Project Description
Citizen Housing Network (CHN) was trying to establish the use of Power BI as a reporting and dashboard tool for some time. The CHN team was at a stage where they wanted to take the next step towards rolling out the solution across their entire estate. Bridgeall worked with the team as their implementation partner to review and improve their existing estate, establish working processes, and guide them through their Power BI implementation journey.
About Citizen Housing
One of the UK’s most trusted social housing providers, Citizen owns and manages 30,000 homes for diverse communities across the West Midlands, from urban tower blocks to rural villages and towns.
The organisation has a clear social purpose, which is to provide homes that are a foundation for life. The team work hard to solve some of the most pressing issues around housing and homelessness.
Challenges facing Citizen Housing
Power BI is a great tool that helps you turn data into actionable insights. However, without the proper strategy, architecture, training, governance and licensing it offers a real threat to organisations. The team at Citizen Housing were very aware of this and wanted to implement a solid framework across their entire estate.
Citizen Housing Network was facing the problem of how to work across multiple teams with different degrees of technical skills and varying ownership of data. They wanted to ensure a flexible solution which would result in consistent and accurate results being produced every time, with a degree of governance to ensure they had the right level of control. Additionally, they wanted consistent, repeatable processes that would allow them to be certain they could roll out reporting company-wide in a way which was comfortably supportable and would scale across the whole business.
To help Citizen Housing meet their objectives we delivered our Power BI Quickstart package, on their repair request data. Our approach was broken down into two main phases:
- A full strategy, governance and review of approach
- A health check of existing deployments
We started off with a discovery workshop to learn requirements, goals, objectives and the teams’ current set up. We then carried out an audit where we reviewed:
- Existing dashboards and reports
- Power BI usage and what is being used the most
- Power BI setup – data models, integrations
- Power BI governance approach – roles, permissions, training, administration, licensing
We worked with Citizen Housing to produce a centralised data model which allowed them to serve their Repairs data to a team of report developers and advised them on good practices on how to build reports from this model to ensure accuracy and consistency. Advice was provided on how that model should be populated from their data sources, and on techniques including dimensional modeling, and how to work with Reference data in their dataset.
Then we helped them to refine their governance around releasing reports to the wider organisation and reworking their processes to do this. This has given Citizen Housing a good foundation, allowing them to be confident in their use of Power BI, and giving them the processes and controls they need to be able to scale their reporting use across the business.
As a result of our efforts, the team has been able to realise the following benefits:
- Help and advice on good practice
- Clear processes with clear separation between teams in their business
- Easier to manage change across their reporting
Why choose Bridgeall as your Power BI partner?
If you’re looking to start your journey with Power BI, we can help. Bridgeall is a leading Microsoft Solutions Partner that provides a range of services to support your journey with Power BI. We have a specialist team of Microsoft certified consultants and developers who will work with your organisation and align your business intelligence with your business objectives. Contact our team and see how we can help you with your business objectives.
