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A key lesson we want you to understand is that with Power BI, you are never “done”. This is not a case of a Consultancy saying, “Oh, we’ll help you, but you’ll always need us”. The reality is that the success of your Power BI Deployment depends on your understanding of the reality of your business in that, over time, metrics and reporting requirements will change.

NOTE: As I was finishing this, Marco Russo released a video that exactly covers the “why” of this.

Semantic Models are the main functional object as far as your Analysis is concerned. However, no Sales Director or CFO ever asks for a Semantic Model. This is where the challenge and the confusion come in. The requirement is to “Automate the Monthly Metrics pack that is produced by the [A N] Team.” When that is done, the second requirement is “Automation of the monthly metrics pack for the [Other] Team”. It is entirely possible to use Power BI Desktop to build a full Power BI Semantic Model and Report for each requirement, however, if you take the time to bring both into a single semantic model and consider Semantic Models and Reports as separate work streams, then you rapidly start to deliver more than the initial request(s) had within their scope.

Beyond-scope reporting is the biggest risk faced by any Enterprise Reporting tool. What is the result when a new request arrives that cannot be met by the Enterprise platform quickly? What happens is someone determines how to extract data either from the Enterprise Reporting Platform or directly from source systems. Suddenly, you have a secondary reporting solution. Next month, the same thing happens, and again, a “temporary” solution is implemented. Fast forward one or two years, and what is in place is an Enterprise Reporting Platform that provides Excel (or CSV) extracts that are then reworked within Excel to produce Pivot Tables and Charts to meet reporting requirements. What added value is being provided by your Enterprise Reporting Platform?

This may seem to be overly dramatic, but as a consultancy that is most typically engaged by clients looking to get that first Power BI Project in place or to move Power BI from being a “glorified Excel” to an Enterprise Reporting Tool, we see this time and again. Semantic Models are your friend here and why you have to make sure as a business you commit to your Analysis and Reporting, ensuring you have the capability to keep it moving forward as part of your BAU activities. This is why we recommend and support our clients to upskill their existing internal resources to undertake these activities.

Our Back2Basics series showed very clearly in the first three weeks how you can find that early assumptions or discussions about your data models can be proven wrong when you start to build the measures. The flexibility of the models and the ability to immediately connect to them to build your own pivot tables in Excel rather than exporting data. Remember as well if you rely on a consultancy to build every aspect of your reporting platform, then your internal resources are forced to build solutions they know about. By embracing that this should be internally focused, you find that the people who would traditionally build new solutions, instead, now find themselves able to deliver solutions within the Enterprise Platform.

Remember, these internal resources do not want to create duplicate workflows, the reality for them is they have used Excel because they need to produce required report content, not because they want to devalue the enterprise platform. Bringing them into that team incentivises them to use it. After a small number of Semantic Model updates, you find that you can schedule updates on a monthly or quarterly basis, the typical response to new requests then becomes the same: “Currently, we have XX% of that available, and this can be delivered almost immediately with the remainder being folded into the next update, or we can take the time to build and export a new solution that will then need to be maintained”. When you understand that the initial requests made by people are often related to testing a hypothesis, xx% now is better than a manually built solution, especially when we remember that the first view of a new report like that will invariably lead to the response of “Oh, that is interesting, but what about ….” When that can again be explored using the existing Enterprise Model it becomes clear that Power BI is offering a very different level of agility for an organisation.

As a final point, let us assume that this latest request goes nowhere, but in a year, the same request is asked by our Board. If Power BI was used, then the secondary (thin) report(s) that were used to test can be simply opened, and the latest data will already be there. The worst case would be to remap some measures should semantic model changes have been made in the time between creation and now. If it was a manual Excel spreadsheet, then likely someone will have to figure out the source and replicate that extraction to then replicate all the work done to build the final charts or tables. So a Power BI-based solution would take between zero and an hour to build vs at least an hour (but having done this many times more likely at least a day). This capability to revisit previous ad-hoc reports almost immediately and with minimal added effort (often zero effort) is why companies that commit to the Centre of Excellence mentality benefit the most from Power BI. Wrapping a Centre of Excellence around your Reporting Platform means that you can do more with it, bring in your Analytics utilise the ETL pipelines for analysis and Data Science activities in addition to the Semantic Models.

Geordie Consulting can greatly enhance your organisation’s reporting and analysis capabilities by providing expert support to your teams. We help ensure that your deployment of Power BI remains agile and responsive to changing business metrics and reporting requirements. By upskilling your internal resources and integrating them into the enterprise platform, we enable efficient and timely updates to your reporting models. For a more structured engagement, our Centre of Excellence and Service offering ensures that your analytics and reporting framework is robust, scalable, and capable of meeting ongoing and future needs. This approach allows your organisation to fully leverage the power of Power BI, leading to more informed decision-making and greater operational efficiency.