment.
This is where the magic happens as this is where your data model comes to life. However, there are a few good practices that you need to follow at this stage of Power BI implementation.
Every visual should answer a business question and provide insights that drive business value. Consider an example below:
We took screenshots from the client’s strategy plan and pasted them above the relevant sections of Power BI dashboard. This way it is clear to the users which business question each chart answers. Consider using this data storytelling technique for your Power BI implementation.
There are a few other good practices to follow for laying out individual visuals of the dashboard. This includes following design principles like consistency, removing clutter, etc. You can read more about it in our guide to dashboard design principles.
You’re 75% through the Power BI implementation process at this point but don’t go sharing your reports just yet.
Not until they’ve been tested.
Testing helps you confirm that your reports work and meet business needs.
At this stage, you’ll check that your visuals are showing the right data, filters and interactions work smoothly, and calculations are correct. You do this by going into your data source and comparing the data there with your data in Power BI dashboard.
You may also do usability testing with other team members. Their feedback will help you identify issues with report layout, interactivity, or design.
Performance testing will help you check if the report loads quickly even with large datasets.
And finally, role-based testing to make sure security roles and permissions are applied correctly and users only see the data they’re supposed to see.
This is all about making sure when your reports go live, they deliver the right insights to the right people, efficiently and accurately.
If you’re used to sending reports by email, this will be a big improvement for you.
Once your reports have been thoroughly tested and finalized, you can use Power BI Service to securely publish and distribute reports so team members can interact with and explore the insights directly.
Power BI automates insight circulation in your organization which is important for driving real business value with data and BI.
Now that you have a Power BI implementation plan to work with, let’s talk about some pitfalls that could disrupt your progress and negatively impact your business outcome.
Imagine spending weeks on creating your Power BI implementation plan and then you have to change it on the go. Unfortunately this is a very common scenario and many projects fail because of extra effort that needs to go into them.
This scenario is more common when you are analysing processes that frequently change. The less frequently your process changes, the more you can plan in advance for how to measure it. It is therefore important to make sure you have enough stability in the business process before creating a Power BI dashboard to support it.
If before starting the project you feel like the needs are going to change soon, there is no point creating a Power BI implementation plan. Instead use a more agile development methodology where you do multiple iterations and take the user feedback as you go.
This is the most frustrating pitfall for Power BI implementation because it follows a successful creation of reports. Why does this happen?
Sometimes managers feel like Power BI reports are highly needed but this feeling is not shared by the team. Everyone who will use Power BI reports needs to be onboard before you go ahead with the Power BI implementation.
Some of our clients take our Power BI dashboard wireframes to their team and ask them “If you had a dashboards that looked like this would you use it?”. This simple step gets overlooked by many teams but we feel it is very effective in ensuring user adoption.
It is also important that the managers use the dashboards once they are developed. If the management will not use them, their teams will follow suit. It is therefore useful to include the managers throughout the Power BI implementation process to ensure their buy-in early.
When reports load slowly, this leads to bad user experience, frustration and lack of user adoption. A poor user experience naturally leads to adoption problems.
This gets worse when dealing with large datasets. Without proper data modeling and efficient queries, reports will load slowly or perform poorly and users will get frustrated and adoption will be challenging.
Poor performance will have a ripple effect on the entire Power BI implementation – causing delays and even making Power BI feel unresponsive as the business grows.
It is therefore important to be aware of the good data modeling practices when designing the reports. The earlier you catch that the reports load slowly, the easier it will be to optimize them.
Power BI is easy to use at first but to get full proficiency requires deep knowledge of its advanced features.
Without proper training, your business may struggle to create good reports or use the tool to its full potential.
Users without expertise will make costly mistakes and be inefficient. Without internal expertise, your team will struggle to maintain, update, and optimize reports and ultimately won’t be able to use Power BI to its full capabilities.
Training and skill development are key to getting the most out of your Power BI investment and having your team self-manage and optimize the platform.
We have delivered 1000+ Power BI dashboards for 600+ clients around the world including US, UK, Europe and Australia. We feel that our experience enables us to properly plan and execute Power BI implementation of projects of any size.
Let our experienced Power BI consultancy take care of your Power BI implementation! We would develop your implementation plan, verify it with you and update you regularly as we move forward. Reach out today to discuss your Power BI project!
