Before Your First Power BI Report, Write a Decision Brief

A request for a dashboard often begins with a list of charts. A more useful starting point is the decision the report should support.

Imagine a fictional service company. Executives want to know where performance needs attention. Regional leaders want to compare their teams. Account managers need to identify which accounts require a conversation. One report may serve these readers, but their questions are different.

Give each audience a decision

Create three short statements: “This reader needs to decide…” Complete each with an action. “Understand performance” is too broad. “Decide which region needs a closer review this week” gives you something to design around.

Then ask what evidence would help that reader act. The executive may need a comparison and a visible exception. The regional leader may need the underlying trend. The account manager may need a permitted account-level view. Treat these as requirements to confirm, rather than assumptions about what every organization needs.

Resolve a disputed measure

In the practice scenario, two source systems disagree about active accounts. One counts any account with an open contract; the other counts accounts with recent activity. Both numbers might be calculated correctly while answering different questions.

Do not quietly choose the larger number or average the two. Record each definition, its source and the decision it supports. Identify who should approve the definition used in the report. If both are needed, give them distinct names that make their meanings clear.

Define comparisons and access

A number becomes more useful when its comparison is explicit: against last month, against a target, or across comparable groups. Write the comparison beside the measure, including any important difference in the groups being compared.

Also record who should see which level of detail. For this written exercise, describe the access requirement without attempting to configure a real workspace or expose account data.

Make the brief reviewable

Your one-page brief should contain the intended audience, its decision, the measure definitions, the comparison period, the source owner, the access requirement and the limitations that should remain visible.

Test it with a simple question: could another person build a plausible-looking report from this brief that answers the wrong question? If so, clarify the ambiguous section. For example, replace “show monthly growth” with the specific quantity, calculation and date boundary you mean.

The result is a planning document, not a finished dashboard. It gives your future implementation a clear purpose and makes disagreements easier to resolve before they are embedded in charts.

Explore READY's PL-300-relevant training. The written decision-brief exercise above does not require a Power BI license or a private dataset. Lessons require a free READY account. This is independent READY learning material; it does not include Microsoft certification, an exam or a software subscription.