Using Power BI to Build World-Class FP&A Tools

Summary

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

1. How the best teams leverage dashboards to support their stakeholders

2. How to prioritize and decide on dashboard projects worth pursuing

3. How to build the perfect dashboards for your audience

How the Best Teams in FP&A Leverage Power BI

The best teams in FP&A have a system in place to create reporting tools for business partners. They have frameworks in place to prioritize requests and work backwards from clearly defined desired outcomes. Thinking through how this can be applied in your organization’s context will be critical to your team’s success with analytics tools.

1. Start with Outcomes & Work Backwards: Building new tools can be exciting and immensely valuable for the organization. But before investing any resources in a project, we need to get absolute clarity on the intended outcome of the report – otherwise it will be incredibly hard for the team to hit a goal that hasn’t been clearly defined. Successful teams do not start working on a new dashboard project until they understand:

   1. What is the desired outcome? What questions are we trying to answer?

   2. What decisions and actions need to be driven from this dashboard?

   3. Who is the intended audience for the report? How do they intend to use it?

   4. Use all of this information to build “requirements” for the dashboard

2. Have a Prioritization Framework: If your organization is like most, word will get out that your team is building high-quality reporting – that is when stakeholder requests will start to flow in. Your team needs to have a framework in place to decide on (“triage”) new projects to support the business. Successful teams prioritize projects that check the following criteria:

   1. High Impact: The dashboard will be used to replace a highly manual reporting process or be used to answer very important analytics questions for key stakeholders.

   2. Frequently Used: The dashboard will be used frequently (e.g. this is not a one-time analysis). Prioritizing reporting that answers frequently asked questions and puts critical reporting at stakeholders’ fingertips will help to ensure the work achieves maximum impact.

   3. Fits into Future State Reporting “Suite”: The dashboard should have a clear purpose “within” the analytics and reporting process that your team is trying to build. Your team needs a clear roadmap to their desired reporting “suite” and the processes that these tools will serve. Prioritizing requests that clearly fit into this desired future state will help your team keep your transformation on track.

3. Know Your Audience: Different audiences have different reporting and analytics needs. Business analysts on an operations team will have different needs from a Sales VP or a CFO. Work backwards, not only from the questions you want to answer for your audience, but the “setting” (business context) they will be using the dashboard within. Know what meetings, conversations, analysis, investigation, and reporting the dashboard will be solving for. This will help you build fit-for-use tools that make an impact for your business partners.

Just Because It Was Requested Doesn’t Mean You Have to Build It

To get the right balance, FP&A teams have to learn to identify the reporting and analytics that will generate operational leverage and prioritize accordingly. The goal of the team is to make finance organization a true partner to the business, focused on offering strategic guidance, generating insight, and helping leaders steer the business. This is why it is important for finance teams to have a roadmap to their target state:

1. How do we want to operate as an organization?

2. What do we want our processes to look like?

3. What strategic objectives do we want to be spending our time focusing on?

4. What are the goals of our business partners in the organization?

5. How can we (finance) serve as the central hub to align strategy and execution?

6. Finally: What do our tools and technologies need to look like to support this vision?

In the Next Newsletter

We will learn more about Budgeting and Forecasting with Power BI and Acterys.