Power Platform Summit North America Preview: Telling stories with Power BI

Editor's Note: MSDynamicsWorld.com is collaborating with Power Platform Summit North America to explore the upcoming conference in a series of preview articles.

With only a little more than a month to go before doors open at the Power Platform Summit North America, October 15-18 in Kissimmee, Florida, expert presenters are already preparing. Mico Yuk, the CEO of BI Brainz Group, host of the Analytics on Fire podcast, author, and expert on Power BI is looking forward to doing what she loves at the event: telling stories.

Power BI and the power of Storytelling

Yuk's Atlanta-based consultancy focuses on implementing Power BI for Fortune 500 customers. She also heads a Power BI virtual user group and presents regularly, including at a sold out Microsoft Business Application conference workshop on storytelling in June.

Typically, we (BI Brainz) do anything from enterprise rollouts of Power BI to producing a certain level of reports or [creating] a BI strategy for self-service. We work with BI and business teams and help them with the tools for creating reports from their backend, whether they are working with SAP HANA or Azure to straighten out data. Or even moving over from SSRS. Data flows are relatively new but we're seeing more of it. We have some requests for newer platforms like Flow. So for us, because we're known for our storytelling methodology and consulting services, the requests [focus on] helping to track user adoption or helping [customers] tell better stories in the tool.

At Summit North America, Yuk is slated to present a one-day workshop and the same session she offered at Power Summit in Amsterdam.

I was pulled in to help with setting up an interactive session. Typically when we have these conferences, a lot of it is technical. Interactive sessions are designed to be more hands on and sometimes not technical. We focused on how to tell stories, how to use the right frames with pictures, words, and post-it notes. Even though the conference is 95% technical sessions, what I love about Dynamic Communities is the focus on the non-technical, business side.

Yuk added:

My pre-conference workshop coming up at Power Summit in Orlando is all about storytelling. I'm so excited! We're going to have a fun filled day teaching how to create a compelling story from  your data. This is literally how to formulate your data into goals, KPIs, trends and actions. I will focus on creating your story from your data while other workshops explain more about how to build your story into Power BI reports.

My other session, on Wednesday, October 16 is about how to effectively gather data requirements using our BI Dashboard Formula KPI blueprint Excel template that [has helped] transform large companies like Shell and Nestle. We have use cases on it from Middlesex Hospital and many other large organizations. Attendees will learn how to go step by step and correctly engage their users [which is key]. A lot of companies have a lot of measurements, sometimes up to 30 metrics and KPIs. [But this spreadsheet brings it down to just 10].

Extracting value from the event

Yuk says she is also looking forward to the networking opportunities she's experienced in previous years.

Last year, I painted my nails yellow for the event and I'm thinking about yellow hair [this year]. I'm looking forward to getting updates on Power BI and learn what's coming next. Meeting some of the community rock stars is also great. The Power BI community  is very entwined. Even though I'm more non-technical, the level of technical access and use cases is really valuable, such as things like learning charticulator or Powerapps. There is so much stuff to learn, you should be able to leave there light years ahead.

Although featured in previous years, she anticipates that Power Platform and Power BI will be more significantly highlighted at this year’s event thanks in part to their rapid growth.