What do you do when IT says it will take 4-6 weeks for a dashboard?
I had the monthly executive and legal review in a couple of weeks. I was tired of doing the same basic calculations and pivot tables in Excel every time. I did what I had to do. Figured it out myself.
My company used Microsoft products, so I looked at Power BI. It was free, it would integrate with my SharePoint list, and there were a ton of YouTube videos. Let’s go.
I started with drag and drop, but quickly dove deeper: dimensional data modeling, star schemas, DAX, date tables, Power Query. It didn’t take long before I had my first report ready for the monthly executive and legal updates.
Leadership started asking me for recommendations. Should we bring on more contract inspectors? Where did we need additional staffing? Can we cut staffing? Are we finally caught up?
Power BI became how I built the business case for those decisions. It let me answer questions in minutes instead of spending four hours recalculating in Excel every time.
What I had built: item-level tracking, aggregated program views, inspector performance metrics, and real-time risk identification that actually changed how decisions got made.
None of this was in my job description. I just needed the information to execute my job well.
That’s where my obsession with operations intelligence really started. Not in a planning session. Not in a training course. In the middle of trying to get my actual work done.