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Power BI implementation planning: BI tactical planning

Note

This article forms part of the Power BI implementation planning series of articles. This series focuses primarily on the Power BI experience within Microsoft Fabric. For an introduction to the series, see Power BI implementation planning.

This article helps you to identify your business intelligence (BI) key results and form actionable, time-bound plans to achieve incremental progress toward your strategic BI objectives. It's primarily targeted at:

  • BI and analytics directors or managers: Decision makers who are responsible for overseeing the BI program and BI strategic planning.
  • Center of Excellence (COE), IT, and BI teams: The teams that are responsible for tactical planning, and for measuring and monitoring progress toward achieving BI key results.
  • Subject matter experts (SMEs) and content owners and creators: The teams and individuals that champion analytics in a department and conduct BI solution planning.

A BI strategy is a plan to implement, use, and manage data and analytics. You define your BI strategy by starting with strategic planning. In strategic planning, you assemble a working team to identify your BI focus areas and objectives. To make progress toward these objectives, the working team next conducts tactical planning. Tactical planning involves defining key results. Key results describe how you'll make progress toward one of your objectives. Key results are specific, actionable, and achievable within a defined period of time.

Diagram shows the hierarchical relationship between BI objectives, key results, and KPIs or OKRs as already described in this section.

In short, strategic planning defines how you envision your long-term, desired future state, whereas tactical planning establishes what concrete, measurable, short-term actions you'll take to get to your desired BI outcomes.

Note

In the objectives and key results (OKRs) framework, objectives are clear, high-level descriptions of what you want to achieve. In contrast, key results are specific, achievable outcomes to measure progress toward one of your objectives.

Further, initiatives or solutions are processes or tools built to help you achieve one or more key results. Solutions address specific data needs for users. A solution can take many forms, such as a data pipeline, a data lakehouse, or a Power BI semantic model or report.

For more about OKRs, see Get to know OKRs (Microsoft Viva Goals).

The following high-level diagram depicts how to conduct BI tactical planning.

Diagram shows an overview of strategic, tactical, and solution planning for business intelligence. Tactical planning is highlighted. The details about tactical planning are described in the table below.

You take the following steps to conduct BI tactical planning.

Step Description
1 Identify and describe specific, actionable priorities that relate to your BI focus areas and objectives.
2 Define what success will look like, and what your key results are for the planning period. These key results are quantifiable goals that help you measure progress toward one of your objectives.
3 Prepare to reevaluate and assess planning periodically in subsequent periods.

Tip

Refer regularly your assessments from strategic planning when you conduct tactical planning. Focus on the key weaknesses to improve, and the opportunities to leverage.

Step 1: Define organizational readiness and priorities

The first step of tactical planning is to define your organizational readiness and to identify activities that you should prioritize in the current planning period.

Diagram shows step 1 in a series of three steps to conduct technical planning to define key results and actions for the BI strategy. Step 1 is about identifying and describing key results.

To ensure that you define achievable and realistic key results, we recommend that you first evaluate your organizational readiness.

Evaluate organizational readiness

The key results you define during tactical planning should produce achievable outcomes during the planning period (the next 1-3 months). You should assess your organizational readiness to understand what achievable means for the context of your organization. Furthermore, you should also clearly define potential risks or threats that could prevent you from successfully achieving progress with your strategic objectives.

Assess organizational readiness by considering the factors described in the following sections.

Identify obstacles

You should identify any obstacles or dependencies that could hinder success or block progress in achieving the objectives that you defined in strategic planning. When you identify obstacles, describe how they might affect your activities in the next period. Define any relevant timelines, what actions could remove these obstacles, and who should perform these actions. You should also assess the risk of possible future obstacles that could prevent you from achieving your key results.

Here are some examples of obstacles.

  • System migrations and other ongoing technical initiatives
  • Business processes and planning, like fiscal year budgets
  • Business mergers and restructuring
  • Availability of stakeholders
  • Availability of resources, including the available time of team members or SMEs
  • Communication and change management activities to adequately inform and prepare business users about the BI strategy
  • Skills of central team members and business users

Assess the necessary skills and knowledge

Teams and individuals in the organization should have the necessary skills and knowledge to achieve your key results. That's particularly true for central teams, like the COE or support teams that should lead by example. Confer with these teams about your objectives, and discuss openly what kind of activities and key results you could have in mind. Identify early on whether they require training or if there's gaps in the knowledge or profiles of the team.

To appraise the skills and knowledge of teams for organizational readiness, ask yourself the following questions.

  • Do central teams (like the COE) understand the focus areas and objectives defined in strategic planning?
  • Are special training programs needed for topics like security, compliance, and privacy?
  • What new tools or processes might require user training? Who could organize this training?

Important

Improving the skills and competences of internal teams is particularly important when you migrate to Fabric or Power BI from other technologies. Don't rely exclusively on external consultants for these migrations. Ensure that internal team members have sufficient time and resources to upskill, so they'll work effectively with the new tools and processes.

Anticipate change management efforts

Change management is a crucial part of successful adoption and implementation. It's essential that you prepare and support people at all levels of the organization to successfully adopt new behaviors, tools, and processes for working with data. Consider who will be responsible for change management activities and what resources are available to plan and complete these activities.

Important

Don't underestimate the importance of change management in making consistent progress toward your strategic objectives. Change management should be a priority to ensure successful evolution toward your desired future state.

Identify priorities

Once you've assessed your organizational readiness, you should proceed by identifying activities to prioritize for the current planning period. We recommend that you first prioritize time-sensitive, quick-win, and high-impact activities.

Time-sensitive activities

Some activities have a defined window of action, meaning that they must be addressed before a deadline or specific event occurs. Typically, these activities address problems that don't currently impact the business, but will impact the business at some time in the future (if left unaddressed). Alternatively, these activities can be linked to technology or business deadlines. You should identify and address these activities before the time window of action expires.

Here are some examples of time-sensitive areas you might prioritize when you define your key results.

  • Tools, systems, or features that have a known decommission date.
  • Business processes or initiatives that have a deadline.
  • Known flaws or risks inherent in existing solutions or processes.
  • Processes with a high degree of manual data handling and capacity constraints.
  • The conclusion of a fiscal or budgeting period.

Important

While it's important to identify and act upon time-sensitive activities, you should also be careful to avoid a scenario where consistent urgency prevents you from achieving progress toward your high-level objectives.

Quick wins and high-impact activities

When assessing timelines and priorities, you should identify quick wins. Quick wins are short-term activities that deliver a significant long-term benefit. For instance, a quick-win might have few dependencies or not involve significant new designs or processes. The key benefit of a quick-win is that it can quickly demonstrate a return on the BI strategic initiative for the business. This return creates momentum that can lead to support of larger initiatives.

Quick wins can also be high-impact activities. In this case, they have the potential to make substantial advancements across many areas of the business.

Here are some examples of quick-win or high-impact areas you might prioritize when you define your key results.

  • Minor changes that improve existing solutions for a large number of end users.
  • Solution audits and optimizations that improve performance and reduce capacity usage and costs.
  • Training initiatives for key users.
  • Setting up a centralized portal to consolidate a user community of practice.
  • Beginning to connect Power BI or Fabric champions to start a champions network for these individuals to share knowledge and practices.
  • Creating shared, central themes, templates, and design guidelines for reports.

Checklist - When defining organizational readiness and priorities, key decisions and actions include:

  • Review BI focus areas and objectives: Ensure that your strategic objectives are current, and that they're understood by everyone who participates in tactical planning.
  • Review the current state assessments: The weaknesses and opportunities that the working team identified in the current state assessments directly inform the key results that you'll define.
  • Identify time-sensitive activities: Identify any potential activities or areas that have a defined time period or urgency. Clarify the deadline and its importance for the business.
  • Identify quick wins: Identify activities that require low effort or time investment to achieve a high impact. Justify why these activities are quick wins.
  • Identify high-impact activities: Identify areas that have a significant impact on your BI strategy. Define why these areas have a high impact.
  • Assess organizational readiness: Survey for potential risks or threats that you should address to successfully achieve your strategic objectives.

Step 2: Define key results

Once you understand your organizational readiness and any activities that you should prioritize, you're ready for the next step. In step 2 of tactical planning, you define key results to help you track progress toward your strategic objectives.

Diagram shows step 2 in a series of three steps to conduct technical planning to define key results and actions for the BI strategy. Step 2 is about defining success and how it's measured.

As mentioned in the previous section, key results are one of the main outcomes of tactical planning. Defining good key results is essential to facilitate focus on outcomes instead of output and to motivate progress toward achieving your objectives.

Ensure that your key results:

  • Address one (or more) of the objectives of your BI strategy.
  • Result in measurable and achievable outcomes within the tactical planning period.
  • Relate to both your business strategy and BI strategy.
  • Follow consistent criteria, like the SMART system, and that they're:
    • Specific: Target an explicit area of improvement.
    • Measurable: Are quantifiable so that you can monitor progress.
    • Assignable: Specify who's responsible for the key result.
    • Realistic: State whether you will achieve the key result, given the current level of organizational readiness and available resources. Set challenging yet achievable goals.
    • Time-related: Specify when you will achieve the results.

A fundamental aspect of your key results is that they help you to define and measure success for your BI strategy.

Define and measure success

It's important that you define what success will look like for your strategic objectives. There are several reasons why you should define and measure success.

  • Demonstrate progress: A key element of clear success criteria is the ability to acknowledge progress and achievements. Good measures of success demonstrate a clear return on investment (ROI) in BI initiatives. While ROI can be challenging to measure, doing so drives motivation and allows leadership to acknowledge the realized business value of the BI strategy.
  • Continuous improvement: Clear success criteria help you to (re-)evaluate your strategy. This evaluation should motivate your iterative tactical planning, together with user feedback and changes to the business or technology.
  • Corrective action: A good definition of success is backed by measurable outcomes. Monitoring these measurable outcomes during operations can inform specific decisions and actions to adjust tactical planning, or intervene if you're heading off track.

There are two ways to track measurable achievement. In this article, we discuss key results, which are part of the OKR framework (objectives and key results), but organizations also use KPIs (key performance indicators), or a combination of OKRs together with KPIs. Both approaches are equally valid. What's most important is that you find an approach to measure progress toward your strategic objectives that works for you.

  • Key results: Evaluate measurable success criteria that track progress toward strategic objectives.
  • KPIs: Evaluate the success of a particular activity against a target. While KPIs typically measure performance against goals, key results measure outcomes. You can use KPIs together with OKRs.

Note

Your measures of success should be closely aligned with business objectives. Ensure that your success criteria aren't specific to technical tasks.

Caution

Measure a limited number of KPIs or key results. These metrics are only useful when you know what they measure and how you should act upon them. It's better to have a few strategic, valuable indicators than many which you can't regularly monitor or follow up.

Effectively use indicators

When you use measure progress toward your strategic objectives, you should regularly monitor them to track progress and take action where necessary.

Here are some general considerations to help you successfully measure and monitor key results and KPIs.

  • Report your indicators: Create reporting solutions for your indicators that let you effectively monitor them. For instance, you can use Microsoft Viva Goals OKRs or scorecards and metrics in Power BI to measure and track progress.
  • Automate data collection: If possible, ensure that data for indicators aren't collected manually. Find efficient ways to streamline and automate the collection of the data so that it's current, accurate, and reliable.
  • Track change: Visualize the current indicator value, but also the trend over time. Progress is best demonstrated as a gradual improvement. If the indicator exhibits high volatility or variance, consider using a moving average to better illustrate the trend.
  • Assign an owner: Ensure that a team or individual is responsible for measuring the indicator and keeping its data current.
  • Define an acceptable range: Establish targets or an acceptable range of values to assign status (like on track or off track) to the indicator. When values fall outside the target or range, it should prompt someone to investigate or take corrective action.
  • Set up data-driven alerts: Set up automated alerts that notify key teams or individuals, for example, by using Power Automate. That way, timely action can be taken when the indicator is off track.
  • Define actions and interventions: Clearly describe how you'll use this information to take action, either to address issues or to justify moving to the next step in your BI strategy.

Important

Ensure that your chosen indicators genuinely reflect your desired outcomes. Regularly evaluate these indicators to survey for avoid incentivizing counterproductive behaviors. Consider Goodhart's Law, which states: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Identify key results

You should identify and describe key results for adoption, governance, and implementation. Identify key results that you can achieve in the next period and that directly address the weaknesses and opportunities that you identified in your data culture and technical assessments. Take into account any activities or areas that you must prioritize, which were mentioned in step 1.

Tip

Refer to the relevant sections of the Fabric adoption roadmap and the Power BI implementation planning to help you define and describe your key results.

Important

When defining your key results, remember that the successful implementation of your BI strategy is more likely when you aim for an evolution instead of a revolution from your current state. Evolution implies that you strive for gradual change over time. Small but consistent, sustained progress is better than an abundance of change that risks disruption to ongoing activities.

Adoption

First, identify your adoption key results. These activities can address many areas, but typically describe the actions you'll take to improve overall organizational adoption and data culture.

Here are some examples of adoption key results that you could define for a period.

  • Increase the usage of an endorsed central report or semantic model by a certain percent, or by a certain number of users.
  • Identify one or more Power BI champions from each department or from each team within a department.
  • Increase the positive response rate of business users to the question BI tools and initiatives help me achieve my business objectives by a certain percent.
  • Guide a certain percent of sales teams through an introductory data literacy training program.
  • Improve attendance of office hours Q&A sessions by an average of a certain number of people per session.
  • Host a certain number of mentorship sessions with Power BI champions.
  • Host a certain number of sessions introducing Power BI champions to the capabilities and use-cses of Microsoft Fabric.
  • Dedicate a certain number of hours per week (on average) of the COE to user mentorship and enablement activities.

Governance

Next, identify your governance key results. These key results should describe how you'll sustainably enable users to answer business problems with data, while mitigating risks to data security or compliance. These governance key results should be motivated by, and closely tied to, your adoption key results.

Here are some examples of governance key results that you could define for a period.

  • Reduce the number of workspaces or reports by a certain percent.
  • Reduce export to Excel by a certain percent.
  • Increase the number of workspaces delivering content from apps by a certain percent.
  • Reduce the number of reports that are shared with the executive leadership to a specific number, or by a certain percent.
  • Reduce the number of support tickets requesting access to data sources or tools by a certain percent.

Important

If you don't have an effective process to monitor user activities and content, you should make this an immediate priority. An understanding of these activities and items informs better governance decisions and actions.

Implementation

Finally, identify your implementation key results. These key results should describe how you'll improve existing or future BI solutions, practices, and processes. These implementation key results should support and align with both your adoption and governance key results.

Here are some examples of implementation key results that you could define for a period.

  • Reduce the number of refresh failures by a certain percent.
  • Reduce the time to investigate and resolve issues by a certain percent.
  • Reduce the time to retrieve specific data or produce certain reports by a certain number of hours or days.
  • Reduce the number of support incidents that relate to inaccurate data by a certain percent.
  • Reduce the number of business-facing outages by a certain percent.

Checklist - When identifying your BI key results, key decisions and actions include:

  • Define how you'll measure success: Decide if you'll use key results, KPIs, or a combination of both.
  • Identify adoption key results: Identify key results that will help you realize your data culture vision and achieve the BI objectives for organizational adoption.
  • Identify governance key results: Identify key results that will help you balance user enablement and risk mitigation.
  • Identify implementation key results: Identify key results to either support defined adoption and governance key results or specific business data needs. Classify implementation key results as either initiatives or solutions.

Step 3: Define solutions and initiatives

Once you've defined your key results and you're sure that you can achieve them, you're ready to take the next step. In step 3 of tactical planning, you define solutions and initiatives you'll implement to help you achieve one or more key results.

Diagram shows step 3 in a series of three steps to conduct technical planning to define key results and actions for the BI strategy. Step 3 is about defining success and how it's measured.

The solutions and initiatives you'll implement have two purposes. They:

  • Support adoption and governance key results: Describe the solutions you build and initiatives you enact to achieve your adoption and governance key results. These solutions help you work toward improving organizational adoption and user adoption.
  • Support business data needs: Describe specific solutions you'll build to address the business data needs and priorities (such as those that are time-sensitive, quick wins, or high-impact). With these solutions, you should aim to achieve or improve solution adoption.

You can implement either solutions or initiatives.

  • Solutions: Systems or tools built to directly address specific business problems or data needs for users. Examples of solutions include:
    • An actionable monitoring solution that allows governance teams to follow up on governance and adoption key results.
    • A unified data lakehouse that delivers business-ready data for consumption by content creators planning other downstream analytical solutions.
    • A Power BI app that addresses specific business data needs for content consumers.
  • Initiatives: Processes, training resources, and policies that support your key results. Initiatives are typically non-technical instruments that support users or processes. Examples of initiatives include:
    • Processes for self-service content creators so that they can request access to tools, data, or training.
    • Governance data policies that describe how certain data should be accessed and used.
    • A curated, moderated centralized portal for the user community of practice.

Here are some examples of BI objectives together with related key results and solutions or initiatives to achieve them for a specific planning period.

Example objective Example key results Example initiatives or solutions
Improve executive adoption and support of BI to promote a healthier data culture. • Identify and engage one or more candidates for an executive sponsor.

• Conduct three executive-led town hall or Q&A meetings about BI accomplishments and planned activities.

• Hold three targeted mentoring sessions with the executive sponsor to improve their knowledge and understanding about relevant BI topics, and allowing them to lead by example.
• Create a communication plan: Create a communication plan with the Center of Excellence (COE), which will involve distributing a regular newsletter from the executive sponsor to share updates, announcements, and highlights from BI solutions and initiatives.

• Conduct an executive feedback survey: Measure executive endorsement and sentiment with a brief survey of executives, including (but not limited to) the executive sponsor. The survey asks for quantitative feedback about the effectiveness, usability, and relevance of BI solutions.
Achieve a better balance of user enablement and risk mitigation in BI governance. • Reduce the ratio of Power BI semantic models to reports by a certain percentage. This key result measures whether semantic models are reused for ad hoc analysis and reporting, or whether data is duplicated across models—a ratio close to one indicates that users might be creating a new semantic model for each report, which is a governance risk.

• Reduce the ratio of exports to views by a certain percentage. This key result measures how often users export data to files instead of using existing reports for their analysis—a ratio close to one indicates that users are regularly exporting data, which is a governance risk.
• Perform a tenant-wide audit: An initial tenant-wide audit to gain visibility on general usage trends and anomalies.

• Create a tenant-wide monitoring solution: Track critical solutions and risk-creating behaviors.

• Conduct targeted training of the top exporters: Identify and engage the people in the user community who export data the most frequently, and offer them several hours of training or mentorship in how to use Power BI reports or analyze in Excel pivot tables.
Improve data-driven decision making in sales teams so that users are more effective at using Power BI to make sales decisions and take actions. • Have a certain number of users complete a data literacy training with a passing score.

• Dedicate an average of four hours of the COE per week to mentorship activities of the user community with open office hours.
• Run a data literacy training program: Improve the data competences of the sales community.

• Hold weekly office hours: Allow users to ask questions about central reports, or request guidance for their decentralized self-service BI solutions.

• Create a certified, centralized semantic model: Deliver daily sales data, which sales teams can connect to in order to answer their questions and perform personal or team BI.

Create a backlog of initiatives and solutions

The working team should make a list of solutions and initiatives that will be implemented this period. For each key result, consider what initiatives or solutions will be implemented to achieve them. Then, order this list by priority, sorting each implementation from highest to lowest, so that it's clear what should be done first.

After tactical planning, content creators and owners work through this prioritized list (or backlog) to iteratively design and deliver BI solutions, which is the focus of the BI solution planning article.

When curating this implementation backlog, consider the following points.

  • Justify the prioritization of the initiative or solution.
  • Approximate the effort involved, if possible.
  • Outline the anticipated scope of the initiative or solution.
  • Describe relevant timelines and stakeholders.
  • Refer to any existing documentation, research, or related solutions.
  • Agree on who will design and implement the solution.

Important

While the solutions you plan aim to address the business data needs, it's unlikely you'll be able to address all of these needs immediately. Ensure that you plan to mitigate the potential impact of unmet business data needs that you won't address now. Try to assess the impact of these data needs and plan to either partially address them with quick wins or even stopgap solutions to at least temporarily alleviate the business impact.

Validate tactical planning

Once you've defined key results, solutions, and initiatives, you should get approval from executives and the key stakeholders before enacting your tactical planning. Present the outcomes of tactical planning to executives and key stakeholders. Highlight the expected benefits and relevant outcomes for the business should tactical planning be successful. Also, explain how the described BI key results support the business objectives and data needs identified in BI strategic planning. Use any feedback to adjust tactical planning, where necessary.

Checklist - When considering your desired future state, key decisions and actions include:

  • Create a list of initiatives and solutions to implement: These initiatives and solutions should support one or more of your key results.
  • Prioritize the solution backlog: Rank the list of initiatives and solutions from highest to lowest priority, so that you know what must be done first.
  • Define initial planning for each implementation: Define the initial estimated scope, timelines, and responsible teams or individuals for implementing these intiatives or solutions.
  • Validate tactical planning: Share the outcomes of tactical planning with executives and key stakeholders. Use feedback to revise tactical planning, where necessary.

Step 4: Periodically revise the plan

The business and technology context of your organization regularly changes. As such, you should periodically reevaluate and reassess your BI strategy and tactical planning. The objective is to keep them relevant and useful for your organization. In step 4 of tactical planning, you take practical steps to iteratively reevaluate and reassess planning.

Diagram shows step 4 in a series of three steps to conduct technical planning to define key results and actions for the BI strategy. Step 4 is about preparing to reevaluate and assess planning.

Prepare iterative planning and anticipate change

To ensure BI and business strategic alignment, you should establish continuous improvement cycles. These cycles should be influenced by the success criteria (your KPIs or OKRs) and the feedback that you regularly collect to evaluate progress.

We recommend that you conduct tactical planning at regular intervals with evaluation and assessment, as depicted in the following diagram.

Diagram shows how to revise tactical planning quarterly to plan and evaluate BI key results.

The diagram depicts how you can iteratively revise the BI strategy to achieve incremental progress.

Item Description
Item 1. BI strategic planning: Define and reassess your BI focus areas and objectives every 12-18 months. In between strategic planning sessions, strive for incremental progress toward your strategic objectives by achieving your key results defined in tactical planning. Additionally, in between strategic planning, you should collect feedback to inform future strategic decision-making.
Item 2. BI tactical planning: Identify and reevaluate your key results quarterly, or every 1-3 months. In between, you implement these tactical plans by building BI solutions and launching BI initiatives. Additionally, in between tactical planning, you should collect feedback and monitor your KPIs or OKRs to inform future tactical decision-making.

Future key results and focus areas defined in your strategic and tactical planning are informed by using regular feedback and evaluation mechanisms, such as those described in the following sections.

Collect feedback about the business strategy

Business key results regularly change, resulting in new business data needs and changing requirements. For this reason, your tactical planning must be flexible and remain well aligned with the business strategy. To enable this alignment, you can:

  • Schedule business alignment meetings: When conducting tactical planning, schedule strategic meetings with key business and data decision makers to assess what was done in the previous period. You should schedule these meetings to align with other key strategic business meetings. Discussions during these meetings provide an opportunity to revise strategic and tactical planning, and also to demonstrate and reflect upon progress.
  • Review feedback and requests: Feedback and requests from the user community is valuable input to reevaluate your BI strategy. Consider setting up a communication hub, possibly with channels like office hours, or feedback forms to collect feedback.
  • Couple tactical planning with project planning: Tactical planning can be integrated with your project planning processes. For example, you might integrate tactical planning with your agile planning processes. Agile planning is a project management approach that focuses on delivering value through iterative work cycles. Coupling tactical and agile planning helps to create a consistent, iterative structure around the operationalization of your BI strategy.

Tip

Creating structured processes to handle changing business key results can help to avoid reactive or spontaneous planning, especially to meet new, urgent business requests.

Anticipate change in technology

Tactical planning should address relevant technological changes. Technological changes can strongly impact on your planning and business processes. Many changes are also opportunities to improve existing or planned implementations. It's important to ensure that your planning is always current to ensure that you can best use the opportunities new technology provide. Not only does it help people remain effective, it helps your organization remain competitive in its market.

Here are some examples of technological changes that can affect your tactical planning.

  • New products, features, or settings (including those in preview release)
  • Decommissioned tools, systems, or features
  • Changes in how the user community use tools or analyze data (such as generative AI)

To mitigate impact and capitalize on opportunities of change, you should regularly examine the technological context of your business. Consider the following points about responding to technological change.

  • Follow updates: Keep current with new developments and features in Microsoft Fabric. Read the monthly community blog posts and keep pace with announcements at conference events.
  • Document key changes: Ensure that any impactful changes are included in your tactical planning, and include relevant references. Call attention to any changes that have a direct or urgent impact on business data needs or BI key results.
  • Decide how to handle features in preview: Clarify how you'll use new preview features that aren't yet generally available. Identify any preview features or tools that have a strategic impact in your organization or help you achieve strategic key results. Consider how you'll benefit from these preview features while identifying and mitigating any potential risks or limitations.
  • Decide how to handle new third-party and community tools: Clarify your policy about third-party and community tools. If these tools are allowed, describe a process to identify new tools that have a strategic impact in your organization or help you achieve strategic key results. Consider how you'll benefit from these tools while identifying and mitigating any potential risks or limitations.

Proceed with solution planning

A key outcome of tactical planning is a prioritized backlog of key solutions and initiatives that you'll implement to help you achieve one or more key results. The next step is to plan and implement these initiatives or solutions.

Checklist - When planning to revise your strategic and tactical planning, key decisions and actions include:

  • Schedule periodic planning workshops: At the end of each planning period, schedule workshops to assess progress and review the milestones attained.
  • Schedule regular workshops to re-align with business strategy: Use workshops to align the BI strategy with the business strategy by having a cross-functional discussion between the working team and key stakeholders.
  • Create mechanisms for assessment and feedback: Ensure that feedback relevant to the BI strategy is documented. Create forms, or encourage key stakeholders to use the communication hub to provide feedback and submit new requests.
  • Assign a team to own feedback: Ensure that there's a team that has clear ownership of user feedback and requests. This team should respond to users to acknowledge their requests or request more detail.
  • Create a schedule to review requests: Review feedback regularly, like every week. Identify priority requests before they become urgent and disrupt existing planning. Clearly and transparently communicate any rejected requests to users. Propose alternatives and workarounds so that users can continue their work without disruption.

In the next article in this series, learn how to conduct BI solution planning.