More easily integrate goals into all your business processes

It’s been 6 months since we released the preview of Power BI goals and we’re excited to announce a new set of features to help you take Power BI goals to the next level of use in your organization!

These new features include goal level permissions, Power Automate integration with goals, and a new scorecard visual that can be added to Power BI reports. We’ve also added several top requested user experience enhancements for moving goals within a scorecard and showing/hiding scorecard fields.

Since the initial preview release of goals it’s been amazing to learn about how organizations are using goals to help grow their data culture. We’ve heard how creating scorecards and assigning goals is helping teams work towards clear and measurable objectives, how goals are helping to drive the use of data to track progress on key metrics, and how the ability to “check-in” on goals and provide status is helping improve how owners and stakeholders collaborate and stay aligned. Based on this usage and your feedback we believe this new round of features will help you deploy goals even more broadly and integrate them more fully into all of your key business processes.

New Scorecard Visual (Preview)

Integrating goals and scorecards deeply into reporting solutions is a great way to help drive alignment and progress on a team. To make this easy we’re adding a new scorecard visual which can be added to Power BI reports. When included in a report, this visual enables users to see the entire scorecard and even make updates to their goals in the context of the report.

Goals can also now be created directly from within Power BI desktop using the visual, streamlining how they are created and managed. The visual supports various formatting options for scorecards, ranging from font style, colors to backgrounds, so users can customize existing scorecards however they like it to fit the look and feel of the rest of their report.

This new scorecard visual is the first step we’re taking to help you integrate goals into your reports. We’re going to continue to expand and improve on Goals visualization and are looking forward to using your feedback to guide us.

Goal level permissions

In many organizations, different roles need different types of permissions to specific goals. For example, maybe only managers should see goals related to human resources and finances, while all employees can view goals related to operations. Further, perhaps only certain individuals should be able to edit or update a goal while other groups should only have view access. Now, with goal level permissions, you can support these scenarios where different users need different levels of access for specific goals.

You’ll find the goal level permissions settings in the permissions tab of the scorecard settings pane. Here you can create roles with different sets of permission and assign these roles to specific user groups.

Here are the different types of permissions we support:

• View permission grant access for users to view specified goals within a scorecard
• Update permissions allow users to update specific aspects of a goal.  To further control how users interact with a goal there are a few options available under update permissions (and any combination of the following can be selected)
• Note – allows users to add notes to a goal
• Status – lets a user update status for a goal
• Current Value – grants the ability to update the current value for a goal.

To make it easy to set these permissions across goals in your scorecard you can use the “apply to all” option or turn on an inheritance option so all existing and future subgoals under that level inherit the permissions of the parent.

Another useful goal level permissions feature is enabling a “default” permission model that’s applied to anyone without specific permissions assigned who accesses the scorecard.  You can create a role with any combination of permissions you choose, and make that the default permissions, ensuring that any time anyone lands on the scorecard, they’re seeing exactly what the scorecard author selects.

Power Automate Integration

Power Automate provides an amazing set of capabilities to create no-code automation to streamline tasks across a huge variety of SaaS experiences. With new Power BI goals integration with Power Automate we can’t wait to see the ways people directly drive action based on changes to goals or update goals based on events in other systems.

We’ve made it easy to get started by launching Power Automate directly from your scorecard so you can immediately construct your automated flows. Here are the triggers and actions enabled within Power Automate:

Triggers:

• When a goal changes (e.g., status, owner, etc.)
• When someone adds or edits a check-in
• When an owner is assigned to a goal
• When a data refresh for a goal fails

Actions:

• Create a goal
• Create a check-in
• Add a note to a check in
• Create a scorecard
• Update a check-in
• Update a goal
• Get goal(s)
• Get goal check-in(s)

In addition to these actions and triggers, new templates will be rolling out within the next few weeks that allow you to start from a flow showing you how to complete different business scenarios and giving you the building blocks you need to automate your process.  A sneak peak at just a few of the scenarios we’re providing templates for:

• Triggering a Teams notification when a status changes to “behind” or “at risk”
• Sending reminders to team members at a specified interval with a link to a scorecard or specific goals to review
• Notifying a specific team member when they are assigned to a new goal and should perform a check-in
• Sending a forms survey that gets added as a check-in note on a goal at a specified interval
• Sending a congratulations email when a team completes a goal

Using Power Automate with your Power BI goals helps your teams and organization respond more quickly to changing conditions, and to easily use data to take better actions.

 Moving goals around your scorecard

We understand that things change within an organization and the placement of a goal within the scorecard matters. Now you can drag and drop goals around your scorecard, making it easier than ever to create an accurate view of your organization’s priorities and goal groupings.

Showing/hiding and moving columns

When creating a scorecard that is right for your organization you may want to have users focus on specific attributes of a goal. With this release, we are enabling the ability to hide/show columns in the scorecard to give you control over what is shown. Additionally, scorecard authors will also be able re-order the columns, so the scorecard is best optimized for its audience.

To do this, in edit mode, simply click the arrow icon next to a column and open column settings. Here you’ll be able to specify which columns you want shown or hidden. You can also drag the column names up or down to reorder them on the scorecard.

Aligning goals to dataset hierarchies

If you tuned in for the Ignite Goals session, you saw a sneak peak of an upcoming feature that let you align your goals to dataset hierarchies. This feature enables users to ‘slice and dice’ a scorecard based on a pre-determined hierarchy so they can understand progress to goals for specific parts of the business – without the need to manually create a specific goal for every item at every level of a hierarchy. This is key for supporting unified scorecards that span large organizations or business processes. We’re still putting the final touches on this feature, but wanted to show you what’s coming.

Between the features shipping during Ignite (which are rolling out world-wide and will be available everywhere soon) and the upcoming hierarchies feature we believe Power BI goals is ready to be integrated deeply into the fabric of your organization, at every level of the business, and with every business process.

We can’t wait to hear your feedback and continue to help you drive a data culture.