UK County Council get savvy with Power BI

JBI Training has provided a Southern England County Council training in Power BI for the last four years.

The decision to switch to using Power BI for one UK county council has been a wise one. In this case study we examine some of the considerations the council needed to make before implementing the software, as well as the nature of the training that staff would need to undertake. 

We look at how implementing Power BI has been enormously beneficial to the organisation and how training staff has provided a more efficient and effective operation.

As technology changes implementing the most advanced software and systems can be very cost effective in the long run. This has certainly been the experience of a UK county council who made the decision to start implementing Power BI four years ago.

Power BI is a powerful tool for data visualisation and analysis, so it was important to assess the council's data needs and determine if Power BI was the right tool to meet those needs.

Budget considerations are always primary concern for a UK county council, with costs being ongoing subscriptions, implementation, maintenance, and training. The long-term benefits however far outweigh these expenses.

Power BI requires technical expertise to set up and maintain, the council would need to provide ongoing training for staff members. JBI Training were able to develop a tailor-made course that would utilise the programme to its fullest capacity with training particular to the needs of a local county council.

The bespoke training would need to teach delegates how to integrate with existing systems, as the software was being integrated with historic databases and spreadsheets. This information would be needed to be pulled into Power BI to provide a more comprehensive view of the data.

We were able to assess the council's existing systems and supply training that would teach staff how Power BI could be integrated with them.

Its benefit for the council and residents

How has Power BI been used and what has been the benefit? As an interactive visualisation tool, used to show sales data, survey results, analytical data (e.g., COVID figures), and much more. The council has been taught how to splice/filter the data down to the users liking.

The council has been able to gather insights from the data and understand the wants and needs of the local community. These Insights have been used to shape future policy making and implementation. This long term strategy is considerably cost effective, as the council now have a evolving system that was able to help faster decision making, with data mapped in order to identify issues before they arise and action problems in the most efficient manner.

We taught council employees to use Power BI to easily display attractive visualisations and how to share insights and data. Sharing the data allowed the council to show the ongoing measures and work being implemented with information and news shared with both internal and external stakeholders, partner organisations and residents.

Power BI has provided low code solutions utilising drag-and-drop interfaces and so allowing the average savvy business user to build customisable systems.

With the training conducted by an expert. The trainer was able to work in collaboration with the council to develop the systems that they would be using and to train accordingly the staff to the requirements of their positions.  Working in collaboration with the council we were able to help build from the bottom upwards, the system being cost effective and able to be built upon in the future.

Upon implementing Power BI and training with JBI council Staff were taught how to:

1. Create Dashboards: Create interactive dashboards to display important metrics.
2. Integrate Data: Integrating data from different sources to have a comprehensive view of the data.
3. Use data visualisation: Visualizing data in an intuitive way to help uncover patterns and trends.
4. Generate Reporting: Generate reports that are shared with stakeholders.
5. Analysis Prediction: Using machine learning algorithms to make predictions about future trends based on historical data.
6. Collaboration: Sharing data and insights with colleagues and partners.

We supply a complete range of Power BI course and can customise a course to the needs of your operation. 

All of our Power BI courses can be found here 

We can help your organisation switch to Power BI and train your staff 

Our most popular Power BI training courses are

Power BI Fundamentals & Power BI Beyond The Basics 

Below is a taster video - Power BI: Sorting Fields

The Ongoing training is held onsite at the client’s premises, but we can also train remotely or provide our own training spaces.

Some of the feedback from our Power BI training 

“ I found the course very useful and informative, and Mariella's way of teaching allowed me to grasp things quickly. The written documents / instructions provided for the exercises were well presented, and are a great resource to take away as well" – Reece, Procurement Officer. 

“All Great” – Jimmy, Category and Contract Analyst

“The ways in which you can use the tools for the visual elements - to eventually show your data - looking forward to using my own data."  Clement, Category and Contract Analyst

"I found Mariella to be very informative on Power BI and was able to demonstrate that knowledge utilising a number of different scenario and settings. This was my first structured introduction to Power BI and whilst I found the course challenging, due to the sheer amount of things it can do, at no point did I feel the course wasn't structured or the content insufficient." - Ian, Finance Business Partner

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