- June 28, 2023
- Power BI
No, actually, you are just getting started! 🚀
I've been a Power BI consultant for almost 7 years now and in my experience, the hardest part of all of Power BI is to produce a report that is actually used by your report users. Just sending an email to your users with a link to the report, in my experience, has very little chance of success.
What you need to start off by is organizing a kick-off meeting / user adoption session with your report users. What I've found to work best is to follow along with this agenda:📆
1. Business Introduction to the report:
🧑🏻💼
Make sure this is done by someone from the team who is well respected among the rest of the team. That could very well be the manager of the team but that is not necessarily the case. This individual should give a presentation in which the importance of the report is clarified and a sense of urgency is created.
2. Technical introduction to the report:
👷🏻
Then you come in and go about explaining how to navigate the report. Make sure you tailor this to the report users taking into account things like whether they're already familiar with Power BI.
3. Tailored training:
🏫
Prepare a few questions to be answered by the report users. How much was sales vs budget two years ago for client X given in a percentage? A few questions like that. In my experience, there are always a few users that have a hard time coming up with the answers to all of the questions. In this setting, you can help them out and clarify the report.
So now you're done right? 👍
No, you are still not done!!!
Again, in my experience, only a few report users will proactively approach you with their questions and remarks about the report. They are busy people with more on their minds than just your report. But, if you proactively organize a follow-up meeting where you ask for feedback, users will usually attend and tell you all sorts of things about the report they want different, added, skipped etc.
Done right? 👍
No, you are still not done!!!
Next, you're going to incorporate the feedback and schedule a next follow up meeting to discuss. If the report is business critical, you'll find that you're going to iterate this way multiple times in order to reach a report that truly satisfies your users info requirements. And, on some periodic interval, it is important to keep running this cycle to ensure that the report remains up to date and relevant.
So actually, you need to continuously improve the report and, therefore, are never actually "done"!
