Department of Education

The Department of Education was required to move their internal HR reporting tool from Tableau to Power BI. It was expected that as part of this transition, HR reporting could be automated and delivered interactively. Previous reports were produced in Tableau but presented as a static PDF. As Power BI expertise was limited within the Department, expertise was required to support this transition.

The Department of Education engaged Data Knowhow's Lisa Cornish to develop Power BI templates, standards and expertise to ensure their Power BI environment could deliver people data timely, interactively, and securely. Lisa developed improved reporting standards, documentation and training to ensure staff are capable in managing, maintaining and creating further interactive reports using Power BI.

As part of the transition to Power BI, it was important to ensure reports could be delivered rapidly from raw data sources. Lisa Cornish engaged with stakeholders to understand the data sources and their formats and develop new processes to manage data and reduce the need for manual manipulation of data sources. By gaining an understanding of data processing methodology, Lisa developed data ingest pipelines using Power Query to combine and process monthly people data.

The presentation of data required improvement to meet branding guides and to communicate data insights effectively. Lisa developed new reporting standards for the HR team to ensure they implemented consistent visual styles and ensured information presented was succinct and clear.

To deliver the reports more effectively, Lisa developed Power BI reports that could deliver relevant information to all department managers using row level security, as well as anonymized data to staff who were not permitted to view person-level information. This method ensured that staff could only see their team information, and security breaches would be limited.

Lisa additionally trained the HR reporting team for basic and advanced Power BI use, and has developed training materials for using, managing and maintaining templates.

The HR reporting team are able to produce monthly people reports in a timely manner. Management have praised the new visual standard for its ability to deliver insights more effectively. The HR reporting team are also capable of developing new and secure Power BI reports for a range of purposes including diversity reporting, and reporting of APS census results.