Power BI Goals, a new way in tracking your KPI’s
Power BI has always been about making your data visible. By creating pie charts, line graphs, tables, and all other kinds of visuals, you can show organizations their performance in finance, sales, you name it. With KPI Cards you can show if they’re on track with their target, and with alerts in dashboards, you can notify anyone and show when somethings wrong. With the new Goals feature in Power BI you can also track its history!
At the Microsoft Business Application Summit (MBAS) on the 4th of May, Microsoft announced “Power BI Goals” as a new premium feature in the Power BI service to keep track of your KPI. A KPI can be created from all data points in a report, either if it’s a line chart or a donut chart. But you can also create them without a visual, by manually adding values you can create your own KPI. This could be very useful, for example, if you want to track team motivation, which is discussed in weekly meetings.
All KPIs will be shown in a Scorecard, disconnected from any workspace. This way you can collect KPIs from multiple workspaces, but as soon as you click on one of them, you will be sent to the report where it’s coming from, just like how visuals in a Dashboard work. Because of the disconnected workspace, different roles can access the KPI, but won’t need access to the report.
Each KPI gets check-ins: A possibility to give context to the current status by adding notes. But you can also manually change your KPI value and the status. The “Higher is better” and “Lower is better” options will be added at a later moment since this is still in public preview, but it’s already a very nice addition to the service.
If you add a new KPI to the scorecard from a line graph, you’ll get the history of that graph directly into the KPI. For other visuals, it will start with only the current value. Every day this KPI gets updates so you can keep track of your KPI very easily.
And then there’s one of the things I like most about this: A scorecard gets its own dataset, including snapshot data! This way you can always check the history and the values from certain points in time. You can even create your own reports based on these datasets. Before, you had to create your own snapshot tables, for example in SQL Server. But now, all Power BI Creators can use this great technique of keeping track of your KPI history! Another big step in citizen development.
Do you want to know more about this amazing feature? Please feel free to contact me!
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