RUN IT and operations analysis - Reporting as a product

Overview of Our Organization

Our telecommunication department has more than 10 projects and programs ongoing in parallel, with more than 45 products involved. To monitor these, we have an existing globally centralized reporting tool (which has around 50 pages) that contains all the analytics across multiple departments. The stakeholders, including project managers, network architects, program managers, operations managers, etc., are using it to make informed decisions. However, it is consuming a lot of time due to their lack of familiarity with the tool. They have requested to make this process easier as they are experiencing a lack of visibility and complexity in visualization.

Problem statements

• How can we use the business intelligence to create a report to have one landing area and easy to follow dashboard?

• How can we make stakeholders to get familiarize with the tools we are using and also make our department transition into self service BI

Planning

• Collected requirements from stakeholders and a senior operations leader

• Divided the BI project report into 3 areas and extracted data from the source with respect to that area and that can be visualized in one page

  • RUN IT (Sourced from service now, existing azure data flows and flat files)

  • Project and program status (Sourced from service now and flat files)

  • Operational readiness assessment (Flat files)

• Communicated ways of working with the team

Implementation

• Received a list of KPIs, yearly objectives and added to the azure board to work in agile

• Implemented ETL in azure data factory, developed data models(restructured the models which improved data quality by 15% with 30% faster querying) in azure SQL data warehouse, created data warehouses (compressed data which led 20% more storage utilization) and integrated the required data as per business case in power BI

Below is the data architecture we followed:

• Created a one page report on power BI like below

• Utilized snowflake schema for better cross filtering

• Optimizing performance and UI/UX using buttons and bookmarks

• Optimized performance using performance analyzer

Data governance on power reports:

• Created user groups depends on the project like below

  • Internals

  • Externals

  • Guest

  • Custom project groups or policies based on Entra ID

• Assigned these to audience groups by implementing RBAC (role based access control)

• Implemented scheduled refreshed 12 time per day, that is every 2 hours

• Conducted workshops and one to one meeting to share information to familiarize with the tools which made user adoption rate 80%