PM’s/Project Controllers – PowerBI = Best Friend

Pictured on the left is an example of what PowerBI can do for management teams and project controllers. What you see depicted is an idea of the direct charging, overhead, and different indirect charges for my client on a month by month basis. Each piece of data can be interacted with and will update all the other visualizations within the report. This would then be published online in Microsoft’s PowerBI cloud environment and distributed to the appropriate team members. Once published, the data can be refreshed periodically at predefined intervals. For this client it was updated right after the time sheets were submitted, allowing the project team and the executive immediate visibility as projects were completed – key for an Engineering, Procurement, and Construction company.

 

 

What’s great is the ability to mashup different data sources. The data you are extracting from the company’s accounting system doesn’t have the data bucketed correctly? No problem, let’s create a mapping file in Excel, load it up, and BAM! You can now present the data in a completely different way. Again, this played into financial statements for the client. They had a number of organizations (think departments) defined, but not how those departments rolled up into divisions. A quick ten minutes in Excel (which was stored in SharePoint Online, making sure it was versioned and easily changed by the Finance team when the time came to reorganize the divisions) and we had the mapping done and loaded. We also used a similar tactic to define their income statements and account roll-ups.

 

 

Pictured above is what we created for the Project Controllers. Every single hour by every single employee and contractor could be inspected from a high level all the way down to each timesheet – on a single page! Within this environment, project controllers could see where the labour was billed to and who was billing to what buckets. We can see the amount of overtime by project and we could easily filter by company, by the employee, etc. All this with the same set of data as in the first picture and a couple hours of tweaking visualizations.

 

It’s so easy to get started with PowerBI. To create the reports, Microsoft doesn’t charge anything. You can download the product and start using it. Nothing costs until you want to start to share the reports. At that point, you’ll pay about $12/user/month Canadian($9.99 US) for the Pro membership. And Microsoft releases updates to the product every month! There have been so many significant additions over the last twelve months that if you haven’t checked it out recently, you might be in for a shock. If you’re not having success with the tool, the only thing you’ve committed to is the time you’ve invested to set up PowerBI on a workstation.

 

We’ve used PowerBI at a number of organizations now and the management team and frontline staff really love it. The divisional leaders at our last client had so much more visibility to what was happening in the operation and the Finance team was having fun digging into the capabilities and using it all over the place. The last thing we did was to quickly pull a special complex report together to prove out the Input Tax Credits to the CRA. Something the finance system wasn’t capable of doing and had quite an impact on the company.

 

If you’d like more information, reach out for a one on one discussion.