Case study
Power BI migration & implementation process & outcomes for North Bristol Trust (NBT) – pt1
Summary
When North Bristol Trust (NBT) was tasked with migrating their existing reporting tool to Power BI, CACI was their trusted partner that supported the successful production of a migration readiness package. This readiness package included a detailed report of all quantitative and qualitative findings, a newfound understanding of existing functions and capabilities, a reassessment of future requirements and definitive progression of next steps in the Trust’s migration from business case creation to sign-off.
NBT possessed over 100 reports in their pre-existing analytics platform, ranging from list-based for front line, operational workers to more backend, dashboard and analysis reports for email distribution. Once these reports needed to move from NBT’s pre-existing system to Power BI, the Trust wanted to understand and reconsider their design, particularly its contents and data structure.
Andrew Elliott, Head of Data Analytics at North Bristol Trust, has handled analytics platform outputs and has been a key player in the Trust’s Power BI migration.
Company size
13,000+
Industry
Healthcare
Products used
Power BI
Challenge
The first course of action identified for NBT was the need to improve efficiency when creating reports. This was a multi-step action, not simply addressing the speed at which reports are updated, but the efficiency and maintenance of data.
To achieve this, Andrew’s team revisited their hospital data analysis practices to ensure they would remain up-to-date, reliable and accurate.
There was also an emphasis on redesigning the data models that fed the reports to meet requirements. This required a substantial amount of analysis to understand where data was coming from and what NBT was doing with that data to display the report. Once this analysis was complete, NBT had to consider how it could be streamlined to become more efficient and recreate that logic in a new location within their data warehouse.
Solution
This process took the Trust substantial time and input from CACI, with Richard Brennan, CACI’s Principal Consultant, working on the mapping process and providing ongoing support to Andrew’s team.
Determining the best data design followed this. Andrew’s team had ambitions on what the Trust wanted to do with their data, an especially crucial factor being that through Power BI, other analysts from across the hospital could be brought on board.
In the weeks prior to going live, Andrew’s team liaised with key individuals across the Trust on upcoming reports, Power BI was displayed on the intranet’s homepage and a Power BI developer group was established for updates from Andrew’s team, their use of Power BI and best practice sharing.
Once the reports were signed off as tested, they were moved into the appropriate workspace apps for users. A soft launch took place prior to go-live to ensure comfortability of using Power BI and address any final issues. Finally, users were added to groups for immediate access and the original platform was turned off, marking the official introduction of Power BI.
The diversity of requirements and revisiting the data design were two pivotal focal points to be reprioritised over the course of the implementation.
The ambition around optimised data design was initially obfuscated due to the comparatively little data available from clinical divisions and departments across the hospital that used Excel. This prompted Andrew and his team to encourage the use of one cohesive reporting platform to ensure data sufficiency, accuracy and reliability, creating an environment that analysts would engage with and host their reporting on.
The immense size of this ambition quickly became clear to the Trust, particularly regarding the data scope, the systems it took from, the amount of available data and the data used by divisional analysts. Upon further investigation into data sources, an added layer of complexity came to be: rebuilding all the data sources into a new data model would be impossible to achieve by the stringent deadline. With CACI’s help, however, the situation took a positive turn.
“CACI provided helpful support and advice [during this time], even during times where I think our project had gone from a green to an amber stage where we were coming into the last couple of months,” Andrew shared. “CACI was incredibly supportive of the decisions that we were making, also contributing to those decisions themselves.”
Results
Richard’s Power BI configuration set up Andrew’s team for a successful first few weeks of post-go-live, with the team receiving about 600 hits on reports in the first two days post-go-live and approximately 60 support requests.
According to Andrew, Richard’s continued support in demonstrating any changes to the semantic models, identifying any issues with uploading data or explaining the environment’s functions has been particularly useful.
“We had Richard in the background with any small changes that we wanted to do with the data loads or semantic models, and that support was useful in the run-up and afterwards, because we’ve watched how to look after this system as Richard has built it, but when you’re actually live and you’ve got to look after yourself, it’s nice to have that bit of hand-holding as you learn,” he explained.
NBT has presently moved out of the post-go-live period of constant close monitoring and rapid issue resolution towards a business-as-usual position. Plans for future enhancements can now be reviewed, along with an assessment of the Trust’s future and the potential of reaching a similar outcome with NBT’s partner, UHBW, enabling both data teams to identically view data across Trusts and share it seamlessly.
The project’s success also led to Andrew and his team being nominated by NBT’s Operations leadership for their annual staff award, an internal mark of excellence and recognition for a project well-delivered.
