Planning Power BI Projects
Power BI is a robust, flexible business intelligence platform enabling organizations to deploy data analysis and reporting solutions according to their individual policies and use cases. Organizations can utilize Power BI to enable self-service data analytics and visualization for business analysts, as well as deploying enterprise-grade solutions involving technical expertise and advanced security and scalability features. Likewise, Power BI fully supports both cloud and on-premises data sources as well as all primary types of reports, ranging from interactive visualizations to pixel-perfect paginated reports to Excel-based reports.
While specific organizational goals, the data landscape, and specific resource responsibilities can vary greatly, the underlying concepts, deployment choices, roles, and planning processes for business intelligence projects remain the same. The long-term success or failure of most Power BI projects is most highly correlated to the planning, organization, and effective collaboration of the different stakeholders. Solutions that deliver the most value to the business over time are the result of thoughtful decisions around the people and processes involved in data governance, data quality, data modeling, and finally data visualization and distribution.
This chapter explores the various project planning decision topics, roles, and processes critical to the success of all Power BI projects.
In this chapter, we review the following topics:
- Power BI deployment modes
- Project discovery and ingestion
- Power BI project roles
- Power BI licenses
- Dataset design
- Data profiling
- Dataset planning
To begin, we first explore the different deployment modes for Power BI.