You Are Not Your Job: Building a Purpose-Driven Personal Brand with Ikigai

In a tech industry that often equates success with titles, certifications, and technical mastery, it’s easy to lose sight of what truly defines our value. Our worth isn’t in the job title we hold, it’s in the work we’re meant to do.

In this session, I’ll share how the Japanese concept of Ikigai, meaning “reason for being”, reshaped my approach to personal branding. From navigating a career crisis to becoming an international speaker and STEM changemaker, I’ll walk you through how aligning with purpose transformed my visibility, impact, and career direction.

Together, we’ll explore how to build a personal brand rooted in authenticity, values, and intentional action. Through the lens of Ikigai, you’ll learn how to:
1. Distinguish your “job” from your deeper “work”
2. Align your passions, strengths, and purpose with what the world truly needs
3. Launch side hustles that energise your spirit, not just your income
4. Attract opportunities by living your brand, not chasing recognition

Whether you’re just starting out or redefining your path, this session offers practical strategies, reflective prompts, and real-world examples to help you build a brand that resonates, because when you live your Ikigai, your impact speaks for itself.

Optimising Primavera P6 Reporting with Power BI

Unlock the full potential of Primavera P6 reporting with Power BI! This session is designed to help project professionals transform P6 data into actionable insights by leveraging Power BI’s powerful analytics and visualisation capabilities.

I will explore different ways to connect Power BI to Primavera P6, break down the structure of P6 exports, and demonstrate how to build meaningful reports, including S-Curves. Additionally, I’ll highlight the importance of data accessibility to ensure that reports are inclusive for all users.

Through a real-world case study, attendees will gain hands-on knowledge of how to clean, model, and visualise P6 data, empowering them to drive better decision-making and streamline project reporting.

When Red Isn’t a Warning: The Accessibility Problem with RAG Status

Red, amber and green (RAG) status indicators are everywhere in dashboards and reports. They feel intuitive, fast and familiar, but for many users, they don’t communicate what we think they do.

In this lightning talk, I’ll briefly highlight the accessibility issues caused by relying on RAG colours, particularly for people with colour vision impairments and low vision. I’ll explain why colour-only signalling is a common accessibility failure and how it can undermine clarity and trust in reporting.

I’ll introduce tools that allow us to check accessibility issues in our reports, helping teams spot problems early and make more informed decisions about their designs.

Sampling Bias: When Data Collection Shapes the Story

Sampling bias is rarely obvious, and that’s exactly why it matters.

In this lightening talk , we’ll explore how limitations in data collection and sampling choices can shape the story an audience takes away, even when the analysis and visualisation are technically correct.

Using real-world examples, I’ll show how certain populations can be unintentionally over-represented, under-represented, or excluded entirely, and how visual design decisions can either mask these gaps or make them transparent.

This session focuses on awareness rather than accusation, understanding the limits of what a sample can tell us, and making those limits clearer through thoughtful data communication and visual design.

Beyond Red, Amber, Green: Building Colour-Accessible Dashboards

Raise your hand if you rely on red, amber, and green (RAG) to report performance and progress…

Now imagine discovering, as I once did, that a colour-blind user had spent six months quietly struggling to make sense of a dashboard, simply because the colours told a story he couldn’t see.

For millions of people with colour-blindness, those familiar RAG visuals can blur into a single message, or no message at all.

In this session, we’ll explore how to move beyond traffic-light reporting to create dashboards everyone can read and act on. You’ll learn how to apply WCAG contrast principles, introduce accessible colour themes (including a Power BI colour-mode toggle), and strike the right balance between brand guidelines and usability.

Walk away with practical techniques to build colour-accessible dashboards that inform, include, and genuinely empower every user.

Accidental Data Lies: How Poor Visual Choices Can Mislead

Welcome to the world of accidental data lies, where innocent-looking charts quietly twist the truth. And in today’s world, where ethical data visualisation is a hot (and important) topic, it's something we all need to watch out for.

We’ll uncover the most common (and sneaky!) ways charts mislead, from pie chart pandemonium to axis trickery, colour chaos, and scale fail! Expect real-world examples of chart crimes, a few laughs at visual disasters, and sharper instincts for spotting deception.

But it’s not just about dodgy design, this session also dives into the ethics of visual storytelling. We’ll explore how the ‘framing effect’ and ‘sampling bias can quietly distort meaning, and how to design with integrity so visuals inform rather than mislead.

From spreadsheet wizards to Power BI spellcasters, this session will help you create visuals that don’t just dazzle, they tell the truth and earn trust.

Learning Outcomes:
1. Spot the Sneaky Stuff:
Identify the most common ways charts mislead, including bad chart types, distorted axes, and overloaded visuals, and understand why they’re so effective at fooling us.
2. Choose the Right Chart for the Right Story:
Learn how to match chart types to data types, avoid common mismatches (like line charts for categories), and use Power BI visuals with purpose and clarity.
3. Design with Integrity:
Apply practical Power BI techniques to simplify dashboards, label data clearly, and communicate insights with transparency and trust.

Accessibility Considerations in Power BI: Designing for Everyone

Ready to future-proof your dashboards? In this 20-minute session, we’ll explore how to make Power BI reports not only beautiful and insightful, but truly accessible.

We’ll look beyond compliance to inclusive design, uncovering the tools and settings already at your fingertips inside Power BI. From keyboard navigation and tab order to colour contrast and visual cues, you’ll walk away with practical, easy-to-apply tips that work for everyone.

Blink First, Think Later: Designing Power BI Report for Human Instincts

Before users analyse your data, they blink, scan, and make snap judgements.

This session is about designing Power BI dashboards for that split second of human instinct. You’ll learn how layout, spacing, and visual hierarchy guide attention before logic kicks in, and how accessibility plays a key role in making insights discoverable, not hidden.

Expect real-world examples, quick wins, and design techniques you can apply immediately to help users find what matters without being told where to look.

What the European Accessibility Act Means for Power BI

When people think about the European Accessibility Act, they usually picture websites, online services, ticket machines, or banking apps, rarely Power BI reports. But if your organisation uses Power BI to communicate performance, decisions, risk, or strategy, those reports are digital services. And if people can’t access them, they’re excluded from the conversation.

Accessibility is not theoretical for me. After a work injury left me with nerve damage in both hands, a simple hardware adjustment transformed how I could work. That experience reshaped my understanding of design: accessibility isn’t an optional improvement, it’s what enables participation.

In this practical, design‑focused session, I’ll connect the requirements of the European Accessibility Act with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and demonstrate how these principles translate directly into Power BI best practice. We’ll explore actionable techniques such as meaningful structure, keyboard navigation, tab order, colour contrast, and designing information that does not rely on colour alone.

Attendees will leave with clear, practical methods for creating Power BI reports that are inclusive by design, reports that go beyond compliance to become genuinely usable for everyone.

Sketch, Scope, Succeed: Prepping for Power BI Development

What happens before you open Power BI can make or break your report. Join this engaging and practical session to explore the crucial pre-development stages that often get overlooked but are key to creating accessible, user-focused dashboards that actually deliver insights. From asking the right questions to sketching your ideas, we’ll walk through a tried-and-tested approach that sets your reporting project up for success!

Main Outcomes:

Know What to Ask – Learn how to confidently gather requirements by understanding user needs, usage context, and report types.

Plan Before You Plot – Discover how wireframes, storytelling, and thoughtful design create smoother builds and more meaningful visuals.

Design with Everyone in Mind – Understand the role of accessibility and how to embed inclusive thinking right from the planning phase.

When Ocean Models Become Data Models: Navigating a Career You Can’t Predict with DAX

How does an Oceanographer become a recognised Power BI leader delivering reporting solutions across complex infrastructure programmes in the UK, and an international community speaker before holding a formal leadership title?

This session explores the unexpected journey from modelling ocean circulation and processing dynamic positioning data to leading Project Controls Anytics using Power BI.

Rather than focusing purely on tools, this talk highlights the technical and analytical foundations that enable scalable, decision-ready reporting: pattern recognition, data structuring, stakeholder translation, and problem-solving under pressure.

You’ll learn how transferable analytical skills, combined with hands-on Power BI experience, can accelerate progression from report developer to reporting lead, even when starting outside traditional tech pathways.

If you’re building your career in Power BI, analytics, or data platforms, this session will challenge you to think beyond features and focus on the capabilities that truly drive impact.

Rethinking Power BI Design Through Persuasion, Perception and Practice

Designing clear, trustworthy, and inclusive Power BI dashboards is a challenge for many users. Even experienced report builders can struggle to present information in a way that supports good decisions, avoids bias, and works effectively for all audiences.

That’s why two philosophy enthusiasts, who also happen to be Power BI experts, have teamed up to deliver a full day workshop that transforms ethics, accessibility, and human centred thinking into a practical, repeatable framework for designing better Power BI dashboards.
This workshop introduces a human centred, ethics aware design approach inspired by Aristotle’s principles of persuasion: Ethos (credibility), Logos (logic), and Pathos (emotion). These classical concepts are combined with modern cognitive science and accessibility practice to form a clear solution.

The framework blends ethical data design (to strengthen credibility), perceptual design (to improve understanding), and empathy driven accessibility (to ensure dashboards work for everyone).

During the session, attendees will learn how to apply these principles through interactive, hands on exercises. They will prototype wireframes in Figma with AI assistance and translate those designs into Power BI. By the end of the workshop, participants will have a repeatable method for creating dashboards that are clearer, more ethical, and more effective in real world use.

This is not a typical technical Power BI workshop. It’s a design first, ethics aware approach to data design, that equips attendees to build dashboards that are persuasive without being manipulative, inclusive rather than exclusive, and reliable enough to support confident decision making.

Inclusive Analytics: Engineering Accessible Power BI Reports

When people talk about digital accessibility, the focus is usually on websites or external digital services, rarely on Power BI. But if your organisation relies on Power BI to communicate performance, decisions, risk, or strategy, then those reports are digital products. And if users can’t access them, they’re excluded from critical conversations.

Accessibility is not theoretical for me. After a work injury left me with nerve damage in both hands, a small hardware adjustment completely changed how I could work. That experience reshaped my understanding of design from an engineering perspective: accessibility isn’t an enhancement, it’s what enables participation.

In this practical, development-focused session, I translate the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) - Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust - into clear Power BI development practices. We’ll look at how engineering choices in layout, colour systems, navigation paths, tab order, screen reader behaviour, and text elements directly affect who can use a report and how easily they can do so.

We will also explore how AI can support developers by generating dynamic, context-aware alternative text for visuals, a technique that can help describe charts more accurately, reduce manual effort, and raise accessibility quality across a reporting suite.

Attendees will leave with practical, repeatable techniques for structuring Power BI reports to improve usability, support accessibility compliance, and ensure that analytics outputs are inclusive by design and usable by everyone.