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The Power BI platform is an incredibly versatile and powerful tool, especially in the hands of those who know how to use it. Let’s dive in and look at everything Power BI can do and why working with Power BI consulting services might make sense for your business.
Microsoft Power BI is a comprehensive business intelligence tool that includes top-tier capabilities for visualization, data modeling, data transformation (aka ETL – Extract, Transform, and Load), advanced analytics, and artificial intelligence. It is Microsoft’s flagship tool in the BI space.
Compared to its competitors, Power BI is far more comprehensive in its capabilities across the entire data pipeline. Tableau, for example, is very strong in visualization but much weaker in data modeling and ETL. Power BI is, therefore, a far more flexible and agile tool that allows businesses to quickly pivot their analyses in new directions without requiring new infrastructural investments that the other tools almost universally require.
In addition to being by far the most comprehensive and agile of the modern BI tools, Power BI is also deeply integrated with the rest of the Microsoft platform, from Office and SharePoint to Azure and Fabric. None of Power BI’s competitors bring a similar network of integrated benefits.
Somewhat counterintuitively, given its many advantages, Power BI is also far more affordable than its competitors, costing a fraction of the price of other tools. Combined with its comprehensive support for the entire BI lifecycle and its superior agility, Power BI implementation costs are often an order of magnitude more economical than projects executed with other tools.
In short, Power BI:
Let’s be clear: There’s a WIDE range of what you’ll find in terms of Power BI consultants. Given that it’s very easy to connect Power BI to a single raw data source and immediately begin building visualizations and dashboards, the barrier to entry to advertising oneself as a Power BI consultant is low. While it’s a very good thing for aspiring analysts that the tool has a gentle onramp in terms of learning curve, a frightening percentage of so-called Power BI consultants possess only surface-level knowledge of the toolset.
In the hands of those with skin-deep expertise, Power BI rarely delivers on its amazing promise. We’ve seen this first hand when we’ve been hired by companies who are considering abandoning Power BI, and we quickly discover that they were misusing its capabilities – either due to a lack of internal expertise or because they hired a consultant who overrepresented their own expertise. Applying Power BI properly, the client quickly sees wins – often within a week or two – that eluded them for months or years prior.
So, what are the skills that differentiate the pretenders from the experts? Note that these skills are important whether you are aspiring to become a Power BI consultant and/or land a Power BI consulting job but also if you are looking to hire a Power BI consulting company.
A Power BI expert consultant:
Power BI consulting rates can vary quite a bit. Some of the authorities in the space charge more than $500 an hour, whereas offshore resources can be priced under $50 an hour. Some Power BI consultants avoid hourly rates altogether and charge per-project fees, but in our experience, that only works well in narrow circumstances when the project is 100% transparently clear from the beginning. In our experience, most Power BI implementation projects inherently involve the discovery of unknowns – both obstacles AND opportunities – that were invisible before getting started. Consultants who charge per-project rates most often insulate themselves against the risk of the unknown by significantly padding and inflating their project cost rates, which can create a winner/loser dynamic relationship with the client.
We prefer to stick to hourly rates while remaining 100% committed to following the absolute most cost-effective path to delivering on our clients’ ambitions. We’d much rather win our clients’ trust – and future business – than extract a predatory margin and damage the relationship.
A “Power BI implementation” can mean one of two different things: the focused creation of a dashboard or set of dashboards to address a specific purpose or the overall adoption of Power BI as an organization’s preferred BI tool.
Focused Power BI dashboard implementations deliver immediate value to the client organization. Still, they are often the best way for an organization to evaluate Power BI for potential adoption as the tool of choice. As hinted above, these focused implementations begin with a “mind meld” between consultant and client oriented around the client’s needs and ambitions for the project.
What is the status quo? What are the pain points? How do we expect things to improve if we implement the dashboard(s)? Who will be using them, and what decisions will they be using them to make? What are the data sources that will be required, and where do those data sources “live” today?
From there, actual Power BI development can begin, taking place at three distinct layers – the reports/dashboards/visualizations layer, the data model layer (which feeds the visuals), and the ETL Power Query pipeline (which feeds the data model). Even though these layers form a natural sequence of ETL -> Data Model -> Visuals, Power BI is at its best when the consultant can rapidly iterate through all three layers nearly simultaneously.
Power BI experts think backward from the desired visuals and immediately see the data model, and ETL required to provide it. Sometimes, a single end goal can be achieved nearly effortlessly with a savvy change in one layer while being prohibitively expensive if shoehorned into one of the other two layers. If a Power BI consultant rigidly locks themself into a sequential or waterfall approach to the three layers, these efficient solutions elude them.
Suppose implementation instead means adopting Power BI as the organization’s preferred BI tool. In that case, the focus is obviously not on any single need but rather on instituting an effective org-wide culture and capability. Identification of audiences and roles is an important and often neglected first step. Who will be your authors, your consumers, your administrators, and your invested stakeholders? Your authors will be your Power BI developers but also your primary Power BI ambassadors – the advocates for the tool as well as the go-between where all of the other audiences’ concerns meet. These authors will be the primary targets of your adoption plan.
Power BI instructor-led training and/or pre-recorded Power BI courses will be valuable primarily to them, and these Authors are also often the right people to cooperate with Power BI-partner consulting firms on specific projects in the early going. In our experience, training is most effective when immediately followed by the execution of a Power BI project in collaboration with a more seasoned Power BI expert.
It can be hard to say who is the best consultant for your needs objectively. But there ARE definitely things to look for.
The best Power BI consulting firms:
If that sounds like a lot to look for, good news. Personally, we think you’ve already found the best right here (heh heh).
Once your company reaches around $25 million in annual revenue, Power BI consulting provides more than enough ROI to be a significant net positive, as long as you’re hiring the right kind of firm. We like to joke that “if there’s money at stake in your organization, and you have data, we can help.”
At that scale, even a modest 1% profitability improvement more than pays for itself very quickly. Organizations of that size tend to possess already more than enough data richness to mine for value (and sufficient complexity to overcome). Those sorts of gains are nearly always attainable.
Other specific indicators include:
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