Irth’s NEW Work Item reporting for our Power BI feature!

We are excited to introduce the new Power BI Work Item reporting feature, designed to provide you with comprehensive insights and a deeper understanding of your work items. This powerful tool allows you to analyze metrics based on specific work item field values, run comparisons, cross-compare with other related work items, and identify patterns and trends.

Our goal is to equip you with the information needed to make informed decisions, optimize workflows, and enhance overall productivity. This document serves as a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) guide to help you get started, understand key functionalities, and make the most of the Power BI Work Item reporting feature.

Q: How do I view or access the Work Item measures and dimensions in Power BI?

A: These records are available in the same manner as the ticketing Power BI. Navigate to the Analytics menu, select ‘Power BI Reporting’, and then ‘CREATE NEW REPORT’ or select an existing report from the dropdown menu.
 

Q: My forms aren’t listed in the ‘Templates’ dropdown when creating a new report; what should I do?
A: Head over to App Designer and simply resave and publish the desired forms—while not instantaneous, you should see these appear in the Template dropdown within a few minutes of re-publishing!

Q: Can I create a single report with multiple form or app visuals?
A: While our current state doesn’t allow you to pull the record details of multiple forms in one report, you can pull global utilization details for all forms by leveraging the ‘Work Item Summary Overview’ template.

Q: I want to be able to compare related or dependent forms and their use on related tickets or work items. Is there a best practice or recommendation for being able to accomplish that?

A: If those forms have shared fields which you can leverage as unique identifiers, you will be able to do this for all current work items in existence (by leveraging the export functionality within Power BI). If the forms do not currently share the appropriate fields to serve as unique connecting identifiers, you can add the fields in app designer and hide them (or make them view only)—this will ensure that all records going forward contain the needed values to enable this type of analysis externally. Please note that the latter solution in not able to be retroactive since the value and field cannot be gathered from records created in the past.
 

Q: I’m not seeing the expected values in the Excel file created through the Power BI export. Is there a way to fix this?
A: It is likely that you are using a summary value in your current report visual; the recommendation would be to either copy the visual by selecting the visual while in ‘ADVANCED EDIT’, right-clicking the mouse, selecting ‘Copy’ from the menu, and then ‘Copy visual’; then either pasting the visual in the current report page and changing the visual type to a ‘Table’ or ‘Matrix’, or pasting into a new page of the report and leveraging a DRILL THROUGH and hiding the new page from view**.
 

NOTE: you may need to add additional columns and data to the table or matrix to enhance useability of the desired, exported data.

 **NOTE: hiding pages is purely optional, but can avoid confusion or overwhelm with resources having access to excessive amounts of data.