1. Reporting principles
Purpose, scope, and design intent for this phase.
This page documents a proposed approach for the fictional GreenBox portfolio. Decisions and outcomes are illustrative until validated against business requirements, source data, security constraints, and measured implementation results.
Design area 01
Business question first
Every report page should support a named decision or operational action. Avoid building visuals before agreeing the KPI meaning, audience, grain and required drill path.
Design area 02
Initial report suite
Executive performance: approved revenue and margin views; order-to-delivery: order status, partial fulfilment and delivery outcomes; inventory: stock by product/location/status and snapshot date; supplier performance: delivery reliability; customer service: cases and root-cause categories.
Design area 03
Report design
Use a consistent semantic model, explicit KPI descriptions, clear date context, drill-through to appropriate transaction detail, and visible definitions for metrics with important caveats. Distinguish operational and financial views where definitions differ.
Design area 04
Power BI modelling
Prefer a well-designed semantic model with star-schema relationships, appropriate date dimensions, explicit measures, and controlled filter paths. Use aggregations or incremental refresh where justified by measured workload and data volume.
2. Implementation considerations
Controls and decisions to make the design supportable, explainable, and testable.
Performance and usability
Measure visual load times, refresh duration and query behaviour. Optimise based on evidence; do not remove required transaction detail solely to improve a dashboard. Apply row-level security only where requirements and identity design justify it.
Validation with business
Use example scenarios and reconciliation packs. Ask Finance to validate financial metrics, Supply Chain to validate delivery measures, and Customer Service to validate case definitions. Capture feedback and sign-off status.
Portfolio-safe presentation
Use synthetic data and clearly state that figures are illustrative. Avoid presenting invented performance improvements as measured outcomes.
Acceptance criteria
Each report maps to approved requirements; critical metrics reconcile; definitions are discoverable; access is tested; performance is measured; business feedback and outstanding issues are documented.
3. Acceptance criteria and handoff
Evidence required before this phase should be considered complete.
Step 08
Next step
Operationalise quality, governance, monitoring and change management.
- Requirements and assumptions are documented and traceable.
- Business owners and technical owners are identified where applicable.
- Security, quality, and operational implications are considered.
- Validation evidence is captured; proposed designs are not presented as implemented outcomes.
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