Power BI is taking off, and it’s fast becoming the most popular business intelligence platform on the market. It’s easy to engage with and get professional results quickly, making it the perfect tool for organisations looking to beef up their BI prowess and make data driven decisions through-out the organisation.
In this post we’re going to look at three good practices for implementation and give you the tips you need to make sure you avoid common pitfalls so you are on the fast track to success with Power BI on your organisation.
1. Setup multiple environments
When working on a Power BI implementation project, it’s wise to have multiple environments to manage the lifecycle of your BI assets. Below we’ve listed several environments that should be considered depending on the complexity of the project and your organisation’s needs.
Development (aka Dev)
Being able to keep on top of the many reports you’re testing, and having the ability to track changes that occur, is essential as you get setup. Without a specific Dev environment, your production environment will quickly become overwhelmed with assets, making it hard to maintain and manage.
When working in the dev environment, make sure that you have data sources specifically for development. We’ve seen production data used in dev on many occasions which can lead to serious privacy and data sovereignty issues. Your dev data sources shouldn’t contain sensitive data.
These development environments can be on your local network or in cloud storage (like OneDrive for Business or GitHub). It is recommended to have separate Workspaces in Power BI Service for each environment.
Tip: The data sources of all published reports to Power BI Service must be sufficient for development use only and should avoid including confidential data.
User Acceptance Testing (aka UAT)
The people who will be using the reports daily are the ones who should be testing them – they know the business best, and will be able to identify opportunities and gaps that the development team may not be able to identify themselves. By making sure the user is brought into the process early on, it maximises the value added to the business.
User acceptance testing is the last phase of testing. The UAT environment should only be created once the solution has been fully tested in Dev and approved by senior Power BI developers.
Continue reading “Power BI Governance, Good Practices, Part 1: Multiple Environments, Data Source Certification and Documentation”
