Power BI project roles
Following the review of the project template and input from the business analyst, members of the Power BI team directly engage the project sponsor and other key stakeholders to officially engage in the project. These stakeholders include SMEs on the data source systems, business team members knowledgeable about the current state of reporting and analytics, and administrative or governance personnel with knowledge of organizational policies, available licenses, and current usage.
New Power BI projects of any significant scale and long-term adoption of Power BI within organizations require Dataset Designers, Report Authors, and Power BI Admin(s), as illustrated in the following diagram:
Figure 1.5: Power BI team roles
Each of the three Power BI project roles and perhaps longer-term roles as part of a business intelligence team entail a distinct set of skills and responsibilities. It can be advantageous in a short-term or POC scenario for a single user to serve as both a dataset designer and a report author. However, the Power BI platform and the multi-faceted nature of Corporate BI deployments are too broad and dynamic for a single BI professional to adequately fulfill both roles.
It’s recommended that team members either self-select or are assigned distinct roles based on their existing skills and experience and that each member develops advanced and current knowledge relevant to their role. For example, individuals with a user experience and user interface (UX/UI) background are generally best suited to fulfill the Report Author role. Conversely, more technical developers with a background in coding and data modeling often fulfill the Dataset Designer role. A BI manager and/or a project manager can help facilitate effective communication across roles and between the BI team and other stakeholders, such as project sponsors.
Let’s now take a closer look at each of the three roles involved in Power BI projects.
Dataset designer
The dataset designer is responsible for the data access layer of the Power BI dataset, including the authentication to data sources and the M queries used to define the tables of the data model. Additionally, the dataset designer defines the relationships of the model and any required row-level security roles and develops the DAX measure expressions for use in reports, such as year-to-date (YTD) sales.
A Power BI dataset designer often has experience in developing Analysis Services models, particularly Analysis Services models in tabular mode, as this aligns with the semantic modeling engine used in Power BI. For organizations utilizing both Analysis Services and Power BI Desktop, this could be the same individual. Alternatively, business analysts experienced with Power Pivot for Excel or with the modeling features of Power BI Desktop may also prove to have the skills required of Power BI dataset designers for self-service scenarios.
Datasets (semantic models) have always been the heart of Power BI solutions as they serve as the data source responsible for rapidly resolving the report queries generated by reports and analysis sessions. Power BI datasets can be designed to import copies of data from multiple data sources into a compressed, in-memory cache, as well as merely passing report queries back to a data source system such as Azure Synapse Analytics. Additionally, Power BI dataset designers can mix both import (in-memory) and DirectQuery storage modes across different tables of a dataset thus balancing the tradeoffs between the two storage modes.
In addition to providing a performant and scalable data source that efficiently utilizes resources (CPU, RAM), datasets must provide a user-friendly interface for report authors and analysts to quickly produce effective content. Moreover, datasets also typically contain Row-Level Security (RLS) roles that limit what certain users or groups of users can see and can also contain complex logic to support certain business rules or report requirements. Datasets are therefore a critical component of Power BI projects and their design has tremendous implications regarding user experience, query performance, source system and Power BI resource utilization, and more.
Given the importance of Power BI datasets and the implications of dataset design decisions for entire environments, many organizations choose to dedicate one or multiple developer roles to Power BI datasets. These individuals are expected to have advanced- to expert-level knowledge of Data Analysis eXpressions (DAX) as well as experience with enterprise features such as aggregation tables, partitions and incremental refresh, and other supporting third-party tools such as ALM Toolkit. All of these topics are explained in later chapters.
Business analysts or “power users” can often independently learn or receive essential training to build basic Power BI datasets that meet the needs of their department. However, business analysts can also struggle to learn coding languages like M and DAX and can fail to appreciate other goals of a dataset such as resource usage. For this reason, organizations are well advised to regularly monitor the datasets developed by business teams/analysts and consider adopting a process for migrating ownership of these datasets from a business team to a Corporate BI team.
It can’t be emphasized strongly enough that Power BI project teams should carefully distinguish between datasets and reports and maintain a goal of supporting many related reports and dashboards via high-quality, well-tested or certified datasets. This can be challenging as teams are generally tasked with developing reports regardless of the source dataset, thus creating a temptation to simply create a dataset dedicated to the needs of a single report. Over the long term this “report factory” approach results in both inefficient use of resources (CPU) as well as confusion and manageability issues with many datasets having slightly different logic and all needing to be maintained.
Dataset designers should regularly communicate with data source owners or SMEs, as well as report authors. For example, the dataset designer needs to be aware of changes to data sources so that data access queries can be revised accordingly, and report authors can advise of any additional measures or columns necessary to create new reports. Furthermore, the dataset designer should be aware of the performance and resource utilization of deployed datasets and should work with the Power BI admin on issues such as Power BI Premium capacity.
As per Figure 1.5, there are usually relatively few dataset designers in a team compared with the number of report authors. This is largely due to the organizational objectives of version control and reusability, which leads to a small number of large datasets. Additionally, robust dataset development requires knowledge of the M and DAX functional programming languages, dimensional modeling practices, and business intelligence. Database experience is also very helpful. If multiple dataset designers are on a team, they should look to standardize their development practices so that they can more easily learn and support each other’s solutions.
With the crucial role of the dataset designer understood, we next explore the report author role.
Report authors
Report authors interface directly with the consumers of reports and dashboards or a representative of this group. In a self-service deployment mode or a hybrid project (business and IT), a small number of report authors may themselves work within the business.
Above all else, report authors must have a clear understanding of the business questions to be answered and the measures and attributes (columns) needed to visually analyze and answer these questions. The report author should also be knowledgeable of visualization best practices, such as symmetry and minimalism, in addition to any corporate standards for report formatting and layout.
Power BI Desktop provides a rich set of formatting properties and analytical features, giving report authors granular control over the appearance and behavior of visualizations. Report authors should be very familiar with all standard capabilities, such as conditional formatting, drilldown, drillthrough, and cross-highlighting, as they often lead demonstrations or training sessions.
It’s important for report authors to understand the use cases and essential features of the two alternative report types available in Power BI – paginated reports and Excel reports. For example, given the requirements to export or print detail-level data, a report author should be comfortable in building a paginated report via the Power BI Report Builder. Additionally, report authors should understand the organization’s policies on custom visuals available in the MS Office store and the specific use cases for top or popular custom visuals.
It should be clear now that report authors have distinct responsibilities and skillsets compared to dataset designers. The ability to design intuitive reports and dashboards that are easily understood by the business is also of critical importance to the success of every Power BI project. Next, we look at the last critical role, the Power BI administrator.
Power BI administrator
As Power BI has grown its capabilities and become a mission-critical tool for organizations, the role of a Power BI administrator (admin) has become increasingly common. Power BI administrators are responsible for ensuring Power BI is utilized effectively and according to the organization’s policies. For example, Power BI administrators monitor and troubleshoot dataset refresh failures, performance issues, user access requests and issues, and the overall health of an organization’s Premium capacities.
A Power BI administrator is assigned the Power BI administrator role in Azure Active Directory, the identity and access control service at the heart of Microsoft’s cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) products. Assignment of the Power BI administrator role is done in the Microsoft 365 admin center and only Global administrators of Office 365 can assign users to the role.
Users assigned to the Power BI administrator role obtain access to the Power BI admin portal and the rights to configure Power BI tenant settings. The Power BI admin portal and tenant settings are used to enable or disable features, such as exporting data and printing reports and dashboards. BI and IT managers that oversee Power BI deployments are often assigned to this role, as the role also provides the ability to manage Power BI Premium capacities and access to standard monitoring and usage reporting.
The Power BI admin should have a clear understanding of the organizational policy on the various tenant settings, such as whether content can be shared with external users. For most tenant settings, the Power BI administrator can define rules in the Power BI admin portal to include or exclude specific security groups. For example, external sharing can be disabled for the entire organization except for a specific security group of users.
Power BI admins must also have a thorough knowledge of permissions, roles, sharing, and licensing of Power BI in order to resolve common issues related to access. For example, a Power BI admin would know that build permission to a dataset could be granted to a business analyst as a less permissive alternative to membership in the workspace of the source dataset.
Most organizations should assign two or more users to the Power BI administrator role and ensure these users are trained on the administration features specific to this role. Chapter 14, Administering Power BI for an Organization, contains details on the Power BI admin portal and other administrative topics.
While Power BI admins are not involved in the day-to-day activities of specific projects, the role is ultimately critical to the success of all projects, as is the overall collaboration between all project roles, which we cover in the next section.
Project role collaboration
Communicating and documenting project role assignments during the planning stage promotes the efficient use of time during the development and operations phases. For organizations committed to the Power BI platform and perhaps migrating away from a legacy or different BI platform, project roles may become full-time positions.
For example, BI developers with experience in DAX and Analysis Services tabular models may transition to permanent dataset designer roles while BI developers experienced in data visualization and report development may become report authors:
|
Name |
Project role |
|
Brett Powell |
Dataset Designer |
|
Jennifer Lawrence |
Report Author |
|
Anna Sanders |
Power BI Administrator |
|
Mark Langford |
Report Author |
|
Stacy Loeb |
QA Tester |
It is important for the individuals within all of the various roles to work together and communicate effectively in order to deliver a successful project outcome. Proper communication and collaboration are important to all projects but are perhaps even more crucial within the realm of business intelligence given the distinct nature of the roles involved and the criticality of accurate, effective reporting to the success of organizations.
With project roles and responsibilities now understood, we next cover the various forms of licensing for Power BI deployments.
