---
title: "DON'T Start With KPIs: A Better Way to Plan Power BI Projects"
description: Starting a Power BI project? Learn why business questions, processes and data modeling should come before defining KPIs and building dashboards.
image: https://www.teamscs.com/hubfs/Blog%20Images/person%20stacking%20blocks.jpeg
---
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# Plan Your Power BI Project Around Decisions and Actions, Not Just KPIs
###### October 21, 2026
Starting with the KPIs you want to track *sounds* like the logical place to start a Power BI project. After all, if you're building reports and dashboards, you need to know what people want to measure.
But starting with KPIs can narrow the conversation too early.
A stakeholder might tell you they need to track sales by region, customer retention or production efficiency. That tells you what number they want to see. It doesn't tell you what they're trying to understand, what decision they'll make with that information or whether the available data can reliably answer the question.
Before defining KPIs and building dashboards, take a few steps back.
## Start With the Decisions People Need to Make
Instead of asking what someone wants to measure, start by asking what they're trying to decide.
What questions come up regularly? What information would help them answer those questions? What happens after they get the answer?
For example, “We need a dashboard showing sales by region” gives you a reporting requirement. But there could be several goals behind it. A sales leader may be trying to decide where to focus their team, whether a territory needs additional support or why one region is falling behind another.
That context can also uncover needs that aren't captured by the original KPI request. The same sales leader may need to drill into individual products, compare performance against previous periods or spot changes quickly enough to act on them.
## Understand How the Work Happens Today
Next, look at how people currently get the information they use to make those decisions.
Which systems are involved? Does someone export data from an ERP, CRM or another platform? Are spreadsheets used to clean, combine or calculate information before it reaches leadership?
Pay attention to the manual steps and workarounds along the way. A spreadsheet may contain a calculation nobody mentioned during discovery. Someone may manually correct information before a report is distributed. Two departments may be pulling similar numbers from different systems.
Mapping the current process helps you identify what Power BI needs to replace, connect or improve rather than simply recreating the final report in a new platform.
Related Content:[You Have Power BI. So Why Are You Still Reporting Out of Excel?](https://www.teamscs.com/superior-spotlight-blogs/you-have-power-bi-so-why-are-you-still-reporting-out-of-excel)
## Find the Data Behind Those Questions
Now you can work backward from the business questions to the data required to answer them.
Where does that information live? How detailed is it? How frequently is it updated? Are definitions consistent across systems? Who owns the source data?
You may discover that the requested KPI is simple, but the data needed to calculate it isn't. Two systems might define a customer differently. Historical data may not contain the level of detail someone expects to analyze. A metric may rely on information that isn't captured consistently.
This is where [data modeling](https://www.teamscs.com/data-modeling) becomes a central part of Power BI planning. Instead of structuring data around a handful of metrics requested for one dashboard, you can model the business entities, relationships and definitions needed for broader analysis.
## Then Define the KPIs and Reporting Requirements
With the business questions, current process and available data understood, you have the context to define useful reporting requirements.
*Now* you can ask:
- How should this metric be calculated?
- What level of detail does the user need?
- How often does the information need to refresh?
- Does someone need to drill into the number?
- Who should have access to it?
- What should happen when the metric changes?
These answers turn a broad request like “show me customer retention” into something your team can design around. They may also reveal that the originally requested KPI isn't the best way to answer the underlying business question.
## Build for Questions You Haven't Asked Yet
If your data model is built around a narrow set of requested KPIs, every new question can become another development project. A user wants a different breakdown. Another department needs to analyze the same information from a different perspective. Leadership wants a comparison that wasn't part of the original requirements.
You don't need to predict every future request. Instead, build the underlying model with reuse and flexibility in mind. Consider which entities and relationships will be shared across reports, which definitions need to stay consistent and where future reporting needs are likely to overlap.
Related Content:[What Most Teams Miss When Implementing Power BI](https://www.teamscs.com/superior-spotlight-blogs/what-most-teams-miss-when-implementing-power-bi)
## Plan the Data Foundation, Not Just the Final Dashboards
A Power BI project may end with dashboards displaying KPIs, but planning shouldn't start there.
The better progression is to understand the decisions people need to make, how information currently moves through the organization and what data supports those questions. From there, you can build a data model that supports the KPIs and reports people need now without unnecessarily limiting what they can analyze next.
Team SCS helps organizations build data models that turn information from multiple sources into a reliable foundation for Power BI reporting and analytics.
[Book a Discovery Meeting](https://www.teamscs.com/discovery)
---
*Superior Consulting Services (SCS) is a Microsoft-centric technology firm providing innovative solutions that enable our clients to solve business problems. We offer full-scale data unification, modeling, and reporting services.*
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