Connect and Learn: PowerBI

At AG Consulting Partners we emphasize the importance of consistent growth and professional development. As technology and systems advance, it is a core priority for the AGCP team to evolve and expand their professional acumen. Our self-driven employees utilize our professional development benefit to expand their skillsets individually.

To help advance our learnings, we host monthly connects with our Management Consulting Workforce where consultants get to present on topics that help advance our consultants’ careers.

This month we participated in a PowerBI Tutorial by Management Consultant, Nick Johnson.

The Importance of Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence is a process of analyzing data and key metrics to infer valuable business insights. The ability for leaders to easily consume and understand large amounts of data is essential for agile decision making. As consultants, a business intelligence tool such as PowerBI enables us to efficiently create data backed insights for our clients.

Power BI is a business and data analytics software that can help you track and analyze key metrics to make more informed business decisions. With Power BI, you can analyze large data sets in clean and visually pleasing dashboards.

Nick kicked off the tutorial with a case study based on a survey. He showed the team how to gather and prepare data for analysis using Power Query:

“Power Query is a powerful, user-friendly interface within PowerBI that allows the user to build complicated formulas without the need to write DAX. For those who aren’t familiar, DAX is the library of functions and operators that drives Excel and Power BI in addition to several other platforms. If you’ve ever had to research and write complicated formulas in Excel, you instantly see the value Power Query has to save you valuable time.”

Visualization in PowerBI

After preparing the data, Nick showed the team how to quickly build a visual PowerBI dashboard relevant to the dataset. PowerBI enables the user to create a variety of visuals, ranging in complexity to custom fit the business need. After a short period of time, we had an impressive dashboard subdivided into graphs, filters, and tables.

“Learning PowerBI has enabled me to help my clients make decisions and feel confident that their insight is backed by the data.” – Danika Shtukin, Consultant

Example dashboard (Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/sample-customer-profitability).

Impact of Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence does not need to be intimidating or complicated. During our MC Connect, Nick emphasized just how easy it is to build a dashboard to deepen the insights our clients need to make effective decisions. Optimizing the capabilities of PowerBI and the integrated Office 365 suite empowers our consultants to drive increased productivity and efficiency for our clients.

Our Management Consulting Connects are self-driven and require a lot of effort. We want to extend a huge “thank you!” to Nick Johnson for his presentation and ability to guide our team through challenging problems. We are looking forward to our next meeting and expanding our skillsets even further.

If you are a self-driven professional with an entrepreneurial spirit and a deep desire to increase your consulting skills, take a look at our Careers page. We are always looking for talented individuals to join our growing team.

At AG Consulting Partners, we believe in taking care of our people first to enable them to bring their best to every client project. Our employees embrace the entrepreneurial spirit and embody our core values: transparency, stewardship, and intention. Founded in 2009, and headquartered in the Greater Seattle area, AG Consulting Partners is recognized as one of Inc 5000 and Puget Sound Business Journal’s fastest growing private companies.

Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash