Upskilling Your Finance Team with Power BI

Summary

In this edition, we will be covering the following items:

1. How to develop “T-shaped” technology skills in FP&A

2. Different support models for business intelligence

3. How to balance upskilling with FP&A’s core responsibilities

T-Shaped Skills Are the Foundation of Data-Driven Culture

Finance teams spend up to 70% of their time working with data. This work is the basis for the analysis and decisions that will drive the business. So, it makes sense to invest in the data literacy of the team. But where should you start, and what should you expect along the way?

1. The Case for Power BI: Building a Power BI competency is a low-risk, high-reward investment in your team’s skills. It’s also relatively easy to learn. A strong Excel user can get familiar with the core concepts of the tool in less than a month. While true mastery (of any technology tool) can take time, Power BI empowers your team to see the fruits of their labor much sooner than most.

2. Let Specialists be Specialists: Your goal isn’t to turn your FP&A team into data scientists. But you do want to give them the tools to build solutions for themselves, serve your stakeholders with great reports, and have productive conversations with their tech counterparts. Your goal should be to augment deep domain expertise with “strong-enough” data skills.

3. How T-Shaped Skills Work: “T-shaped” skills refer to the combination of deep domain experience with wide-ranging adjacent skills. Finance teams with strong subject matter expertise, supported by the right technology skills, can produce world-class results.

4. Cross-Pollinate Between Teams: Building the right skillsets across teams can unlock exponential value as learning is shared and solutions can be cross-pollinated between and within teams.

Structure Your Support Model to Set Your Team Up for Success

Most finance teams don’t want to be responsible for their entire business intelligence setup. In most cases, you will be working with a data or IT team. Getting the support model right is the next critical step in supporting your team’s Power BI skills journey.

1. Develop (Focused) Self-Service Capabilities: By building T-shaped skills, you will give your team the ability to build self-service analytics for day-to-day use cases. When things get complex, they will also have the tech savvy to drive productive conversations with your data/IT team who will build more advanced solutions.

2. Establish Clear Expectations (SLAs): Your team needs to build a strong relationship with the technology team that will be supporting your FP&A tools. Having clear expectations around support, maintenance, and roles/responsibilities will ensure that your team can focus on their job, fully supported by the tools they need.

3. Maintain a Shared Roadmap: Developing a strong partnership with your technology counterparts starts with developing a shared roadmap. Your team should work together to define goals, work backwards from a target state, and create an FP&A ecosystem that supports your stakeholders and helps your team deliver value.

Making Power BI Work for You, Without Distracting Your Team

You want to develop strong data skills without overwhelming your finance team. Too much technology can be a bad thing. A clear framework for using tech tools is key to finance transformation. Technology initiatives must not distract your team from their core tasks:

1. Know Enough to be Dangerous: Your team has a much higher chance of success when there are reasonable expectations in place. We recommend setting the expectation that team members will learn the fundamentals and be able to support basic analysis in Power BI. This is an easy hurdle to overcome and can give your team the confidence and experience to tackle advanced projects in the future. So, what are the key skills the team needs to know?

   1. Connecting to Data: Power BI comes with over 160 pre-made connectors to various data sources. Your team just needs to learn how to select and connect to the desired sources.

   2. Basic Data Modeling: Relationships (data models) are the key to success with Power BI. Your team needs to learn how to create and manage relationships between different tables in the data, to support their analysis.

   3. Basic Data Transformation: Data transformation in Power BI uses the Power Query Editor. The good news is that your team is already probably using Power Query, and if they aren’t it is an easy, low-code tool for an advanced Excel user to learn.

   4. Basic Calculations (DAX): Calculations in Power BI are created using a language called DAX, which was designed to be intuitive to any strong Excel user. DAX can become complex with advanced use cases, but it is also possible to build very powerful reporting abilities with simple DAX calculations.

   5. Basic Visualization: Building visualizations, charts, and graphs in Power BI is as easy as click-and-drag. This will be extremely intuitive to users with experience building charts in Excel using pivot tables.

   6. Power BI Service 101: Your team needs to know how to publish dashboards to workspaces (and schedule data refreshes) so that their teammates and stakeholders can access the reports. This work will usually be supported by your technology team.

2. Know When to Leverage Technology Teams: Developing a strong partnership with your technology counterparts will help your team offload the burden of developing advanced solutions. The goal is to allow the team to focus on their job while empowering themselves with best-in-class reporting, analytics, and planning apps.

3. Make Continuous Learning Part of Your Culture: Technology will continue to evolve. The only way to stay ahead of the curve is to build a culture that encourages continual (incremental) investment in technology tools and skills. Once this is engrained in the team’s culture, continuing your upskilling journey will get easier.

Putting It All Together

Building a data-driven culture takes time. To give your team the best chances of success, you need to empower them with easy-to-learn data skills and intuitive tooling. That’s why we focus so heavily on Power BI for FP&A. Power BI gives you the ability to start small, build T-shaped skills, and share responsibility for solution development with your technology team. Used correctly, Power BI allows you to empower your team to augment their existing domain expertise with strong data skills – without overwhelming or distracting them.

In the Next Newsletter

We will be learning about how winning teams create and track KPIs that drive results.