Michael McKinley
Data. Made actionable.
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Michael McKinley is the founder of McKinley Consulting. Michael has managed projects and workstreams in consulting for the last thirteen years, in areas including data analytics, change management, operations excellence, and supply chain transformation.
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Power BI API: Automating the Analytics Lifecycle
Take your Power BI solutions beyond the Desktop! In this session, we’ll dive into advanced use cases for the Power BI REST API, showcasing how to automate your workflow, streamline your development, and integrate into your custom portals. Learn how to automate report deployment, create personalized experiences with row-level security, and leverage real-time data updates to keep your visuals fresh.
Whether you’re building internal tools or client-facing applications, this session will provide actionable insights and practical examples to help you unlock the full potential of the Power BI API. Join us to supercharge your analytics solutions!
TMDL: Transforming Metrics, Driving Logic – Advanced Techniques in Power BI
Take your Power BI metrics to the next level with TMDL (Tabular Model Definition Language)! This advanced session dives into the power of TMDL for managing, modifying, and enhancing your Power BI models programmatically. Discover how TMDL enables you to fine-tune your dataset properties, create calculated columns, manage relationships, and even implement custom measures—all without needing to open Power BI Desktop.
Whether you’re streamlining workflows, managing large-scale datasets, or working in collaborative environments, mastering TMDL will revolutionize how you build and maintain your analytics. Join us to learn how to harness TMDL and elevate your Power BI expertise!
Supercharge Your Power BI Development with AI, Agents, and MPCs
Unlock the next level of Power BI development with the latest AI tools—ChatGPT, Copilot, MCPs, and beyond. This session explores how AI is reshaping every stage of the Power BI lifecycle, from design to delivery, and introduces cutting-edge advancements like model context protocols (MPCs) and autonomous AI agents.
Learn how AI now empowers Power BI developers to:
• Accelerate DAX creation and troubleshooting with context-aware suggestions tailored to complex calculations.
• Demystify data modeling challenges, including filter context, relationships, and performance bottlenecks, through AI-guided recommendations.
• Design impactful visuals and data stories, leveraging AI to generate layouts, narratives, and presentation-ready insights aligned to your audience.
• Streamline repetitive workflows with AI agents that can build reports, publish to the Power BI Service, optimize models, and summarize insights autonomously.
• Orchestrate end-to-end development with MPCs, chaining together AI tasks across multiple tools and modalities to deliver smarter, faster BI solutions.
• Enhance governance and documentation, with AI automating report descriptions, data lineage mapping, and compliance-ready outputs.
Whether you’re new to Power BI or a seasoned expert, discover how AI is transforming BI development from reactive problem-solving to proactive, intelligent automation—helping you work smarter, deliver faster, and drive real business impact.
Modern Power BI Training: From Data Rookie to Dashboard-Ready In One Day
Learn Power BI the modern way—faster, smarter, and ready for real-world work.
This full-day, hands-on workshop is built for busy professionals who want to do more with data—without getting buried in jargon or lost in a sea of online tutorials. Whether you’re a business analyst, Excel power user, operations lead, or data-curious professional, you’ll walk away with the skills and confidence to build insightful, interactive dashboards using Microsoft Power BI.
This isn’t your old-school training session.
You’ll learn a streamlined, modern approach to Power BI that focuses on the most important concepts—and skips the outdated ones. Along the way, we’ll incorporate AI-powered tools and tips to accelerate your workflow, improve report quality, and reduce friction in your development process.
By the end of the day, you’ll have built a complete Power BI solution from scratch—and know exactly how to apply what you’ve learned when you get back to work.
Key Takeaways
You’ll learn how to:
• Build a complete Power BI report from scratch
• Ingest and transform raw data using Power Query
• Apply key data modeling concepts for accurate insights
• Write simple but powerful DAX measures
• Use AI tools to reduce friction and speed up development
• Design engaging, interactive visuals
• Publish, share, and operationalize your reports in the Power BI Service
• Confidently use Power BI back on the job—immediately
Workshop Schedule (This can be adjusted to fit the timeline of the facility, for example.)
• 8:00–8:30 – Introduction & Setup
• 8:30–8:50 – Where to Get Started: Beginning at the Finish Line
• 8:50–9:30 – Data Ingestion & Transformation, Part 1
• 9:30–9:45 – Morning Break
• 9:45–10:30 – Data Ingestion & Transformation, Part 2
• 10:30–11:15 – Data Modeling
• 11:15–12:00 – Creating DAX Measures and Visuals, Part 1
• 12:00–12:30 – Lunch Break (Provided)
• 12:30–2:15 – Creating DAX Measures and Visuals, Part 2
• 2:15–2:30 – Afternoon Break
• 2:30–3:30 – Publishing, Sharing, and Operationalizing in Power BI Service
• 3:30–4:00 – Wrap-Up and Q&A
This is the Power BI class we wish we had when we started.
Bring your laptop and your curiosity—leave with a working dashboard, modern skills, and a faster path to insight.
Data Modeling for Business Intelligence
At some point in your Power BI journey, something stops working the way you expect it to. Your numbers don't add up. A filter isn't behaving. A report that looked fine yesterday is suddenly wrong today. More often than not, the culprit isn't your DAX. It's your data model.
This session is for anyone who has outgrown the single-table dataset and is starting to wrestle with something more complex. We'll cover the foundational concepts that make the difference between a model that works and one that fights you: how Power BI's engine thinks, how relationships propagate filters through your model, and why those mechanics should drive the decisions you make when you're building.
None of this requires a background in database design or software development. What it requires is a willingness to understand why things work the way they do. Once you have that, a lot of things that used to feel like black magic start to make sense.
You'll leave with a clearer mental model of how Power BI interprets your data, practical patterns you can apply immediately, and the vocabulary to diagnose problems you've probably already encountered but couldn't quite name.
ALM for BI: A Practical Menu for Managing Power BI at Every Stage
Everything in this session comes from real experience. Actual problems I've faced building and managing Power BI & Fabric solutions over the years, and the practices I developed to solve them. Version control, deployment pipelines, environment strategy, TMDL, release management. Each one of these is something I adopted because I needed it, not because someone told me I should.
The good news is you don't have to do all of it, and you certainly don't have to do all of it right now. ALM for BI is a menu, not a checklist. You look at what's on the table, you figure out what matches the problems you're dealing with right now, and you start there.
That's really the philosophy behind this session: the 1% rule. Just get 1% better. Pick one thing that's causing you pain, make it a little bit better, and move on. Do that consistently and your development practice transforms over time without you ever having to blow everything up and start over.
We'll walk through the full toolkit available to Power BI and Fabric teams today. For each piece we'll cover what problem it solves and what it looks like in practice. You'll leave knowing which parts of the menu are worth ordering first.
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Michael McKinley
Data. Made actionable.
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