As we round out this series of videos, we look at what it takes to take something live. Your internal Change Management or Comms process is only a tiny part of the puzzle.
Preparing to launch is a step that can quickly go badly wrong, the desire to keep changing or “tweaking” your work is significant. However, there must be a cut-off at some point, and the product has to launch. For this, we introduced some deliberately new terms, don’t get bogged down by them; this is more about asking you to consider your process.
- Plan
- Consider
- Deliver
Planning for going live is something that all too often doesn’t take place, primarily due to the pressure of continual development until launch. Power BI is terrible in this area; tweaks are “easy and quick”, so ongoing development is overly simple. Ongoing development prevents you from moving to the next steps. In the real world, the “Plan” step we have mentioned is about Validation – “Has the programme or work met the requirements, and if not, is it acceptable for deployment?”. Be prepared to loop back through this phase. Remember to appreciate this and why continual development is a BAD thing.
“Consider” focuses on the internal processes. Does a Change need to be logged? Is a Comms plan required? Most importantly, remember to document your solution! DAX Studio and Vertipaq analyser have you covered here.
Lastly, you have to “Deliver” your updates into your production environment, and of course, then validate the delivery!
Having gone through this process, I would invite you to consider when you need to go through this and when you do not. Governance options are one of the things that Power BI does amazingly well but is not appropriately documented. From experience, I have found that putting your full controls against the data model, a lightweight version against the app and none against specific secondary reports works best. Your data models are the most critical element of analysis as these cover all the relationships and ETL endpoints, so excellent governance is a must. Apps are your end-user layer, so you want to understand changes and make sure they are communicated out. Secondary reports may or may not need to be added to an app; after all, every viewer can potentially create and publish secondary reports (to their “My Workspace”). so it makes no sense to try to govern it; governance comes from the data set after all.