I was recently talking to a potential customer about getting started in Power BI. A question they asked me was essentially “What are the difficult parts of Power BI, how do these engagements usually go?”. This was a really interesting question and for me a lot of customer engagements fall under two broad categories.

The lost and confused. A lot of potential customers are just starting to look into Power BI. They cans see what it can do, they understand what it is for, but they have questions. Generally these questions are all about governance and implementation. How do we deploy Power BI? How do we license Power BI? How do we secure it?

This is a reasonable challenge because Power BI has a lot of nooks and crannies. It has a bunch of ways to deploy it and a bunch of ways to license it, and it seems like that add a new one every 6 months. For these customers they generally just seem to be concerned about the unknown unknowns out there. Usually after that first hour, that seems to be all the help they need.

The out of control. These customers have made an investment in Power BI. These customers have started creating reports and seeing result. The problem here is scaling their reports. M and DAX have goofy learning curves. Both start out easy, but get incredibly difficult when you try to do more complex things. Maybe reading CSV files was easy, but now you need to work with a web api now. Maybe your report was fast when it was 60 MB. But now your measure or more complex and you have 250 MB of data and it is slow. These customers need help applying good data modeling and optimizing those models.