Here are my tactics on how to introduce Power BI Metrics to your business
Empowering Organizations with Power BI Metrics: A Journey of Performance Tracking Transformation at Origin Housing
Every organization, regardless of industry, strives to reach its goals. Understanding how close or far we are from achieving these objectives is crucial for growth and success. To do this, we need readily available data to track our performance.
In this article, I will share how Origin Housing is transforming its performance tracking by utilizing Power BI Metrics, a data-driven solution for measuring key business metrics.
The Challenge: Tracking Goals
Organizations have access to vast amounts of data, but tracking goals remains a challenge. Many still rely on manually calculated scorecards. A typical ‘Data Services’ team oversees the calculation and tracking of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or Objective Key Results (OKRs). However, to be data-driven, performance tracking should be readily available without relying on manual calculations.
The Solution: Power BI Metrics
Origin Housing already uses Power BI for data visualization, making it a logical step to trial Metrics, a collaborative and adaptable way to measure key business metrics. To leverage Metrics, a dashboard in Power BI displays the data needed to track KPIs.
To harness the real value of Metrics, it is about having a dashboard within Power BI along with the data you need to track the KPI. We began by identifying how many KPIs we were already tracking in a report on Power BI. With this information Once we knew how many teams could have their KPI information fully automated.
Early Adopters
We identified a handful of teams which could be part of an early adopters group. The prerequisite was that all their data was connected to our data warehouse, or the data was easy to access. The People team (Human Resources) were identified as our initial team to work with and demonstrate the value of Power BI Metrics to. The People team already had an extensive set of dashboards in Power BI, so it made it straightforward for us to create a Metrics report.
The benefits of the new system were clear for all to see, the time saved (4 days a month for the team), the ability to trust the data and the shift in a snapshot of last month to being able to see at any time where there were in terms of performance throughout the month.
The analysis of all our KPIs
At Origin Housing there are over 200 KPIs across the organisation and based on what we are tracking today, 12% could be automated from a dashboard or report we already had. Further analysis found that we could reach up to 40% with relative ease, the remainder would be harder to do as it is manually calculated and not from a system source. There would be a mixture of fully automated, hybrid and manual scorecards as some KPIs could be calculated and others couldn’t.
Automation is key
After creating a scorecard for each of the teams, we transferred the data from the manual Excel based scorecards. Where we could, we would connect the KPI directly to a Power BI dashboard source. This is where the value of Power BI kicks in, as you no longer need to worry about someone calculating the data and inputting it each month.
1,140 hours (47.5 days) a year lost by staff manually managing this process.
Once the data is connected to a goal, all you need to do is set a cycle as to how often you want the goal to be tracked and then add your commentary to it. We demonstrated the benefits of the system to our organisation leads and within a few weeks, we had begun the adoption of Power BI Metrics.
We are now working on creating dashboards, which connect to the data sources we need to be able to automate the remaining metrics. In the meantime, some staff will still need to manually calculate and update the goal with the data but there is still value in beginning the adoption now.
The system has useful tools such as being able to see the owner for a goal and visual ques to be able to see whether a goal is on track, behind or overdue. These can be automated as well, so you don’t need to manually change labels, just by adding in the values will trigger a rule as to whether it should move from on track to at risk.
The drawbacks of adopting Power BI Metrics early
Power BI Metrics is still in a preview phase of its application lifecycle, however there is more than enough to get you started, without any blockers. The future roadmap has a lot of exciting capabilities that are coming later this year.
- A scorecard visual is coming to Power BI Desktop to enable you to place a scorecard alongside other visuals directly in your reports Power Automate
- Integration — You will be able to automate your business workflows based on triggers and actions such as a goal changing status Cascading of Goals
- Transform scorecards from self-service to an enterprise solution. Users will be able to define a hierarchy based on their Power BI data model (e.g., a geographical or product hierarchy) and automatically cascade their data driven goals across all the various levels.
To learn more about the roadmap and plans for Power BI Goals visit: Roadmap | Microsoft Power BI
Next steps
The adoption of Power BI Metrics is just the beginning of our shift away from relying on manual processes and data. The need to be able to automate the calculation of our KPIs from a system is crucial if we are to be able to track a goal in real time. Like with any new system or process, the embedding and onboarding will be our immediate area of focus.
Our vision is for individuals in the business to have access and see our organisations KPIs, for managers to talk to their teams about the data, for leaders to collaborate and share their challenges. It’s from these conversations and awareness of the data that we feel that innovative ideas will help grow the organisation.
