Improve project performance with Power BI analytics

All project managers are well aware of the project management (PM) triangle - the triple constraints - scope, time and cost. Many variations of the project triangle exist, adding additional constraints such as quality, resources and risk. At the end of the day, the main goals of the project manager are to complete the project by specified deadline, within budget and ensure the end product or service meets quality requirements. Customer satisfaction and profitability of said project depends on how successful project manager is in achieving these goals.

That is, of course, much easier said than done - project management is still a major challenge for many organizations, despite the abundance of PM methodologies and tools, such as Jira, Asana, Monday.com, Click Up, Trello, etc. Oftentimes organizations still struggle achieving project goals despite using an information system or platform to input and track project activities, resources, changes, etc.

While having the right data is an important first step to improve project performance, it is often not enough for efficient management. An important next step is to analyse and vizualize PM data.

With analytical tools, such as Microsoft Power BI, we can visualize all project management data and help managers focus on the right information, identify opportunities and threats faster and make data-driven decisions to ensure that the projects are completed on time and within budget.

We can distinguish two key levels of reporting in project management:

1. Project portfolio analysis for top management, that provides insight into project performance
2. Project analysis for project managers, so that they can track individual projects' performance, identify and address key inefficiencies

The benefits of project management analytics (business intelligence, BI):

1. They help report readers shift focus to projects or specific project activities that need attention. They can then decide which actions need to be taken in order to achieve project goals such as deadline, cost and scope.

2. Making better informed decisions: the data has to be properly cleaned and data quality checks have to be made before the reports go into production, which ensures data correctness and reliability. Data must also contain all information a project manager needs to efficiently manage projects. BI reports can then efficiently guide decision-making that is based on data interpretation, which leads to better results.

2. Better cooperation: providing all key stakeholders access to relevant information about project activities enables them to solve problems fast and efficiently. All necessary information is available at a glance in these BI reports, which enables project managers to asses and communicate what needs to be done, how and when, as well as to delegate responsibilities to other stakeholders.

3. Better accountability: all stakeholders can track their own KPIs and better manage their responsibilities.

4. Optimized resource allocation: by tracking and interpreting project management data, such as hours worked, costs, activities and key KPIs, project manager can better manage changes, reallocate resources when necessary and react faster to changing environment. 

An Example of Project Management Report in Power BI

Let's now see DEMO Project Management BI report for an imaginary IT service company. The report has several pages, which help us focus on different areas of project management.

1. Project Portfolio Analysis
2. Work Hours Analysis
3. Profitability Analysis
4. Project Delays Analysis
5. IT Tickets Analysis

First, let's delve into Project Portfolio Analysis. We have several visualizations on this page that give us a complete insight into how well our project portfolio is doing. We can see the number of projects by status, month, client, project manager, as well as a more detailed view into each project - its status, number of billable hours, budgeted hours, etc. We can quickly see how many projects are overdue, which projects are overdue, how many hours overdue and who is the project manager in charge. We can then contact said project managers to inquiry more about the reason for delays.

If more project data is being collected (such as change management data), we can create a drill-through report to see the reason of delays as well and in doing so reduce or even eliminate the need to contact project manager to inquire about changes.

Next, we have Work Hours Analysis, where we can track the number of hours worked, number of billable hours and abseenteism. We can see how many hours each person has worked on a specific project, for each month (or other time period), location, type of work; the number of absences, etc. We also have a detailed table visualization with key KPIs. This can help us identify and keep track of team productivity and identify inefficiencies. For example, we might realize our team spends a lot more time on unbillable tasks such as administration than we expected was necessary, and look for solutions for reducing that time. We can see which team members are the most productive (and reward them properly); who has the most absences, etc.

The third report contains Profitability Analysis. It helps us track project budget and cost. Since the value of projects in our DEMO is calculated by estimating necessary working hours, this report compares estimated hours vs. actual hours by time, project and client. If we, for example, notice that we are getting very close to reaching estimated hours, despite the project not being near completion, we can quickly act accordingly and communicate to our client that the budget needs to be increased or other adjustments made.

The fourth report shows Project Delays by client, delay class, project phase and project manager, with KPIs such as % Billable vs Budgeted Hours.

With one single click we can get information such as:

• Which projects have the most delays
• For which clients we have the most delays
• Which project managers are the least and most successful in finishing their projects on time
• How many hours we are over budget (by project, project phase, client or project manager)

The fifth report delves a level deeper into project managent and shows IT Tickets Analysis by priority, status, client, responsible person, month and IT ticket title. It assists project managers in tracking all open tickets, ensuring quick response time and client satisfaction. It enables better cooperation with clients - communication is made much easier when all of the information about the current projects, open tickets and the status of each can be easily gained at a glance in one place. 

Power BI reports for project management can be a catalyst for increasing productivity and project success. They enable easier and better cooperation with clients, save time for reporting and information gathering needed to manage projects, improve collaboration with team members and ensure quick response time which leads to increased client satisfaction.

Analytics also helps you focus on the right data, take informed decisions, optimize resource allocation and accountability.

If you are interested to improve your project management, productivity of your team and profitability of your organization one of the leading analytical platforms Power BI is a great choice to do so. The platform has a great number of functionalities and is user friendly. It is fairly easy to create simple reports and is a good tool for self-service analytics. However, with larger amount of data, various data sources and/or more complex data model, it is imperative to also find a good analytics implementation partner, that will help you not only make the best use of Power BI functionalities, but also build optimal data architecture and ensure data quality, so that the reports provide accurate, trustworthy information. In B2 BI we have worked with dozens of companies in different industries throughout the years, that helped us developed best BI implementation practices for top quality data architecture and reporting.