Developing Power BI reports is simple, and creating basic visualizations is easy. However, with more reports and more users, maintenance gets complex, and the environment starts to be messy – just to name a few examples:

• you have many developers working simultaneously on the same data models and they overwrite the progress of one another
• your reports constantly return incorrect Revenue and Margin results, which infuriates the business
• users wait hours to get their newest data and grow impatient

All such situations lead to the fact that the potential of your Power BI platform gets greatly underutilized. This means missed sales opportunities. Missed chances to negotiate rates with your suppliers. Missed occasions to introduce a new product… and so on.

You will find below three typical scenarios in which customers requested our assistance in reorganizing their environment.

Who did that to you?

Previous IT management has successfully deployed Power BI for one of our client’s internal customers.

However, a couple of months after he took over responsibility for the platform, the following scenario occurs:

• Business users stopped consuming the reports. No-one creates their own content, be it due to incorrect training, lack of internal/external supports or missing knowledge base
• Reports are slow and often time out. At the beginning, users accepted to wait several seconds after every single click, but once historical data from previous years got added to the reports, nothing is working as it should anymore
• Data in the reports are incorrect: category mappings are wrong, identical measures are calculated according to different business rules even if they were not supposed to
• Platform upkeep costs have doubled
• The Power BI environment accumulated technological debt and has become impossible to maintain: every small evolution of a report takes weeks instead of hours

After realizing what was going on, our client wished to resolve the problem and bring the platform back on the right track.

Time to fly

The client has deployed Power BI as a pilot project in one of her departments. The tool proved to be a perfect fit for her audience. Thanks to this success, she got promoted and received the green light from top management to scale the platform out onto the whole company.

She realized this would increase tenfold the number of current users and she definitely wanted this rollout to go smoothly.

That’s when she turned to us and requested advice on the target architecture of the Power BI implementation and assistance in the creation of the tool adoption roadmap, vision and strategy.

Are we on track?

Power BI as the reporting and analytics technology has already been implemented in our client’s company and has been up and running for already several months or years.

After a couple of projects completed in Power BI, seeing that the internal team has already acquired a decent level of skills and expertise, our client was seeking support from an external partner.

The client’s objective was to perform a review of his environment and obtain guidance regarding the optimization of the development process, security, scalability, user-friendliness, and maintenance costs of his platform.

Conclusion

All the stories above proved to be the best moment to take a step back and look at a company’s Power BI architecture from a different angle. This is where Astral Forest can help you with. We share organizational and technological expertise regarding licensing schemes, solution architecture, platform configuration, adoption & technical maturity, UX, CI/CD, governance, monitoring, performance and security.

To find out more about the benefits of performing a Power BI Assessment, visit our website through this link.