3 Power BI Project Dashboards for SharePoint

Microsoft Power BI is a collection of services, apps, and connectors used for reporting across numerous data sources.

Read more: BrightWork Power BI integration for SharePoint

A business intelligence tool, Power BI allows users to create attractive, interactive reports and dashboards to transform data into actionable insights.

The beauty of Power BI is anyone in your organization can generate engaging reports and insights without complex coding or a background in statistics. The application does the heavy lifting for you!

Power BI leverages connectors to import and standardize data from a range of sources, including SharePoint.

Connecting a SharePoint project site to Power BI simplifies and accelerates project reporting. Instead of wasting time gathering data from multiple sources, project teams can analyze ready-made dashboards to understand project progress.

In this article, you’ll learn more about the BrightWork Power BI Pack for project reporting. The pack connects to and reports on BrightWork project sites, surfacing key information such as project status and risks in interactive dashboards.

This article focuses on the Power BI consumer, an end-user who receives and interacts with dashboards and reports.

BrightWork Power BI Pack

The BrightWork Power BI pack for SharePoint is a pre-built report with six dashboards.

The pack connects to the three BrightWork project data sources — Project Cache, Work Cache, and Project Status Report Cache — for complete insight into projects and portfolios.

Aimed at senior executives and project managers, the Power BI pack includes:

• Portfolio dashboards with a roll-up summary of all project sites. The dashboard offers four filtering options: “Project Status,” “By Project Manager,” “By Project type,” “By Department,” and “By Priority.
• Portfolio timeline, a Gantt view of all project sites. Drill down by year, quarter, month, week, and day.
• Project and Task Timeline, a Gantt view of projects and tasks. Filter by project name, project type, project manager, and task owner.
• Work Reports allow project managers to check the status of tasks, risks, issues, and goals.
• The Status Report Dashboard includes RAG indicators, weekly updates, highlights, lowlights, and next steps.
• The Issue Report helps project managers to get further information on issues, including the task-owner.

The six reports include direct links to the relevant project site in BrightWork, providing more context and information.

In the rest of this article, we’ll take a closer look at project reporting with Power BI and BrightWork.

Let’s start with tracking the project timeline. We’ll also cover project status reporting and active tasks.

3 Power BI Project Dashboards for SharePoint

1. Tracking the Project Timeline

The ‘Project Timeline’ dashboard is an interactive Gantt chart with various filtering options:

• All projects
• Individual projects
• Project type
• Project manager
• Date started (year, quarter, month, week, and day).

Tasks are listed by status with color-coding for ‘in progress’, ‘not started’, or ‘waiting on someone else’.

With this information, project managers and teams can plan work, balance workloads, and manage vacation requests with more accuracy.

In the below video, Traci Grassi, Customer Success Partner, explains how to use the dashboard.

2. Project Status Reporting

A project status report is a useful way to capture details about a project at a given time.

The report typically includes red-amber-green (RAG) indicators and other relevant information.

Using the ‘Project Metrics List’ in a BrightWork site, this dashboard allows project managers to filter and view data by:

• Health status
• Time status
• Issue status
• Project name.

The dashboard also incorporates text such as comments, and notes on work completed and work planned.

In this short video, see how to review project status reports in one visual dashboard.

The Project Status dashboard keeps your team and stakeholders in-the-loop with accurate, visual information.

Use the dashboard as a discussion point in meetings and to help with regular project re-planning.

3. Managing Active and Late Items

Answering questions about the status of your projects just became much easier with this dashboard. As explained in the below video, project managers can:

• Drill down into projects by ‘assigned to’.
• Check the status of tasks, risks, issues, and goals.
• Review individual items in the underlying SharePoint project site.

BrightWork Power BI Services

The BrightWork Power BI Pack is available to BrightWork customers and is delivered by our Customer Success Team.

To learn more about these services and reaching your project management goals with BrightWork, please contact Customer Success (existing customers) or our Sales team.