The Top 9 Benefits of Power BI
Power Business Intelligence, or Power BI, is a powerful tool for businesses moving into the digital era. As we continue to value business intelligence and data, Power BI is one of the most effective tools for organisations. In this post, we uncover the Top 9 Benefits of Power BI, and explain how they will improve the efficiency of your business practices.
What is Power BI?
Power BI is a business analytics service within Microsoft’s Power Platform suite. It specialises in the connectivity, visualisation, and analysis of data. The service itself is a collection of applications and connectors that work together to build build personalised dashboards, connect data sources, build data models, and create efficient data visualisation. It’s a critical tool for the project management office (PMO), particularly for reporting on both a project and portfolio level.
The service is available in both the desktop and mobile versions of the platform. It is run on a subscription model, starting from a free desktop version, to Pro and Premium subscriptions. Fees also range from a monthly user fee to enterprise-level deployment.
Top 9 Benefits of Power BI
1. Extensive data connectivity
With PowerBI, it doesn’t matter if you’re trying to link up content from within the Microsoft ecosystem or external data sources such as JIRA, Oracle, or SAP. All your information is easily accessible through the configuration of data you choose.
2. Cost savings
Say goodbye to massive upfront licensing fees, support services, and technical experts. Power BI is easy to use and is powered by citizen development. That means that you can make your own data sets, reports, and connectors to cater to your specific needs. Additionally, extensive insights highlight ways to reduce risk and costs in the longer term—a significant benefit to organisations.
3. Multimodal support for remote working
In today’s fast-paced environment, having constant and easily accessible data is crucial. Power BI is built for both desktop and mobile versions of iOS, Android, and Windows devices. It also integrates seamlessly with Microsoft applications such as Teams, Sharepoint, and Microsoft Project. That ensures that collaboration with remote departments from your organisation is fuss-free. As a cloud-based service, all you’ll need is an internet connection to get valuable data on the fly.
4. Personalised dashboards
One of the defining features of Power BI is its extensive information dashboards. These not only tap into all internal and external data sources for quality data collection, but easily customise to meet your business needs. With drill-down functionalities and flexible drag-and-drop tiles, project teams can optimise their dashboards. These dashboards provide valuable insights down to the most specific of requirements.
5. Streamlines reporting
No more wasting time collecting data and building reports—the PowerBI dashboards are easily published and shared securely. Teams can schedule data refreshes to occur automatically so that employees will have access to real-time data with minimal effort.
6. Highly secured cloud-based data
Power BI data is stored in Microsoft’s Azure IRAP-certified data centres. This ensures the highest degree of cyber and data security. All your data is presented in real-time, but you’re also assured that none of your data can be lost or stolen. Read all about the measures which Microsoft has put in place to ensure your data security in Power BI.
7. User-friendly dashboards and data analysis
There’s no point in having great data if no one can understand it, replicate it, and use it. Power BI makes everything simple by making all necessary configurations accessible with a single click. Its real-time capability also helps with team productivity as team members can easily work on the same analytical reports at the same time.
8. Power BI community
With over 5 million subscribers and servicing over 200,000 organisations, Power BI has an extensive online community that shares ideas on how to build the best dashboard for you. Developers can also build custom report templates through Power BI API, and share them through external platforms like GitHub. When you’re scratching your head trying to optimise your dashboard, you won’t need to call up an expensive technical expert, you can simply rely on the collective experience of thousands through the internet.
9. Turning valuable data into easy actions
Data and analytics are great, but without an effective way to turn them into actual action, they have limited utility. The extensive integrative capabilities of Power BI mean that your team won’t have any problem gaining insights from your data. They can also link data to strategic objectives and build actionable ways to achieve them. Teams gain valuable insight from their dashboards, seamlessly send it through SharePoint and link it all the way through to Microsoft Project, so that every project action is built on trustworthy data.
Tap into the power of Power BI with pmo365
Our PPM experts are Power BI wizards. At pmo365, we’re all about tailoring the right solution to your needs, and we highly recommend Power BI to our clients. Make sure to book a chat with our PPM experts to see how we can take your PPM activities to the next level.
IIR: Introduce, Integrate, Replace
Step 01
Introduce
You cannot run a portfolio on Excel and PowerPoint alone.
Project portfolio management is the discipline of seeing every project in one place, prioritising the work that matters, allocating people against demand, and governing delivery with real numbers. It is not optional at any serious scale. The moment you have more projects than one person can hold in their head, you need a single, current view of status, schedule, cost, resource and risk.
Excel and PowerPoint feel free because there is no licence conversation. The real cost is elsewhere. It is the hours spent maintaining workbooks, the version confusion, and the numbers that go stale the moment they are pasted.
A spreadsheet cannot tell you, on demand, which projects are at risk, where your people are over-committed next quarter, or how much of the portfolio budget is actually spent.
Introducing a proper PPM platform is the first step. Not to add another tool for its own sake, but to give the portfolio one place where the data lives together and stays live.
Step 02
Integrate
The instinct after buying a PPM platform is to make everyone move into it. That is the fastest way to fail. Project managers already have tools they trust, and finance already has systems of record. Force a migration on day one and you get resistance, shadow spreadsheets, and a dataset nobody believes.
Integrate first. Meet the data where it already is. Two directions matter.
Direction 01
Enterprise systems
Connect to the finance or ERP layer so actuals, commitments and budgets flow in automatically. Reporting stops being a monthly reconciliation and becomes a live view. Nobody rekeys a spend figure again.
Direction 02
The tools PMs already use
The direction most platforms neglect, and arguably the more important. The portfolio should read from the PM's own tools, not force people to abandon them.
The reason this matters is simple. That data is already there, and it is kept current by the person closest to it. When the portfolio reads directly from these sources, the status report updates itself. No chasing, no copy and paste, no reporting lag. The PM keeps working the way they always have, and the board gets a live picture as a side effect.
Step 03
Replace
Integration buys you two things: trust, and live data. Once both are in place, you look at what can go.
Every organisation carries tools and spreadsheets that either do not do the job well or carry a heavy maintenance overhead. The classic example is the resource spreadsheet. It is a workbook someone maintains by hand to track who is on what. It is always slightly out of date, owned by one person, and impossible to reconcile against real demand.
Replace it with the equivalent function in your PPM.
A proper demand management capability does what the spreadsheet was reaching for, with none of the overhead. It models demand against capacity across the whole portfolio, updates as projects shift, and needs no manual upkeep.
Replace deliberately, one function at a time, and only after the platform has earned it. The test is simple: if a spreadsheet is high overhead or low quality, and the platform does the same job natively, retire the spreadsheet.
The payoff
You stop producing reports and start reading them
Follow IIR and the nature of reporting changes. The status view is current because it is fed by the tools people already use and the systems that already hold the money. The overhead that used to consume the last week of every month disappears, because there is nothing to assemble.
That is the whole point of real-time reporting. Not a prettier deck, but a portfolio you can look at any day of the month and trust, at a fraction of the effort it takes today.
Built on Microsoft 365. Native ground for IIR.
pmo365 integrates with the tools your teams already run in, so the path from Introduce to Integrate to Replace is a natural progression rather than a rip and replace.