Thinking about migrating to Power BI? What Power BI migration challenges will you face?
Join Gaurav Issar for Part 2 of our 7-Part Power BI Migration Series!
In this video Gaurav outlines key obstacles in moving from Tableau or Click to Power BI and suggests proactive management strategies for a successful migration.
Some challenges highlighted are:
Gain insights on how to address these challenges throughout the migration process and how a Migration Proof-of-Concept (POC) can ensure a successful outcome.
Key Moments:
0:00 Introduction
0:40 Previous Video Recap
0:55 Business and IT Sponsorship
2:10 Data Ingestion and Transformation
3:15 UI Visuals
3:35 Training & Skill Development
5:50 Change Management
6:55 Next Video Overview - Planning Your Migration
7:10 Conclusion
Welcoming back to the second video in a seven-part series about migrating to Power BI.
In the first video we covered validating business drivers, which is essential for establishing a strong foundation and ensuring the migration is done for the right reasons. This video will focus on the challenges of migrating to Power BI and how to manage them for project success.
The first crucial challenge is ensuring strong business and IT sponsorship, which is even more vital for migration projects due to the impact on business users and their reports and dashboards. Changing BI tools is likened to changing cars with similar but subtly different features, such as a gear shift versus a dial, which can affect users. Strong sponsors can communicate the bigger picture and the business drivers for the migration, helping to mitigate these challenges.
The second challenge relates to data consistency and documentation. While users interact with visualizations, the data behind them is critical. Often, significant data preparation and transformations are built into Tableau or Click, sometimes without a solid data architecture, leading to inconsistencies and a lack of documentation. Furthermore, the individuals who initially built and understood these processes may no longer be with the organization. To address this, a detailed review of all data integrations and transformations in every report is recommended before starting the migration, a topic that will be covered in the next video.
The third challenge concerns visualizations, as these are what users see and interact with daily. It's important to move the visuals as closely as possible to their current state to minimize disruption, even though exact replication might not always be feasible. To mitigate user concerns, it's crucial to involve them in the process, walk through each tab and report, and have someone with Power BI experience who can bridge the gap between the old and new tools. This engagement should include both developers and end-users, as the latter may interact with reports in unexpected ways. Selecting a report for a Proof of Concept (POC), which will be discussed in the fourth video, can also increase user confidence. These steps aim to make the organization comfortable with the new visuals and proactively manage this challenge.
The fourth challenge involves ensuring the BI team and users have the necessary Power BI skills before the rollout. The BI team, responsible for supporting the Power BI environment and users, needs to learn to use Power BI effectively and efficiently. To address this, the Power BI team should begin re-skilling at the start of the migration with online courses offered by Microsoft. During the project, they can start with simpler migrations to gain familiarity before tackling more complex ones. For end-users, in-depth, interactive training should be set up and delivered multiple times to explain how Power BI works and how to use the new reports within the Power BI environment. This will be discussed in more detail in the final video, which covers executing the migration.
The final challenge highlighted is the general resistance to change, a common factor in organizational projects, especially those of significant magnitude. To mitigate this, it's essential to involve business users throughout the entire project. This includes engaging them early when defining business drivers, during the analysis of the user interface, in the proof of concept, and in testing the migrated reports. Furthermore, providing interactive training and maintaining frequent communication are crucial. Gaurav emphasizes that your organization should be informed about the migration to Power BI from the beginning and remain aware of its progress through to deployment.
The next two video's will detail how to plan for the migration by understanding the current Click or Tableau environment.
If you are exploring migrating to Microsoft Power BI from Qlik or Tableau, you may qualify for a free Proof of Concept.
Qualify for a Qlik to Power BI Migration
Qualify for a Tableau to Power BI Migration
<< Did you miss the first video "Migrating to Microsoft Power BI - Part 1: Business Drivers"?
