I didn't want to wait for IT
My lack of patience and determination to figure it out was the start of my operations intelligence journey
What do you do when IT says it will take 4-6 weeks for a dashboard?
I had the monthly executive and legal review in a couple of weeks. I was tired of doing the same basic calculations and pivot tables in Excel every time. I did what I had to do. Figured out how to build it myself.
Naturally, because my company uses Microsoft products, I looked at Power BI. It was free and would integrate with my SharePoint list. There were also a ton of YouTube videos. Let’s go.
I started with drag and drop, but quickly dove deeper: dimensional data modeling, star schemas, DAX, date tables, Power Query. It didn’t take long (though there was a lot of dragging and dropping early on) before I had my first report ready for the monthly executive and legal updates.
Leadership started asking me for recommendations. Should we bring on more contract inspectors? Where did we need additional staffing? Or most often: can we cut staffing? Are we finally caught up?
Power BI became how I built the business case for those decisions. It allowed me to answer questions in minutes instead of spending 4 hours recalculating in Excel every time.
What I had built: item-level tracking, aggregated program views, inspector performance metrics, and real-time risk identification that actually changed how decisions got made.
None of this was in my job description. I just needed this information to execute my job well.
That’s where my obsession with operations intelligence really started, in the middle of trying to get my actual work done.