Research shows that 55% of project managers simultaneously handle two to five projects, while 11% handle up to ten. When working with a diverse set of teams and projects, ensuring quality and project tracking becomes difficult.

For this reason, it is essential to choose an effective project management tool that ensures that all activities stay on track.

This article explores how using Power BI for project management can help you make more timely and efficient business decisions.

What is Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI is a cloud-based tool designed to centralize and make data interactive in real-time.

It allows organizations to consolidate information, analyze project performance, and create dashboards and reports that highlight key metrics across multiple projects.

Secure and Accessible Data Management

The tool includes built-in artificial intelligence (AI) features for advanced data analytics and actionable insights. Its security measures, such as end-to-end encryption, real-time access monitoring, and sensitivity labeling, ensure data remains protected.

Power BI is an excellent option for organizations that want to use a visual tool to monitor and manage project portfolios.

Its cloud-based design frees organizations of the hassle of infrastructure support and capital expenditure. Therefore, it is a cost-effective solution for business intelligence.

How to Use Power BI for Project Management

Power BI has a host of features that make project management efficient, especially for multiple projects going on at the same time.

1. Create Personalized Dashboards

A Power BI dashboard, also called a canvas, is a graphical representation of your data. It allows you to interact with reports and gain valuable insights into the performance of your projects.

With Power BI, you can create multiple project management dashboards tailored to different users, such as project managers, executives, and stakeholders.

These dashboards have one-page data visualization and are accessible on any device with a Power BI account, making it easy for users to stay informed. Here are some benefits of creating project management Power BI dashboards:

Improve Collaboration Flow

Project stakeholders can monitor project updates and contribute more effectively to outcomes by staying informed on project progress.

Increase Team Engagement

Dashboards inform your team members about what is expected from them by displaying key metrics for their projects. This helps achieve better engagement across teams, leading to project success.

Align Priorities

Dashboards highlight team contributions to organizational goals, illustrating how delays impact deadlines, costs, or revenue. This visibility supports better resource allocation and prioritization.

Microsoft Power BI template allows seamless data import from Project for the Web and Project Online. Various templates cater to different project needs, ensuring flexibility and customization options.

2. Enrich Data Through Custom Visualizations

Power BI’s custom visuals editor allows users to create tailored visuals for deeper insights into project data. Users can also import visuals from the Gallery or enrich their data using Microsoft Excel.

Some out-of-the-box visuals that come with Power BI are waterfall, histogram, line-of-business (LOB) apps, maps, scatterplots, sunburst charts, and treemaps. These help project managers visualize and understand project metrics easily.

Visualizing Correlations

For example, a scatter plot can highlight correlations between variables in an XY-coordinate system.

Project managers can use it to compare the relationship between two variables to understand which one impacts the other.

Moreover, you can add filters and legends in your custom visuals by using any dataset in your report. These tools simplify the process of reviewing multiple projects and assessing performance.

3. Create Insightful Reports

One of the major benefits of Power BI is the creation of reports for significant insights. Its built-in report builder makes it easy to create interactive dashboards tailored to the needs of project managers and teams.

According to Advisicon, “Combining project data with Power BI gives you the ability to tell a story to both management and teams alike.”

Some of the available report types in Power BI are column, matrix, and table.

Column Chart

It is ideal for displaying data in columns with different measures for data analysis. For example, it can show total project costs against completion time on two different axes.

The x-axis can show different projects, while the y-axis shows the total costs and days taken for a particular project.

Table Report

It allows you to display certain fields in a grid with their corresponding measures. Depending on your data, you can choose between various table styles, such as star and clustered tables.

Matrix

It is similar to table reports, but it shows multiple measures within the same grid. For example, it can compare project cost and duration on different axes.

• A: It shows that the report has four pages. Currently, it’s on the Sentiment page.
• B: On this page, you can see a page title (Sentiment Analysis) and five visuals, including line graphs and column graphs.
• C: In the Filters pane, you can see the filter that has been applied to the pages of this report. You can also collapse this pane.
• D: On the banner, Power BI shows the report’s name. It also shows when the report was last updated. If you click the arrow pointing down, it will show you who owns the report.
• E: The action bar has a number of actions that you can do in this report. For instance, you can export the report’s data or add a comment to it.

BrightWork 365 integrates with Microsoft Power BI to offer a comprehensive project management solution. This platform offers a collaborative hub for project teams to plan, manage, and report on projects, allowing them to perform their duties seamlessly.

4. Use Industry-Leading Artificial Intelligence (AI)

According to this study, the main role of artificial intelligence (AI) is to provide assistance and advice, improve decision-making, and improve performance and reporting.

Power BI’s industry-leading artificial intelligence (AI) features allow project managers to extract insights from reports, streamlining processes and automating tasks.

AI Features for Project Insights

For example, Key Phrase Extraction is a prominent Power BI feature. It evaluates the unstructured text and gives you a list of key phrases. Meanwhile, Sentiment Analysis shows whether a text is positive, negative, or neutral.

Let’s say you manage a team developing an AI-powered chatbot. You can use Power BI’s Sentiment Score to assess customer feedback. A score of 0 indicates a negative response, while 1 indicates a positive one.

Using this information, organizations can determine if they need to tweak things in the project.

5. Turn Insights Into Action

Power BI’s project management template and dashboards help project managers convert insights into action. For instance, identifying customers who experience glitches in their chatbots can be overwhelming to determine manually.

Power BI simplifies this by showing you exactly what people are saying, allowing you to take appropriate action.

The Power Query makes it easy for organizations to import datasets from various sources. It also allows users to transform raw data from campaigns or reports into actionable business insights.

Maximizing Project Management with Power BI and BrightWork 365

To sum up, Microsoft Power BI supports project management with pre-built templates, interactive visuals, and industry-leading artificial intelligence (AI) features. It empowers managers to take immediate action, boosting organizational performance and increasing productivity.

Project managers can find Microsoft’s templates or create custom Power BI dashboards for each task. For those seeking an easier solution, BrightWork 365 is the ideal project management solution, delivering data-driven insights and easy collaboration.

Using Microsoft Power BI and BrightWork 365, anyone in your organization can connect to a data source and build reports – no coding or statistical skills are required. This integration simplifies project reporting and enhances the capabilities of managers, teams, and senior executives.

Here’s a quick read on how to use Brightwork 365 to get maximum benefit from Power BI to manage your projects and portfolios.