All organisations have projects and task that enables them to achieve their business objective. Organisations are more aware than ever of the impact of driving projects and tasks through a data driven approach. It is often challenging for organisations to stay up to date on project statuses which is complicated through the use of multiple disconnected systems. Power BI Premium now offers the ability to seamlessly create scorecards where goals can be managed and tracked.
Today we are going to show you how to create a project plan in Power BI Premium and how this can be used to increase visibility in your organisation. Goals in Power BI Premium is a data driven approach to track key metrics and goals in a collaborative and adaptable manner in Power BI. These goals allows users to easily track Power BI projects and measure the health of their business.
Goals Overview
To create your first Goals project, select the Goals icon on the left hand navigation pane in Power BI Service. A scorecard represents a project and within each scorecard there can be multiple goals where each goal consists of sub-goals.
We will select our Scorecard called Project Infinity. From the Scorecard view we enter the Goals view. The Goals view gives a very data driven overview to how each of the goals and sub-goals are progressing.
- Collaboration and sharing – goals easily allows you to collaborate on teams and outlook as well as sharing the link to goals
- Overall project statuses – goals provide a summary view of where each one on your goals are tracking
- Goal and sub-goal name – this is the name of your goal
- The Goal owner – the person responsible for the goal
- Goal status – goals allows you to choose between 6 different statuses for a certain goal
- Value – you can set goal values either manually or through a connection to another Power BI workspace
- Goal progress graph – graphical display of the progress of each goal
- Start & due date – manually set the due date and start date for each goal
- Notes – allows you to take notes so that you can keep critical meeting notes in one place
Collaboration and Sharing
Project collaboration and sharing of critical information on projects is now more important than ever before. People are in different locations that requires and extra focus on transparency of project statuses as well as mediums that will drive employee collaboration. Goals provides a seamless way to interact directly in teams or to share project among team members.
Overall project statuses
Goals gives a great overview of the health of your goal. It allows you to see at a glimpse how many goals are on track, not started, overdue etc.
Goal status
Goals have a built statuses to choose from. We find that the six statuses that you can choose from is sufficient and keeps things simple. Often when projects or goals consists of too many statuses the impact and importance of those statuses are often lost.
Goal progress value
Each goal or sub goal have a current value as well as a target value. To update the value we either fill in the value manually or connect the value to a data source in the Power BI Service. A good example of goals that can be connected to a data source is tracking sales data or tracking new client sign-on for the month or year. The key here is to determine which company data is processed automatically and can be imported to better track the progress of projects.
Let’s have a closer look at connecting the status values to a data source. From the above image we select connect to data in order to connect to one of our datasets. After selecting connect to data a screen will appear from where you select the data source that contains the specific data.
From here you can select any value from a graph or a table. This is very useful as you can just tap into existing dashboards or reports. We simply selected a value from one of our sales tables as an example.
After selecting the data it pulls through to your current or target value and updates as your data updates. This is an incredibly useful way to measure certain business metrics that forms part of larger projects.
Goal progress graph
The graph is simply a duplicate of the current value. It is an extremely important view as it gives a visual queue of the progress of each goal. It also indicates a goal that is delaying another goal or goals that is moving backwards for some reason.
Notes
Goals allows you to add notes on each goal. You simply select the goal that you want to see the details off. Accordingly, all the dates of status updates as well as notes are visible. Furthermore, this leaves a great paper trail of each step in the process. We find this functionality that seems very simple extremely useful. This allows you to keep those critical meeting notes on hand when questions are asked about the progress of certain goals and why certain goals are ahead or behind schedule.
This is all for today’s introduction to Goals in Power BI Premium. Although this feature is still in the preview phase with a lot of improvements to come, we believe it is worthwhile to start incorporating it into your organisation. Project management is often a labor intensive task to keep up to date. Furthermore, projects gets delayed because of poor goal tracking and updating. We hope this will enable your organisation to a more data driven way of managing projects.
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