In podcast #286 we take the time to review an older video of John Cleese giving a talk about the Creative Process in Management. We thought this would be an outstanding conversation to draw parallels to the Business Intelligence world. There are so many different areas we can apply creative thinking in implementing Fabric & Power BI solutions.

You can check out that video by John Cleese here -> https://youtu.be/Pb5oIIPO62g?si=66KNV2I8p5ZlESzz

Episode 286 – Creativity in Power BI

Talking Points:

• What is Creativity, and what strategies can we use to be more creative?
• Discussion centered around the concept of being creative in handling data, building reports and fostering a data culture.
• Emphasize that creativity is not a talent but a mode of operation and discussed its relevance in the field of Business Intelligence.

Key Topics:

Where does creativity lie:

• Discussed the distinction between open and closed states.
• Strategies to foster creativity and measure its benefits.
• Dedicated time for creative thinking, challenging the conventional to-do list approach.
• Creating an oasis of quiet for pondering and problem-solving.
• Embracing humor as a catalyst for transitioning from closed to open thinking.

Overcoming Barriers:

• Identifying common obstacles to creativity within organizations dealing with technology and data.
• Evaluating the balance between analytical rigor and creative exploration in Power BI.

Applications and Tips:

• Exploring creativity in the adoption of BI practices, report building, and its application in day-to-day operations.
• Building reports with an open mindset.
• Allowing time for pondering before making decisions.
• Encouraging positive collaboration within a community.
• Applying the “art of the possible” by exploring new ideas.

Meeting Creativity:

• Examining the impact and value of injecting creativity into BI processes for organizational growth.
• Introducing humor in meetings to foster creativity.
• Building on ideas without fear of right or wrong.
• Utilizing random connections for innovative solutions.
• Creating a positive environment by avoiding negativity.

Report Building Process:

• Front-loading creativity in requirements gathering.
• Incorporating creative thinking in model design and building calculations for visuals.

This podcast episode is a treasure trove of insights for BI professionals looking to infuse creativity into their work, ultimately contributing to more innovative and effective business intelligence solutions. You can listen to the full conversation on the Explicit Measures podcast here:

As a special add-on for your enjoyment Tommy came up with a whole slew of jokes in the same vein that John Cleese told in the presentation. Feel free to use them in your next creative meeting!

Jokes Created by Tommy Puglia:

How many data scientists does it take to change a light bulb?
Three. One to replace the bulb, and two to model whether it was the most cost-effective light bulb choice.

How many machine learning experts does it take to change a light bulb?
Just one, but it will take thousands of tries to learn how to do it properly.

How many business analysts does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Two. One to assure everyone that everything is going according to the plan while the other screws the bulb into the water faucet.

How many BI consultants does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Only one, but they’ll first conduct a cost-benefit analysis to determine if the light bulb change will add value.

How many marketing analysts does it take to change a light bulb?
One, but they’ll also rebrand the room to make it look brighter.

How many sales analysts does it take to change a light bulb?
Just one, but they’ll convince you to upgrade to a smart bulb with a subscription plan.

How many data warehouse architects does it take to change a light bulb?
Two: one to change the bulb and another to ensure it integrates seamlessly with the existing lighting infrastructure.

How many AI developers does it take to change a light bulb?
They won’t. They’ll train a neural network to predict when the bulb will burn out and preemptively send a drone to replace it.

How many cloud storage experts does it take to change a light bulb?
None. They’ll just store light in the cloud and access it as needed.

How many Business Analysts does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Just one, but they will first interview everyone in the room to define the requirements for the ‘ideal light’ experience.

How many Data Analysts does it take to change a light bulb?
Two. One to replace the bulb, and the other to tell everyone how much brighter it could be with just a few more data points.

How many stakeholders does it take to change a light bulb?
Four. One to ask for a greener bulb, one to demand a cost-effective solution, one to insist on a smart bulb, and one to question why the bulb needs changing at all.

How many report requesters does it take to change a light bulb?
None. They’ll just ask for a daily report on the status of the light bulb but never actually replace it.

How many Data Analysts does it take to screw in a light bulb?
One, but by the time they’ve finished analyzing the best method, the technology for light bulbs has already changed.

How many stakeholders does it take to change a light bulb?
Five. One to change it and four to form a committee that debates whether it was better the old way.

How many report requesters does it take to change a light bulb?
None. They just keep requesting status updates on the darkness.

How many BI Consultants does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Two. One to assure the client that they’re leveraging cutting-edge lightbulb technology, and the other to outsource the actual screwing in to an intern.

How many BI Consultants does it take to change a light bulb at a large corporation?
An entire team, but the project will take three years and by the end, they’ll switch to a completely different kind of bulb.

In the day to day operations of businesses speed of delivery, cost effectiveness, and satisfaction of outcome is a trifecta of challenges we run against as report authors. Picking and choosing what parts to deliver, and when, determines the overall success of a given report. However, we typically can’t do all at the same time. As a result, we need to keep in mind that there should be a process or cycle of continuous improvement to ensure we are making the biggest impact to the business. In this episode we dive into these areas and more to discuss how to improve upon our solutions and what tips & tricks you can use to ensure you are continuously improving user experience.

Ways to Improve User Experiences

A few ideas that we mull over and explore in depth are how do you elicit or collect the feedback that would prompt you as the report author to understand what areas you could improve upon. Are you performing surveys? Are you analyzing or generating reports off the metrics that you have access to via the Power BI Service to understand usage. Are you tracking and managing against the overall influx of requests or tickets and are those going down as you solve problems? Are there tools that would help you dive deep into the tracking and dependencies of a report? We answer all these and more so be sure to check out our conversation.

Recommendations

Mike 

• Less is more – Use less visuals on a report page 
• Add documentation  
• MSFT open source project for tracking usage

Tommy 

• Build training for the report 
• Have a road show for the report 
• How do you measure educating users on reports 
• Quarterly report surveys 
• Number of people filling out survey 
• Usage of report 
• How many people are asking for access? 
• Is the 30 day usage views, Active users  

Seth 

• Add a tab to explain how to use portions of the report 
• Build an index report for use in Apps 
• Focus on areas of the business the use Power BI the most and least 
• Have open feedback sessions 

If you like the content from PowerBI.Tips, please follow us on all the social outlets to stay up to date on all the latest features and free tutorials.  Subscribe to our YouTube Channel, and follow us on Twitter where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content. Alternatively, you can catch us on LinkedIn (Seth) LinkedIn (Mike) where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content.

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Themes are the bedrock of consistency. As report authors it is important to create a consistent experience in a single, series or multitude of reports. With a little forethought you can easily build reports that exhibit the same fonts, properties and many other aspects with a Power BI Theme. If you aren’t using a theme and you build reports, its time you learn about them and put them into your arsenal.

Using Power BI Themes

Themes are available in a simple form in the Power BI Desktop and you can set color templates and some global properties for fonts and sizes. You can read more about that in Microsoft’s documentation here. However, themes go much, much deeper than that. You can set almost any visual property to a pre-configured setting. This greatly simplifies building a report, and creates a consistent experience across all your report pages. A single theme can be applied and removed from the Power BI desktop with ease.

Are Power BI Themes Hard to Build?

Creating a custom theme on your own would be hard… very hard. The theme files are built using the JSON format and have grown in complexity over the years. So, its highly unlikely that you are going to endeavor to build your own. Lucky for you, we love themes and created one of the first and most widely used theme generator to minimize the time it takes you to build a comprehensive theme to maximize your efforts. You can find and use that tool for free here. Another great resource has been provided by Matt Rudy, be sure to check out his Git repo. One of the key reminders when using themes: Make sure you don’t customize any properties in your report before applying a theme because they won’t be applied.

Discussion

We tackle all there is to know about implementation, when and how to best use themes and how to maximize your experience using themes in your Power BI reports in this episode. Be sure to join us to learn more.

If you like the content from PowerBI.Tips, please follow us on all the social outlets to stay up to date on all the latest features and free tutorials.  Subscribe to our YouTube Channel, and follow us on Twitter where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content. Alternatively, you can catch us on LinkedIn (Seth) LinkedIn (Mike) where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content.

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First of all, go read this amazing blog put out by Alberto Ferrari over at SQLBI that he posted awhile ago. It is the context for the conversation we had and is well worth the read. 7 Reason DAX is Not Easy If you are new to DAX you will find a wealth of deep, insightful and helpful content in anything you find on SQLBI. Marco and Alberto are amazing guru’s in DAX and tabular models and have been perfecting their craft and helping the wider community hone their skills for many years.

I’m not going to re-hash the article as you should go read it yourself on their site. The points we talk about in depth in the podcast relate to focusing on the best methods to approaching and learning DAX. We take our experiences and the methods we learned and discuss at length the different points made in the article. Explore with us how you get better and overall simplify your process when building or troubleshooting DAX.

Key Takeaways

Tommy

Practice with Intent

Understand each part of the calculation

Reverse engineer Calculations

Seth

Start Simple

Break down the problem to simple forms

Use variables and tables to build measures

Mike

Use Community Tools –

Power BI Side Tools (Download with Business Ops)

DAX Generator

If you like the content from PowerBI.Tips, please follow us on all the social outlets to stay up to date on all the latest features and free tutorials.  Subscribe to our YouTube Channel, and follow us on Twitter where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content. Alternatively, you can catch us on LinkedIn (Seth) LinkedIn (Mike) where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content.

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This topic was gleaned from the absolute wealth of knowledge put down in the MSFT Power BI Adoption Roadmap. We highly recommend you check the full roadmap. In this episode, we focused in on Data Culture, this topic is a bit ambiguous as it relates to how you measure the outcome or success of your organizations data culture. Despite that, we took a good shot and covered quite a bit of ground and came up with some good ideas of how to better measure and determine how to build, how to measure and challenges organizations face when embarking on increasing the value of decision making based on data.

Its a Culture Thing

“You know it when you have it, and you know it went you don’t.” – Mike Carlo

“If you are trying to measure culture, you are really just trying to measure behavior.” – Tommy Puglia

“It’s pattern changing of people… one of the largest challenges any organization will have..” – Seth Bauer

How do you Measure it?

Behaviors are hard to measure, but you can put things in place to evaluate it. Tommy uses his sociology degree and brings up a good point in that there are ways in which we can directly and indirectly measure culture. Overall, the time invested in each of the different areas of the adoption roadmap will indicate how successful the data culture is. Success metrics are pointed out in how widely available data is to the organization.

Is it easy for individuals to find, access and use the right data at the right time? When they find it, do they know what it means? As organizations begin to invest time and resources in building out areas of the adoption roadmap the better and stronger they become at making data based decisions. The investments start to develop patterns of behavior that drive to better outcomes. Listen for more ideas on what sort of KPIs you could measure, or different patterns and behaviors would indicate your data culture is strong.

Listen to for these key points and more in our recent conversation

Listen to the Podcast

If you like the content from PowerBI.Tips, please follow us on all the social outlets to stay up to date on all the latest features and free tutorials.  Subscribe to our YouTube Channel, and follow us on Twitter where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content. Alternatively, you can catch us on LinkedIn (Seth) LinkedIn (Mike) where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content.

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We’ve been having an amazing amount of fun having conversations on our podcast “Explicit Measures”. Join us live on Tuesdays and Thursdays on YouTube or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcast. During our podcast this last week, we talked about which method is better when trying to learn all the different aspects of Power BI, Formal vs. Self-Training. Given that the tool has been out 6+ years, there are plenty of resources available now to all end users. As such, we discussed in detail many aspects of what these approaches offer. We’re huge proponents of making sure that all individuals keep learning, and the time you invest in yourself increases your value personally and professionally. Above all, whether it is formal training, or self-training, we encourage everyone to keep learning.

Formal vs. Self-Training

Formal

Typically this type of training revolves around someone teaching you. One of the benefits of formal training is that it allows beginners and advanced users alike to accelerate their learning. The main reason is because the expert teaching can provide insights and shortcuts that have to be hard earned when doing Self-Training. Formal training will almost always be something you need to pay for.

Self-Training

Self-Training revolves around what material is out there that you find on your own. This means you are learning things as you go. A lot of the different things we learned ourselves fall into this bucket. The challenge with this method of learning is that you don’t know what you don’t know. As a result, it may take longer for you to experience the bigger issues and solve the problems without anyone guiding you. Some types of materials that support Self-Training are the Power BI Community, blogs and books. When you are researching and finding your own learning path the material is usually free.

Our Recommendations

Have your organization support your goals. Is there potential for you to tie this to your yearly goals? Is there some way you can take what you learned and share with other colleagues.

Some of our favorite Links for learning:

• SQLBI Training 
• Melissa Coates – Data Governance 
• Delta Associates

Other Questions & Areas Discussed

Is Self-Training the same thing as solving a problem for your current job need?

Practical vs. Theoretical Learning.

Is there a difference between knowing Power BI in your job vs. knowing Power BI?

Will Formal or Self-Training set you apart from others when looking for a job?

Check out the full episode below where we discuss all these things in detail.

If you like the content from PowerBI.Tips, please follow us on all the social outlets to stay up to date on all the latest features and free tutorials.  Subscribe to our YouTube Channel, and follow us on Twitter where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content. Alternatively, you can catch us on LinkedIn (Seth) LinkedIn (Mike) where we will post all the announcements for new tutorials and content.

As always, you’ll find the coolest PowerBI.tips SWAG in our store. Check out all the fun PowerBI.tips clothing and products: