I remember my boss at the time asking me, so all this theory stuff is fine but how are you going to make benefits real? In other words, show me the money.
Up until this point, I’d had to get across the message of what benefits realisation is and why we should be implementing it in the company that I was working for at the time.
In case you’re wondering what this all about, in my words, initiatives are proposed to deliver business outcomes. Once the initiative turns into a project then the focus turns to delivery and outputs. Often the team delivering the project is different to the one who scoped the initiative to start with.
Benefit realisation ensures that projects remain on course to deliver those business outcomes, as well as ensuring post-project that those outcomes continue to be met once the project team has disbanded. Success is based not only on delivery but on achieving the expected outcomes (benefits).
Why Power BI? I needed a dashboard that senior management could view, that was automatically refreshed and updated without involving me in the long run. The creation of the dashboard allowed management to have discussions with project teams and business areas around the benefits of projects and to ensure results were being reported. The data sources for the dashboard needed to be trusted and auditable by finance to support those conversations.
My challenge now in turning theory into practice was:
- Working for a multinational company operating with different currencies, Excel wasn’t going to cut it to present a single report to the leadership team of the company that was up to date any moment they viewed it, from wherever they were located at the time.
- Collating results from multiple countries, divisions and stakeholders in Excel spreadsheets would also have been a nightmare. And if things were too hard no one would want to be involved.
- I needed a compelling data visualisation (story) to show. This needed to be backed up by data that could be audited. Otherwise, senior management wouldn’t support applying benefits realisation practices.
Solution: I created a Power BI Dashboard linked to Project Online and MS Dynamics. The rollout included training people on how to capture and track benefits and continued following up to ensure benefits were being recorded with key benefit champions in the organisation.
Project Online was my source of data. It’s very easy to customise and connect to with Power BI as I’ll explain below.
It captured:
- Project name
- Sponsor and project manager
- Organisation unit, companies etc.
Then with the addition of the following custom fields it was used to track benefits:
- Benefit target
- Benefit actual
- Benefit tracking start date
- Benefit tracking end date
- Currency
Additionally, the business case had to be uploaded to the related Project Online SharePoint site with any financial benefits reviewed and signed off by the respective finance teams.
Project Online — It was used to track benefits at a project level.
MS Dynamics — Provided a feed of exchange rate conversions. This ensured that the benefits dashboard was aligned with corporate reporting. All of the company’s benefit targets and results were rolled up to single currency based on current exchange rates.
Power BI — Used to create the benefits dashboards that were visible to senior management. The visualisation was key in driving the adoption of benefits realisation in the organisation.
This article explains connecting to Project Online using an OData connection from Power BI: Project Online: connect to data through Power BI Desktop — Power BI | Microsoft Learn
Essentially you need the web address for Project Online and plug that into the OData option in Power BI to access project information. Then you have access to all the tables.
Microsoft also provides an out of the box project online reporting as per this link: Connect to Project Online with Power BI — Power BI | Microsoft Learn
Using this template, I could figure out what I needed from Project Online to create a dashboard for benefits realisation reporting that included the custom fields that I added: https://github.com/OfficeDev/Project-Power-BI-Templates
The end result in Power BI was a dashboard similar to the screenshot below, which also included detailed report pages with links to the related project SharePoint site that contained the business cases and financial signoffs confirming that the reported benefits were real and had been audited.
Please note if I was building a dashboard like this today, I wouldn’t use gauges. Probably just a simple bar graph. The curve on the gauge makes it hard to easily determine how close you are to reaching the target compared to a normal bar graph. However, this worked for the intended audience.
Conclusion
In this article I showed how I used Power BI / Project Online to drive benefits realisation in the organisation I was working for at the time.
It was about the technical setup but obviously there is so much more to getting people to track and measure benefits. Likewise challenges to face, especially implementing a solution that increases visibility and traceability of projects in an organisation with the company’s investment objectives.