Video – Power Apps Project Reporting Dashboards

Introduction

Microsoft Power BI is a business analytics service that provides interactive dashboards and reports, making it easier for organizations to analyze and understand their data.

Power BI can connect to a wide range of data sources, including Excel spreadsheets, cloud-based and on-premises data sources, and various databases.

It also offers a range of tools for data preparation, transformation, and modeling.

The platform is popular for its user-friendly interface and powerful visualization capabilities, enabling users to create compelling and informative reports.

Power BI is widely used for business intelligence, data analysis, and decision-making purposes across various industries, and can be especially useful in reporting across portfolios of projects.

The rest of this blog will cover four Power BI project dashboard templates in BrightWork 365.

4 Power BI Project Management Dashboards

This article will cover 4 Power BI project management dashboards that give senior executives and PMO leaders complete visibility across the project portfolio, including:

1. My Work Dashboard
2. Portfolio and Project Dashboard
3. Project Documents Dashboard
4. Resource Utilization Dashboard

 

As you’ll see, these dashboards are packed with information and easily filterable, and I really think Project Managers, PMO leaders, and senior executives will spend a lot of time here.

1. My Work

The first Power BI report is My Work.

By default, the My Work dashboard opens up a list of the action items that are assigned to the logged in user.

The My Work report in Power BI reports on Actions, Tasks, Risks, and Issues that are assigned to you across all the projects you are working on.

Note that if you click on any of these items, for example, the task called Storage space, that assignment item will open in a new tab.

Here you can view the the details of the task and make any changes, such as the percent complete or add an approver, for example.

One caveat here is that the My Work dashboard in Power BI is not updated update automatically (so you won’t see that change reflected immediately).

That is because a Power BI refresh is essentially pulling a data refresh essentially of your full Dataverse, or at least a large portion of your Dataverse.

So instead that can be scheduled to happen up to eight times a day in Power BI.

2. Portfolio and Projects

This next dashboard is where Project Managers will find themselves spending a lot of time and having a huge effect on the projects, on the entire portfolio, really.

So our Portfolio and Projects report has six built-in reports.

Portfolio Dashboard

By default, it opens to the Portfolio tab, which is a top down view of all projects across all portfolio. Those.

You can filter these this using any of these eight slicers up across the top.

So for example, let’s take a look at only the projects that are in the Marketing program by just selecting it from the dropdown.

All of these visualizations are interactive as well.

So for example, if you want to look at the projects of a specific Project Manager, just click on their name in the chart and you’ll see all the projects assigned to them.

Clicking it again brings all of the dashboard into view again.

Project Status Dashboard

The Project Status Dashboard displays a single project in a great amount of detail.

You can see by default, it’s just scope to the first project in our list, but you can select any project that you want to view.

For example, we’ll open the Widget Blue (New Product Introduction) project.

So here is an overview of what’s going on in the Social Media Campaign project, and there is a lot of relevant detail with insight into how the project is doing.

The Project Status Dashboard has:

• Project timeline information
• Percentage complete
• Key performance indicators
• Task statuses
• Task metrics
• Assignees
• Task types

 

Of course, there is the same ability to interact with any of the visualizations to filter the status report on the information you need.

Projects Timeline

Now let’s jump to the third tab – Projects Timeline.

The Projects Timeline is exactly is simplified Gantt view of your projects.

By default, it’s scoped to all projects across all portfolios.

Again, we have the usual slicers up top.

There are the the five familiar slicers for Portfolio, Program, Project, Project Manager, and Project Status, but the Projects Timelines adds a Start Date slicer.

So in this, you can adjust the Project start date to only projects that started after January 1, 2024, for example.

There is also handy little CSS on hover here that shows some additional detail like Start date End date and percentage complete.

 

Projects and Tasks Timeline

The Projects and Tasks Timeline is very similar to the previous tab, except in this case, what it’s showing is a simplified Gantt of the tasks on a project.

So you can see that each of the projects here is expanded, but there is the option to expand and compress all of them.

You also have same familiar slicers up top, as well as the current start date slider and the details on hover as well.

Work

The Work tab gives you a look across all assignments, across all projects.

Again, there are the same familiar slicers, just on the right-hand side.

Using the interactive chart, you can look at Issues assigned to Alex, for example.

And simply click the link of the issue you want to view and actually jump right into that to that work item in BrightWork 365.

Costs and Budgets

The final tab in the Portfolio and Projects dashboard is Costs and Budgets, and again, a pretty familiar interface within Power BI with slicers and clickable view filters.

In this example, we’re working in Euros, but this report can be scoped it to your specific, regional currency, like US dollar, Japanese yen, etc.

I think the nuts and bolts of this report is to be able to drill into each project and see the specific cost items, in terms of forecast, budget assigned and so forth.

3. Project Documents Dashboard

The third Power BI dashboard in BrightWork 365 is Project Documents.

This dashboard allows stakeholders to view all documents in one place.

Now let’s jump out to a project app in the BrightWork 365 solution so you can see how this all links up.

Here we’re in the Documents tab of the Jon Example project app, and you can see there are a couple of documents attached this project.

You can see how it might be time consuming for project manager or PMO lead to look at documents across all projects navigating project-by-project.

So the Project Documents dashboard in Power BI aggregates them all in one place.

You just expand the project row to see the documents that a saved to each projects.

You can see have the same business document and demo Excel file that we saw in the project app itself.

And then, of course, we can see additional detail, such as

• the parent project,
• the document type,
• and a link that will actually act as a download link.

 

So rather than opening this document up in Excel or Work Online, for example, it will actually drop it into your downloads folder.

Alternately, you can click on the project link and jump into the project and from there open it online. So if you don’t want to download the document, that’s an option as well.

4. Resource Utilization Dashboard

Last but not least, we have the Resource Utilization dashboard.

This Resource Utilization dashboard will give your senior executives and PMO leaders a lot of insight into the availability of personnel across your project portfolio.

You can see that we’re gathering information for a given time period.

Resources have hours available and hours planned or allocated.

For example, let’s reduce the scope to four weeks.

You can enter four in the date range in the top right, for next four weeks, and then click enter.

Then you’ll see that it reduces down that view to the next month or so.

For each period you can see:

• The hours allocated
• The hours available in that week
• An indicator as to whether a resource is under- or over-allocated.

 

When somebody is at 100%, you should see it in green.

So green is the ideal allocation scenario, where everybody is at 100%, and we know that everybody has the required amount of work or the necessary amount of work to accomplish the PMO goals.

Red means the resource is over-allocated and gray indicates under-utilization.

This is probably when you should, for example, find out why Christine is allocated at 140%.

So we can see that she has sixteen hours, sixteen hours, and twelve hours, which essentially exceeds the thirty two by twelve point eight hours.

So maybe there is one project she’s over allocated to out of these three.

Or maybe you want reduce her allocation across all three,

You could also take those extra hours and assign them to somebody else.

Configure Your Power BI Dashboards for Your Needs

You can, of course, have us build custom dashboards to meet your specific reporting needs.

You can build your own custom dashboards if you have a Power BI expert on staff.

We’re happy to build a custom dashboard, tailored to a specific project management needs, or gather specific data, maybe some KPIs that you don’t see in our out-of-the-box dashboards but would help you deliver more successful projects.