Month: February 2020

Real customers, real stories

On By Matthew RocheIn Azure, Power BILeave a comment

This is my personal blog – I try to be consistently explicit in reminding all y’all about this when I post about topics that are related to my day job as a program manager on the Power BI CAT team. This is one of those posts.

If I had to oversimplify what I do at work, I’d say that I represent the voice of enterprise Power BI customers. I work with key stakeholders from some of the largest companies in the world, and ensure that their needs are well-represented in the Power BI planning and prioritization process, and that we deliver the capabilities that these enterprise customers need[1].

Looking behind this somewhat grandiose summary[2], a lot of what I do is tell stories. Not my own stories, mind you – I tell the customers’ stories.

Image by Daria Głodowska from Pixabay
It was the best of clouds, it was the worst of clouds.

On an ongoing basis, I ask customers to tell me their stories, and I help them along by asking these questions:

  • What goals are you working to achieve?
  • How are you using Power BI to achieve these goals?
  • Where does Power BI make it hard for you to do what you need to do?

When they’re done, I have a pretty good idea what’s going on, and do a bunch of work[3] to make sure that all of these stories are heard by the folks responsible for shipping the features that will make these customers more successful.

Most of the time these stories are never shared outside the Power BI team, but on occasion there are customers who want to share their stories more broadly. My amazing teammate Lauren has been doing the heavy lifting[4] in getting them ready to publish for the world to see, and yesterday the fourth story from her efforts has been published.

You should check them out:

  1. Metro Bank: Metro Bank quickly delivers business efficiency gains without requiring involvement from IT
  2. Cummins: Cummins uses self-service BI to increase productivity and reduce unnecessary costs
  3. Veolia: Environmental services company builds sustainable, data-driven solutions with Power BI and Azure
  4. Avanade: Microsoft platform–focused IT consulting company innovates with Power BI and Azure to improve employee retention
  5. Cerner: Global healthcare solutions provider moves to the cloud for a single source of truth in asset and configuration management

Update: Apparently the Cerner story was getting published while I was writing this post. Added to the list above.

I know that some people will look at these stories and discount them as marketing – there’s not a lot I can do to change that – but these are real stories that showcase how real customers are overcoming real challenges using Power BI and Azure. Being able to share these stories with the world is very exciting for me, because it’s an insight into the amazing work that these customers are doing, and how they’re using Power BI and Azure services to improve their businesses and to make people’s lives better. They’re demonstrating the art of the possible in a way that is concrete and real.

And for each public story, there are scores of stories that you’ll probably never hear. But the Power BI team is listening, and as long as they keep listening, I’ll keep helping the customers tell their stories…

[1] This makes me sound much more important than I actually am. I should ask for a raise.

[2] Seriously, if I do this, shouldn’t I be be a VP or Partner or something?

[3] Mainly boring work that is not otherwise mentioned here.

[4] This is just one more reason why having a diverse team is so important – this is work that would be brutally difficult for me, and she makes it look so easy!

 

Lazy communication is theft

On By Matthew RocheIn Generic Blather, Mental Health3 Comments

If you follow me on Twitter[1], you have likely seen me post something like this:

You’ve probably seen it more than once. But you’ve only seen it an order of magnitude less than I’ve thought it, because if I posted it multiple times each day I would be part of the problem. Typically when I tweet a variation on this theme, it’s because someone has been lazy, and has stolen my time, and the time of others.

Consider these scenarios.

Have you ever forwarded a lengthy email thread to a group, with “FYI” or “this is interesting” as your only addition, without adding a summary of the thread? If you have, then each person who receives your mail needs to read through the thread to understand what is important for them.

Have you ever sent an email with a meaningless and non-descriptive subject line that’s unrelated to the message content? If you have, then each person who receives your mail needs to read through the message to understand your intent and to prioritize any follow-up actions.

Have you ever sent an email that includes a document or link to a valuable resource, but you don’t include any relevant search terms in the subject or body? If you have, then when your recipients need to find and use that link or document they will not be able to easily search to locate it. You’ve forced each recipient to implement their own discovery process.

Have you ever sent an email that references a shared resource like a web site or an Excel workbook on a SharePoint site, and didn’t include a link to that resource? If you have, then each recipient has needed to manually locate the shared resource – you have wasted the time of every person who received the mail. And to make matters worse, your laziness has introduced ambiguity, and increased the likelihood that people will end up using the wrong resources.

Have you ever sent an email that includes a general description of a specific problem for which you are requesting assistance? If you have, then you are offloading the responsibility for identifying the problem cause to the recipients – and this often means that multiple people are duplicating the effort that you should have put in proactively.

Have you ever sent an email that includes an acronym that you have not explicitly defined? If you have, then you’re again forcing the recipients to do the heavy lifting to figure out what you mean, when you could have saved them this effort by putting in a little effort on your own…

Have you ever sent an email related to an event – a technical conference “call for content” announcement, for example – and you haven’t bothered to include the event dates in the mail? If you have, then you have forced every recipient to look up this information before they can act on your mail.

Have you ever asked someone for help solving a technical problem or error, but you haven’t clearly articulated the scope of the problem? Maybe you couldn’t even be bothered to include key details like error messages? If this is the case, you’ve very clearly told the people who could be helping you that you do not value their time, and that you are choosing to make your problem their problem.

Of course, the impact of this laziness isn’t limited to email – email just happens to be where I personally experience it the most. My most recent[2] periodic reminder came when someone on Twitter asked for help, and included an undefined acronym. By the time I noticed the conversation, three or four members of the Power BI team had replied, either asking for clarification or proposing possible answers if the acronym meant what they thought it meant. (I did not join that conversation.)

The common theme of these scenarios – and many more like them – is that a small effort to be mindful in your communication can help reduce the cost on the people with whom you are communicating. If you choose not to put in that effort, your lazy communication is stealing time and productivity from your teammates, peers, and colleagues.

Is that what you want?[3]

Each of these bad habits is easily and simply corrected. In most situations it only takes a moment to clarify the meaning and context of your message, to add a subject, or summary, or link. A moment of your time can save many minutes wasted by every person who receives your communication.

Will you choose to spend that time, and to respect the time of others?

Or will you steal their time?

[1] I wouldn’t recommend it.

[2] Most recent when I started writing this post, anyway. That was back in early November. It’s taken me so long to finish and publish this post because people keep stealing my time.

[3] If it is, please don’t tell me.

One diagram to rule them all

On By Matthew RocheIn Power BI1 Comment

A few weeks back MVP Paul Turley blogged on Power Query performance and diagnostics. It was a good, useful post, but I wasn’t really the target audience and I probably would have forgotten about it if it weren’t for one thing.

This diagram.

pbi
It really says it all, doesn’t it?

Look at it.

Look at it again, and pause to thoughtfully consider its elegance and beauty.

In the time since Paul shared this post, I’ve been involved in any number of conversations[1] where customer stakeholders had questions about Power BI application performance. This type of conversation isn’t particularly new, but now I’ve started using this diagram[2] as a point of reference.

The results have been very positive. Although nothing in the diagram is new or particularly interesting on its own, having this simple visual reference for the components that make up the canonical end-to-end flow in a Power BI application have made my conversations more useful and productive. Less time is required to get all stakeholders to a point of shared understanding – more time can be devoted to identifying and solving the problem.

I don’t know if Paul truly appreciates the beauty of what he’s created. But I do. And you should too.

[1] In case you’ve been wondering why my blog and YouTube output has dried up this month, it’s because real life has been kicking my ass. I think I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, so hopefully we’ll be back with regular content before too long. Hopefully.

[2] This beautiful, simple, elegant diagram.