Microsoft Power BI dashboards a collection of services, apps, and connectors used for reporting across numerous data sources.

A business intelligence tool, Power BI allows users to create attractive, interactive reports and dashboards to transform data into actionable insights.

The beauty of Power BI is anyone in your organization can generate engaging reports and insights without complex coding or a background in statistics. The application does the heavy lifting for you!

Power BI leverages connectors to import and standardize data from a range of sources, including SharePoint Server.

Connecting a SharePoint project site to Power BI simplifies and accelerates project reporting. Instead of wasting time gathering data from multiple sources, project teams can analyze ready-made dashboards to understand project progress.

In this article, you’ll learn more about the BrightWork Power BI Pack for project reporting. The pack connects to and reports on BrightWork project sites, surfacing key information such as project status and risks in interactive dashboards.

This article focuses on the Power BI consumer, an end-user who receives and interacts with Power BI project dashboards and reports.

But first, let’s look at some of the benefits of integrating SharePoint Server and Power BI for project reporting.

Microsoft Power BI is a collection of services, apps, and connectors used for reporting across numerous data sources.

A business intelligence tool, Power BI allows users to create attractive, interactive reports and dashboards to transform data into actionable insights.

The beauty of Power BI is anyone in your organization can generate engaging reports and insights without complex coding or a background in statistics. The application does the heavy lifting for you!

Power BI leverages connectors to import and standardize data from a range of sources, including SharePoint Server.

Connecting a SharePoint project site to Power BI simplifies and accelerates project reporting. Instead of wasting time gathering data from multiple sources, project teams can analyze ready-made dashboards to understand project progress.

In this article, you’ll learn more about the BrightWork Power BI Pack for project reporting. The pack connects to and reports on BrightWork project sites, surfacing key information such as project status and risks in interactive dashboards.

This article focuses on the Power BI consumer, an end-user who receives and interacts with Power BI project dashboards and reports.

But first, let’s look at some of the benefits of integrating SharePoint Server and Power BI for project reporting.

Why Integrate SharePoint Server with Power BI for Project Reporting?

The integration of SharePoint Server with Power BI creates a powerful synergy that significantly enhances project management and reporting capabilities.

Here are some key benefits that arise from combining these two robust tools:

• Centralized Data Storage: SharePoint Server serves as a centralized hub for storing project-related documents, tasks, and collaboration artifacts. Integrating Power BI with SharePoint allows organizations to seamlessly pull data from these centralized repositories, ensuring that reporting is based on a single source of truth.
• Real-time Reporting: By connecting Power BI to SharePoint Server, organizations can achieve real-time reporting capabilities. This means that project dashboards and reports are constantly updated with the latest information, enabling stakeholders to make timely and informed decisions.
• Improved Collaboration: SharePoint’s collaboration features, such as document sharing, version control, and team sites, are complemented by Power BI’s ability to share interactive dashboards and reports. This integration facilitates enhanced collaboration among team members and stakeholders, as everyone has access to the same visualized project data.
• Streamlined Project Tracking: Power BI’s data visualization capabilities enhance project tracking by providing intuitive visual representations of project progress, timelines, and key performance indicators. This aids project managers in quickly identifying bottlenecks, milestones, and areas that require attention.
• Enhanced Data Security: SharePoint Server’s robust security features, including role-based access controls and permission settings, seamlessly integrate with Power BI. This ensures that sensitive project data is secure, and access is granted only to authorized individuals, maintaining data integrity throughout the reporting process.

In essence, the integration of SharePoint Server with Power BI not only consolidates project data but also amplifies the effectiveness of reporting, collaboration, and decision-making within an organization. This powerful combination transforms raw project data into meaningful insights, driving success in project management endeavors.

BrightWork Power BI Project Dashboard Pack

The BrightWork Power BI pack for SharePoint Server is a pre-built report with six dashboards.

Aimed at senior executives and project managers, the Power BI pack includes:

1. Portfolio dashboards
2. Portfolio timeline
3. Project and task timeline
4. Work reports
5. Status report dashboard
6. Issue report

Portfolio Dashboards

Portfolio dashboards with a roll-up summary of all project sites. The dashboard offers four filtering options: “Project Status,” “By Project Manager,” “By Project type,” “By Department,” and “By Priority.

Portfolio Timeline

Portfolio timeline, a Gantt view of all project sites. Drill down by year, quarter, month, week, and day.

Project and Task Timeline

Project and Task Timeline, a Gantt view of projects and tasks. Filter by project name, project type, project manager, and task owner.

Work Reports

Work Reports allow project managers to check the status of tasks, risks, issues, and goals.

Status Report Dashboard

The Status Report Dashboard includes RAG indicators, weekly updates, highlights, lowlights, and next steps.

Issue Report

The Issue Report helps project managers to get further information on issues, including the task-owner.

The six reports include direct links to the relevant project site in BrightWork, providing more context and information.

The pack connects to the three BrightWork project data sources – Project Cache, Work Cache, and Project Status Report Cache – for complete insight into projects and portfolios. The pack is ready-to-use or can be customized to support organizational requirements with help from our Power BI Consultants.

In the rest of this article, we’ll take a closer look at project reporting with Power BI and BrightWork. Let’s start with tracking the project timeline. We’ll also cover project status reporting and active tasks.

3 Power BI Project Dashboards for SharePoint

1. Tracking the Project Timeline

The ‘Project Timeline’ dashboard is an interactive Gantt chart with various filtering options:

• All projects
• Individual projects
• Project type
• Project manager
• Date started (year, quarter, month, week, and day).

Tasks are listed by status with color-coding for  ‘in progress’, ‘not started’, or ‘waiting on someone else’.

With this information, project managers and teams can plan work, balance workloads, and manage vacation requests with more accuracy.

In the below video, Traci Grassi, Customer Success Partner, explains how to use the dashboard.

2. Project Status Reporting

A project status report is a useful way to capture details about a project at a given time.

The report typically includes red-amber-green (RAG) indicators and other relevant information.

Using the ‘Project Metrics List’ in a BrightWork site, this dashboard allows project managers to filter and view data by:

• Health status
• Time status
• Issue status
• Project name.

The dashboard also incorporates text such as comments, and notes on work completed and work planned.

In this short video, see how to review project status reports in one visual dashboard.

The Project Status dashboard keeps your team and stakeholders in-the-loop with accurate, visual information.

Use the dashboard as a discussion point in meetings and to help with regular project re-planning.

3. Managing Active and Late Items

Answering questions about the status of your projects just became much easier with this dashboard. As explained in the below video, project managers can:

• Drill down into projects by ‘assigned to’.
• Check the status of tasks, risks, issues, and goals.
• Review individual items in the underlying SharePoint project site.

How Secure Is Your Power BI and SharePoint Data?

Project data stored and reported in SharePoint Server and Power BI is extremely secure. Power BI and SharePoint Server have several built-in security features that help ensure data protection and compliance.

Here are some of the key features:

• Role-based access control (RBAC): SharePoint Server allows you to set up RBAC to control access to data. This means that you can grant access to data only to those who need it to perform their job functions.
• Encryption: Power BI uses SSL/TLS encryption to secure data in transit, while SharePoint Server uses BitLocker encryption to secure data at rest.
• Data loss prevention (DLP): DLP policies for Power BI enable central security teams to use Microsoft 365 DLP policies to enforce the organization’s DLP policies on Power BI. DLP policies for Power BI currently support detection of sensitive info types and sensitivity labels on semantic models, and can trigger automatic risk remediation actions such as alerts to security admins in Microsoft 365 compliance portal and policy tips for end users.
• Multi-factor authentication (MFA): MFA adds an extra layer of security by requiring users to provide two or more forms of authentication before accessing data. This can include something you know (like a password) and something you have (like a mobile device).
• Auditing and reporting: Power BI and SharePoint Server provide auditing and reporting capabilities to help you monitor user activity and detect any suspicious behavior.
• Data protection: Power BI has several built-in data protection features, including sensitivity labels, Microsoft Information Protection, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps. These features help you classify and label sensitive data, monitor user activity on sensitive data, and enforce governance policies even when Power BI content is exported to Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, and other supported export formats.

Moving to Microsoft 365 and Power BI for Your Project Reporting

It’s worth noting that SharePoint Server has evolved, and there are newer versions available beyond SharePoint 2019 and SharePoint 2016, such as SharePoint Online in Microsoft 365.

Some of you may know that BrightWork has been building a product for the Microsoft SharePoint platform for over 25 years at this point, which is the BrightWork solution we have today.

With the evolution of the Microsoft 365 platform, of course, there is still SharePoint Online, but there is also Teams and other extensible features including Power BI within the Power Platform. In addition to SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 includes additional features, apps, and improvements that can all be leveraged for their project management capabilities.

With that in mind, you may wish to move beyond strictly using SharePoint Server to manage projects. Instead of building something in Microsoft 365 just on SharePoint Online, we looked at all of what’s in Microsoft 365 and used the best pieces to build a brand new project and portfolio management system called BrightWork 365.

If your organization is moving away SharePoint as a standalone project management tool, but would still like to manage your projects within the Microsoft ecosystem, then Microsoft 365 is a good place to start.