Scenarios: When to use hierarchies in Power BI scorecards

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Metrics support cascading scorecards that roll up along hierarchies you set up in your scorecard. Hierarchies are a big feature, and you may be wondering where to get started or how to use it in your organization. To help you, we’ve compiled a few useful scenarios where cascading scorecards provide an elegant, large-scale, and most importantly efficient solution. They may help inspire you. Here are the three scenarios:

• Scenario 1: Measuring organizational health across teams
• Scenario 2: Retail metrics across locations and product areas
• Scenario 3: Organizational hierarchies

Scenario 1: Measuring organizational health across teams

Cascading scorecards are great tools for standardized metrics across many different segments in an organization. In this scenario, it’s easy to track the health of an organization by measuring employee engagement, satisfaction, and hiring goals – metrics that are often mapped across an entire company. The following scorecard allows senior leadership to see how each division within the organization is measuring against standard metrics like attrition rates, compliance trainings, employee satisfaction, and diverse and inclusive hiring goals.

This scorecard becomes not only an artifact for metric tracking, but an integral tool for decision making at a high level of an organization to improve company culture and overall organizational health.

Scenario 2: Retail metrics across locations and product areas

For retail scenarios, it’s often useful to create two hierarchies and use the slicer to view cross sections between them. Here, a retail organization has set up a scorecard that has a geography and a product hierarchy, so they can look at their standard metrics by product, location, or a combination of both. Here they are looking at laptop metrics in Germany. They could even dive deeper and look at specific laptop models in Berlin.

This view is helpful because the owners can be mapped as part of the hierarchy as well, ensuring that the appropriate branch manager owns and manages metrics for each retail location.

Check-ins can be performed at any intersection of the hierarchies, ensuring that all integral areas of the business are tracked and updated accordingly. In this case, every branch location can use the same scorecard to increase metric performance, driving a data culture at all levels of the company.

This view shows both hierarchies selected.

Scenario 3: Organizational hierarchies

We often see senior leadership use scorecards driven by organizational hierarchies. There is a set of metrics that the company tracks along an organizational hierarchy – in many cases, compliance metrics. Each person’s team is required to meet these standards, and leadership needs a fast and easy way to see the overall numbers and break them down according to the org hierarchy to see whose team is performing well, and who is behind.

This scorecard uses the organizational hierarchy as the scorecard hierarchy, so that all metrics can be broken down by the accountable person. The heatmap view is also useful in this scenario. It allows you to get a deeper, side by side glance of whose team is red and whose is green, and identify specific teams that need to increase compliance performance. The heatmap view of organizational scorecards drives alignment and clarity at every level of the business.

This scorecard shows the heatmap customization.

Related content

• Get started with cascading scorecards in Power BI
• View hierarchies in Power BI metrics