Lucas Noah 
Important Questions to Ask Before Building Any Power BI Report
If you are building Power BI reports at your organization, all the people will always come to you with requests. Data analyst’s main role is to ask the right questions before they create any tools that your team will use regularly, like reports and dashboards. for organizations looking to get started, it’s beneficial to hire Power BI developer to streamline the initial setup and address any technical requirements. In 2019 there is a 30% growth in adoption of analytics and business intelligence platforms. Power BI is characterized by its easy-to-use functionality. If we make any Power BI reports without collaborating and understanding requirements, these reports will not be useful. But if we go into detail about requirements and create reports, it will get more useful and higher value for the organization.
First Ask These Questions, and Then You’re Ready to Build
To build Power BI reports for the organization we must discuss and open conversations with our team members in detail so for that we must ask questions for different purposes.
What is the Purpose?
This is the first and very important question to ask to know the purpose of reports. The main purpose of asking is we can make a valuable and useful tool that users can use without hesitation.
We must ask the user how they are going to use the report so he can define the purpose. We must ask questions like Do they need to review business or resource performance? The purpose is also to know that they are reporting to their boss or their team. Power BI is a strong solution but for the best use, we must deal with both people and processes.
Who Is the User?
We must understand the audience to know why these reports are needed so they will be very useful and valuable. There is a lot of difference in the need for a manager, an executive, and a group of analysts.
There are some techniques we can use to generate reports. One of the technique names is ladder design, it is very useful when we must decide to go high-level or low-level with data. There are different types of requirements and an executive needs enterprise data from a high level some executives don’t need all the details, but it’s there if they need to see the numbers behind big targets. The best way to understand the requirement is to talk to the user and for that, we can do a meeting with the user and understand their requirements and challenges. We can also face some complexity based on who is the end user.
What About the Data?
We must identify some details about the data before building Power BI reports, such as.
- What the data source is.
- Where data is located.
- How data will be accessed.
We must know for Power BI reports like if this is an Excel file that people can download and load into a SharePoint folder or if it is a SQL database where users need special permission to access data.
4. What Are the Metrics?
So, now we get the purpose of reports so it’s time to build Power BI reports. If we want to present a report, then there are some key points like KPI. KPI includes total sales, total expenses, gross profit, and gross profit percentage. We also must consider the time intelligence metrics during this phase. After that, the next step is to look at how we want to slice and dice this data to filter. We can filter data in different ways time intelligence aspect, it’s like year, quarter, and month, and by categorical aspect, like territory, region, and customer. Leverage Power BI consulting services to make your Power BI reports more dynamic and improve decision-making.
5. Which Design Will Work Best?
Design is more important and useful than many data analysts because it helps users both comprehend and trust the data. When elements or data are not set properly then the user will ask questions about the quality of reports.
If we generate well-designed reports that will help increase adoption. We must check with the user to see if Power BI visuals need to be modified and if something else is causing issues.
How Are You Ensuring Data Quality?
Quality of data is a key factor and very important in report development. If we make any mistakes and show wrong data in reports, then no one will trust us and no one will use it. Get help from experts with Power BI consulting services to maintain the data quality and keep your data up to date.
We can schedule an automated refresh of our data using Power BI. Automated refresh is more batten than a manual process. It will create a big difference in data quality if we refresh the data.