6 Benefits of Power BI – a revolution for data-driven PPM

Why do organisations implement Project and PMO Portfolio Management software? 

Invariably a key objective is to get control and visibility of the project portfolio. We want to gather project information efficiently and turn it into insights to be shared with stakeholders. 

Power Framework lets you rapidly implement a personalised project database and adopt a consistent process framework. But it’s the combination with the benefits offered by Power BI that raises this solution to a higher level.

What is Power BI?

Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Your data may be an Excel spreadsheet, or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses. Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualise, and discover what's important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want.

Microsoft

As a cloud service within Microsoft 365 it’s instantly available and connects easily to a wide range of data sources. Report authors use the Power BI Desktop tool to build reports and publish them to the Power BI Cloud Service. Charts and data visuals can be combined into top level dashboards and shared with others. Users can reuse published data models to create their own reports and dashboards on the fly.

6 Benefits of Power BI

1. It works instantly – as a cloud service, Power BI spins up when you need it. 
2. Power BI can combine data sources from multiple applications – so you can connect to your accounting system, retrieve financials, and combine them with Project data. It can access your on-premise database via a gateway that is easily set up. Or bring in Excel data for ultimate flexibility.
3. Powerful enquiries – are possible thanks to PowerQuery. Out-of-the-box processes allow for complex data extracts and transformations. The resulting data model, once published to end-users, hides this complexity to make it accessible. Anyone can reuse the data to create their own reports. 
4. It’s easy to share – Power BI allows you to share insights with colleagues and external parties. Embed it into SharePoint, publish to the web, bundle reports into content packs, or export to Excel or PowerPoint. The choice is yours.
5. Power BI offers great value – to share a dashboard or view a shared one, users will need a Power BI Pro license, which comes at a cost. However, if you consider the cost of traditional BI and data warehousing platforms, Power BI offers great value. 
6. People love it – whoever we talk to, everyone is excited about Power BI. It looks beautiful and many more organisations are choosing Power BI as their strategic BI platform. 

Power BI benefits all PMOs

The benefits of Power BI are significant. It’s the icing on the project portfolio management software cake. Power BI dashboards help you measure adoption, identify projects in trouble, share project success, measure trends, and give you the insights to drive compliance and process maturity.

You can demonstrate the value of data to others to encourage buy-in from stakeholders. Not to mention all the time saved that used to be spent manually creating and sharing reports.