The Clearly Podcast

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We all have different communities we rely on. When working in technology those communities can become essential to our development and understanding of what we do.

Whether that's getting help from a forum or meeting fellow like-minded professionals to share experiences and help each other when facing a specific challenge, communities are an important part of our daily lives.

In this podcast, we talk about community. It's a slight diversion from our normal subject matter, although focussed on our Power BI communities with 2 community leads in Glen Accardo (Houston, Texas Power BI Community Lead) and Tom Gough (West Midlands, UK Power BI Community Lead).

We also have the pleasure of being joined by Jena Coffie who has worked establishing, growing and maintaining numerous communities. Of particular interest is Jena's thoughts and advice on how companies can setup communities for their own products and services and how the voices of those communities can guide product development.

This is a really interesting discussion on how community has effected our professional lives and we hope you enjoy it.

Our guests can be found on Linkedin as follows:

Jena Coffie https://www.linkedin.com/in/jena-coffie-47663428/

Glen Accardo https://www.linkedin.com/in/glenaccardo/

You can download Power BI Desktop from here.

If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.

To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:
UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/
North America: https://www.clearlysolutions.net/

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This week we talk about Application Lifecycle Management.

It is important to remember that BI projects, like all software projects, should be considered in a cycle, rather than a linear process.  That is to say that the deployed report (or application) should provide a base for iteration.

Most organisations are good at managing the environments to promote code from development to release, but all too often this becomes the end of the chain.  We now have deployment pipelines that give something of a DevOps deployment experience.  Source control is the big problem with Power BI because PBIX files are databases and therefore stateful and resistant to source control.  The template file can be source controlled, but as a binary does not make it easy to use source control tools, such as branching and merging.

Application Lifecycle Management is also applicable to the wider Power Platform, although since the codebase is essentially stateless, source control concepts are a lot easier.

You can download Power BI Desktop from here.

If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.

To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:
UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/
North America: https://www.clearlysolutions.net/

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This week we talk about colour. 

Colour is generally a central element of branding, but we must also think about accessibility and the emotional response colour generates.  Red is frequently associated with stop or bad, whereas green with good or go.  Similarly, we may say we feel blue when we're a bit down.  At the same time, we need ensure our choice of colours are accessible to people with colour blindness, and not relying entirely on colour to tell your data story.

If you want to select an exact colour from an image, and get the RGB code, you can use a colour picker, such as this one.  You can use a theme generator to create a selection of complementary colours, and put these colours into a theme file.  If you don't want to create the JSON file from scratch (and let's face it, who does?),  you can use this handy tool from PowerBI.tips. 

Coloring for Colorblindness gives a reasonably simple  introduction to creating accessible colour schemes.

Finally, make sure the colour is included in the non-function testing - including testing the colours on different screens.  If you're not yet doing non-functional tests, you should be.

You can download Power BI Desktop from here.

If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.

To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:
UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/
North America: https://www.clearlysolutions.net/

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This week we talk to special guest, Reza Rad, about governance.  If you have read any of the previous podcast descriptions, you will probably be familiar with Reza's work.  If you're not aware of Reza yet, you should fix that as he is one of the leading experts in the world in Power BI.

Today, we cover all aspects of data and BI governance, from data sources through to outputs via training and encouraging a data culture.

One of the key aspects of governance is getting the overall architecture right.  If at all possible, this should be in place from day one.  Often, though, with the increase in "citizen developer" tools we can end up in something similar to the old "Excel hell" and a lack of a single source of truth.

The more code that can be re-used, such as creating shared datasets, the easier your task will be.  We will talk a little more about this in a future episode on Application Lifecycle Management and how it applies (and doesn't apply) to BI projects.

Beyond the technological measures, we also need to think about the cultural and "soft" elements of making the architecture stick.  Key to this is creating suitably tailored training to the different audiences in an organisation, and providing the appropriate documentation.

One of the critical challenges thrown up by modern BI tools is an increased expectation that everything can be done quickly - bypassing the normal controls.  At the same time, you don't want to just kill everybody's enthusiasm.

In the wider Azure context, tools such as Data Loss Prevention policies and Azure Information Protection can help, but be wary of being too reliant on technology over policy and organisational culture.

Finally, the Centre of Excellence tool kit can provide a valuable accelerator to governance on the Power Platform more generally.

Reza's website Radacad is a treasure trove of information across all things Power BI, and also the place to go to download Power BI Helper.  Reza can also be found on Twitter and LinkedIn

In addition, Tabular Editor and DAX Studio are fantastic tools to help manage development.

The Power BI Summit takes place on line this April and tickets are available now.

You can download Power BI Desktop from here.

If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.

To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:
UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/
North America: https://www.clearlysolutions.net/

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The capabilities of business intelligence tools have changed over the past 15 years. In the past a specialist or IT function would build and deliver reports. Modern tools such as Power BI now have the capability for users to create and edit their own reports and we see many users taking advantage of that development and devolving report creation across the organisation.

While this is an important development, self service BI needs to be planned and part of your reporting strategy. In this episode we talk through all aspects of self service BI from the basics of how we define it all the way through to self service strategies, tips for being successful and some experiences of what to avoid.

You can download Power BI Desktop from here.

If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.

To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:
UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/
North America: https://www.clearlysolutions.net/

Send a text

This week we discuss an often neglected part of many BI implementations: testing.  It isn't glamorous, it isn't the headline-grabbing side of a project, but it is vital.  After all, what use is a report if it doesn't show the right information.

We talk about different approaches to testing, from structured tests following a script to unstructured exploratory testing.  We discuss why both are important elements of a rounded test plan, and why it should never simply be left to the developers to test their own reports.  And to be clear - we are not suggesting development teams would cynically pass on reports they know to be broken, but rather that when you have been working on piece of code for weeks, it's hard to see where errors might be creeping in.

Finally, we talk about non-functional testing.  This is probably the most neglected part of an already neglected process.  It is vital that a report performs well, has readable fonts and suitable colours.  If any of these aren't the case, the report consumers will quickly be turned off and revert to other ways of reporting data.

You can download Power BI Desktop from here.

If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.

To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:
UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/
North America: https://clearlysolutions.net/

Send a text

In this episode we discuss project management for business intelligence. The complexity of BI projects has increased  significantly in the past 10 years so a structured approach to implementation is required. The historical approach to business systems implementations has been to use the standard reports that come with the application and amend at the end of the project. The complexity of BI means those days are long behind us.

We discuss how a program management approach is required to modern implementions where BI is a separate project in of itself that can be implemented alongside a business system.

We also discuss approaches to BI project management and how to make your implementation successful for the long term.

You can download Power BI Desktop from here.

If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.

To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:
UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/
North America: https://clearlysolutions.net/

Send a text

As we seem to mention this on almost every episode, we decided to devote an entire podcast to it - pre-aggregation.

To start off with, a matter of terminology.  The official terminology is "aggregation".  In the title we talk about pre-aggregation - this is a matter of clarity since every aggregate function (sum, average etc) carries out an aggregation.  What is officially called aggregation is a technique that aggregates the data in-memory during the loading process and link these aggregations to your measure definitions.

The documentation describes the basics of how to build aggregations, but as ever, Reza Rad has a fantastic tutorial on how to do this.

You can download Power BI Desktop from here.

If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.

To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:
UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/
North America: https://clearlysolutions.net/

Send a text

In this episode we offer practical advice to anyone thinking of starting a career as a Power BI consultant. We talk about:

• What a Power BI consultant does
• If an average day in the life of a Power BI consultant exists, what it looks like
• What experience and skills are useful to build on
• Skills v character and what we value the most
• Qualifications
• What we look for when hiring consultants
• CV/Resumes
• Interview preparation
• How to approach the market and the companies you may like to work for
• How to work with recruiters

In this episode we're joined by Jon Styles who leads specialist Microsoft recruitment agency Northcote Dynamics. Jon can be found at:

www.northcote-dynamics.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-styles-91858b35/

You can download Power BI Desktop from here.

If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.

To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:
UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/
North America: https://clearlysolutions.net/

If you have any specific questions about any aspect of our podcast please send an email to [email protected].

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Hugo Soto is the author of the Analyst Mindset a book that details the necessary mindset needed to make data driven decisions in corporate & small business settings, focusing on understanding, cleaning, dissecting, and presenting data, to create actionable business insights.

In this episode we chat to Hugo about the journey that bought him to publishing the book and practical application of the Analyst Mindset to everyday work to help refine the decision making process. We also look at the Business Intelligence market and get Hugo's views on how organizations can unlock more value from the tools that are currently available.

To purchase The Analyst Mindset on Amazon

To connect with Hugo on Linkedin

Hugo's website https://dailygametheory.com/