Designing, developing, and implementing a self-service reporting capability

Challenge

This organisation sought to elevate its internal development capabilities by transforming its existing data and analytics approach. Despite already employing Agile methodologies and having developed initial prototype dashboards, they recognised the need for a more robust, strategic approach to meet their ambitious IT strategy objectives.

The existing prototypes required significant refinement, and the organisation needed support in building a comprehensive data and analytics service that could scale and meet evolving organisational needs.

Solution

Each dashboard required a number of data sources to be integrated (building Extract, Transform, Load (ETL)) to an underlying Microsoft Structured Query Language (SQL) Server 2016 data warehouse, with reporting output provided to end users through a Microsoft Power Business Intelligence (BI) dashboard. The architecture and quality of the required data was unknown at time of initiation, meaning a strong understanding of how to model and integrate data was required.

By leveraging Agile development principles, the team focused on building a flexible, scalable framework that could support the organisation's growing data and analytics capabilities. This involved detailed analysis of existing prototypes, identification of key improvement areas, and development of a comprehensive service design approach. 

Impact

The initiative delivered critical improvements in data management and insight delivery.

Many of the dashboards evolved from initial proof of concept to full production use in the organisation's critical "hold to account" meetings. These recurring executive review sessions now rely on the dashboards to track objectives and priorities through carefully designed Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), with department leads directly responsible for meeting and discussing these metrics.

By creating intuitive Power BI dashboards and providing targeted training, the team enabled diverse stakeholders to effectively interpret and utilise complex data insights. The solution transformed raw data into meaningful, accessible information, enhancing organisational decision-making capabilities across different levels of technical understanding.