Rishi Sapra
Data Platform MVP | Data & Analytics Consultant, Speaker, Trainer and Technology evangelist specialising in Data Visualisation (Power BI) and Microsoft Fabric
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Rishi has a unique blend of technical and commercial skills - he is a 4x Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), a Chartered Accountant, a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) and an Executive MBA (Hons) holder with a first class degree from the London School of Economics.
He currently works as a Data & AI Strategic Project lead at Avanade - a Joint Venture between Accenture and Microsoft which been awarded Microsoft Partner of the Year 18 times! In this role he focuses on Microsoft Fabric Go To Market (GTM) offerings including those around Security & Governance, Industry/Functional accelerators and Azure/BI migration.
Prior to joining Altius in 2017 (Which was acquired by Avanade in 2020), he spent 12 years in the Big 4 /Financial Services (Deloitte, HSBC, Barclays, KPMG) and has a strong background in Business modelling and process improvement.
He is actively involved in the Fabric Community in London/globally and has presented at Meetup groups and several large-scale conferences. His passion is in helping organisations achieve the holy grail of Self-Service BI and helping individuals learn the necessary skills to succeed.
He also runs two core communities - LDI (www.learndatainsights.com) for people to take data analytics quizzes and courses and PPF (www.powerplatformfinance.com) for helping finance professionals apply the Power Platform technology stack in their roles.
Power BI, Fabric and role-based Copilots - how to get them to do what you expect!
There is no doubt that Generative AI, Including tools like Microsoft Copilot, will transform the way we analyse and report on data. But by default, at least for now, it won’t automatically be able to source and understand your corporate data in the same way as ChatGPT can with the data on the internet (on which it has been trained over years with trillions of data points!). The raw data in your organisation needs to be modelled and enriched with the business-specific domain logic/context in order to be able to evaluate performance and provide meaningful insights.
In this session Rishi will:
-Highlight the current capabilities of Power BI and role-based Copilots (e.g Copilot for Finance)
-Discuss the value of metadata for data stored in lakehouses/semantic models and consider how they tie into prompts to help guide Copilot on how to answer questions on your data!
-Look at where Copilot experiences fit in across the entire analytics workflow, from understanding requirements/user stories through to data transformation, modelling/enrichment and process automation.
You will come away with this session with an idea of why applying Copilot to analytics can be challenging and how you can provide it with enough context to help with data-driven insights keeping you firmly in the drivers seat!
Power BI and Fabric Governance – Going from the skies to the ground!
Imagine yourself in the middle of trying to educate and convince senior stakeholders in a large organisation (e.g Head of IT Security, Head of IT, CDO, COO) about how Microsoft Fabric can be securely implemented and Governed. There are debates around how to balance the requirement for self-service with implementing sufficient technical controls to restrict access to potentially sensitive data. All in an organisation where Power BI has brought a lot of value to the business but a lot of pain for IT, essentially forming part of a growing, ungoverned domain of “Shadow IT”. So these stakeholders aren’t immediately sold on the idea of bringing more analytics items into the mix with Microsoft Fabric.
In this session you will be immersed into a series of role-play scenarios with these stakeholders, delivered through an interactive e-learning course. This is complete with a brainstorming exercise and interactive Q&A at the end of each module.
Through these scenarios you will learn clear patterns to deploy in order to “land the plane” and go from high level security requirements to ground operations.
This includes practical steps on how to implement technical controls, but also an understanding of how to organise the people on the ground – the airport staff and crew – so that there are clear roles and responsibilities, processes and ways of working.
The content is delivered through 6 modules:
Module 1: Overview. Understand the high level scope of what is required to effectively Govern and manage a Fabric/Power BI estate.
Module 2: Microsoft Fabric as part of a Data Mesh Architecture. Understand how the principles of Data Mesh apply to Microsoft Fabric and how it solves many of the challenges around data silos and dependencies on specialised technical teams.
Module 3: Administering and monitoring the Fabric environment:
- Manage Fabric capacities from a performance and consumption perspective
-Design feature controls using the Fabric Admin portal and
- know how to analyse Fabric adoption and usage!
Module 4: Data Governance
Understand the principles and key activities required to set up:
-Integration between MS Fabric and Purview for Data lineage /impact analysis, Data Cataloguing, and automatic scanning/identification of sensitive data
- Information Protection, including Data Loss Prevention Sensitivity Label and Data encryption.
- Data Safeguarding including Data residency, data recovery and end-to-end auditing as required to meet compliance requirements.
Module 5: Access control and Data Security
Define and implement security controls around access permissions, including:
-Data level security such as Row/Object level security and OneSecurity at the lakehouse/file level.
-Workspace and artefact security including workspace roles, sharing permissions and delegated data permissions.
-Identity and Network security including Gateways, private endpoints and Microsoft Entra Private Access.
Module 6: The Organisational Operating Model.
Brining it all together and applying the principles of the Fabric Adoption Roadmap to your organisation for end user and developer enablement.
This includes including ensuring the right data culture and setting up an Analytics/BI centre of excellence so that all users and admins have the appropriate level of support and the right environment for learning and continuous improvement!
Governance with Microsoft Fabric - A role play based workshop:Part 2
Imagine yourself as a data analyst in the middle of trying to educate and convince senior stakeholders in a large organisation (e.g Head of IT Security, Head of IT, CDO, COO) about how Microsoft Fabric can be securely implemented and Governed. There are debates around how to balance the requirement for self-service with implementing sufficient technical controls to restrict access to potentially sensitive data.
All in an organisation where Power BI has brought a lot of value to the business but a lot of pain for IT, essentially forming part of a growing, ungoverned domain of “Shadow IT”. So these stakeholders aren’t immediately sold on the idea of bringing more analytics items into the mix with Microsoft Fabric.
In this session you will be immersed into a series of role-play scenarios with these stakeholders, delivered through an interactive e-learning course done as part of a live group workshop. The content is split into 6 core sections (modules) with a live peer brainstorming exercise and interactive Q&A at the end of each module.
In part2 we cover the second set of three topics:
Module 4: Data Governance
Understand the principles and key activities required to set up:
- Integration between MS Fabric and Purview for Data lineage /impact analysis, Data Cataloguing, and automatic scanning/identification of sensitive data
- Information Protection, including Data Loss Prevention Sensitivity Label and Data encryption.
- Data Safeguarding including Data residency, data recovery and end-to-end auditing as required to meet compliance requirements.
Module 5: Security
Define and implement security controls around access permissions, including:
- Data level security such as Row/Object level security and OneSecurity at the lakehouse/file level.
- Workspace and artefact security including workspace roles, sharing permissions and delegated data permissions.
- Identity and Network security including Gateways, private endpoints and Microsoft Entra Private Access.
Module 6: The Organisational Operating Model.
Brining it all together and applying the principles of the Fabric Adoption Roadmap to your organisation for end user and developer enablement.
This includes including ensuring the right data culture and setting up an Analytics/BI centre of excellence so that all users and admins have the appropriate level of support and the right environment for learning and continuous improvement!
Governance with Microsoft Fabric - A role play based workshop:Part 1
Imagine yourself as a data analyst in the middle of trying to educate and convince senior stakeholders in a large organisation (e.g Head of IT Security, Head of IT, CDO, COO) about how Microsoft Fabric can be securely implemented and Governed. There are debates around how to balance the requirement for self-service with implementing sufficient technical controls to restrict access to potentially sensitive data.
All in an organisation where Power BI has brought a lot of value to the business but a lot of pain for IT, essentially forming part of a growing, ungoverned domain of “Shadow IT”. So these stakeholders aren’t immediately sold on the idea of bringing more analytics items into the mix with Microsoft Fabric.
In this session you will be immersed into a series of role-play scenarios with these stakeholders, delivered through an interactive e-learning course done as part of a live group workshop. The content is split into 6 core sections (modules) with a live peer brainstorming exercise and interactive Q&A at the end of each module.
In part 1 we cover the first three topics:
Module 1: Overview.
Understand the high level scope of what is required to effectively Govern and manage a Fabric/Power BI estate.
Module 2: Microsoft Fabric as part of a Data Mesh Architecture.
Understand how the principles of Data Mesh apply to Microsoft Fabric and how it solves many of the challenges around data silos and dependencies on specialised technical teams.
Module 3: Administering and monitoring the Fabric environment:
- Manage Fabric capacities from a performance and consumption perspective
- Design feature controls-
using the Fabric Admin portal and
- know how to analyse Fabric adoption and usage!
Financial Modelling in the Banking Industry
Adventureworks is so yesterday! Learning how to build one of the reports you come across In training exercises is relatively simple but there’s still a huge gap in trying to apply to a complex business domain such as Finance. Trying to create linked financial statements (e.g. P&L and Balance Sheet) in Power BI, where dynamic calculations need to flow across the strictly formatted visuals, is challenging to say the least! Add building a financial model into the mix, where you want to see the effect of tweaking certain (economic) variables to see the impact on profitability/liquidity, and you require some serious DAX mastery!
In this session you will learn how to:
• Take industry Income Statement/Balance Sheet data for 4 Banks (Barclays, Citi, HSBC, Lloyds) and turn it into a financial reporting solution in Power BI
• Create an interactive benchmarking report comparing the financial performance of the Banks on key metrics such as Income Growth, Cost:Income Ratio and Current Ratio
• Create a simple Income Statement and Balance Sheet for each bank
• Link the Income Statement and Balance sheet together through Retained Earnings
• Introduce what-if scenario modelling for key variables such as headcount growth and annual change in loans/deposits
Attending this session will allow you to understand how Power BI can be applied to a complex real-life scenario and show how to use Tabular Editor 3 to script and organise measures so that you can adjust and apply them to any similar models with the click of a button!
Scenario Modelling in Power BI
Power BI isn’t just a read-only historical view of your data - you can also enter parameters which feed into your model and drive outputs under different scenarios. In this session Rishi will show this process using a simple Power Apps form embedded into Power BI, supported by a basic workflow. This solution is made even more seamless by combining a Direct Query connection to the parameter table with an imported data model on the full dataset, utilising the Composite Model feature of Power BI
Achieving AI ambitions in the Finance function with Microsoft Fabric and Copilot
In any organisation, the Finance team is naturally driven by data and analytics but they have often been slow to adopt new technologies because of risk/governance (working with the most sensitive data in the firm!), challenges with climbing the steep learning curve, over reliance on IT teams, and the complexities of applying finance logic which most commonly exists in people’s heads or in spreadsheets!
The self service nature of Microsoft Fabric (which includes Power BI) and Copilot studio makes it accessible to business users, but it needs to be deployed as part of an overall data/AI strategy in order to address all the concerns and avoid building additional technical debt
In this session Rishi and Leon will show:
- Low/no code approaches to connecting to finance data (e.g ERP systems amd spreadsheets) in a secure and performant manner
- Consolidating, cleaning, and re-shaping transactional data using Fabric Copilot and notebooks
- Using pre-defined data schemas to ensure data is represented in a consistent format for analytics
- Securely sharing data and reports at different stages of the data pipeline (raw, cleaned, conformed) to ensure a single version of the truth
- Building AI solutions on top of the data models (e.g AI skills linked into Copilot/agents)
The end result of this will be a month end board pack in Power BI which stakeholders can self serve on through visual interactions and Power BI copilot, which is supported by a set of connected artifacts in Fabric that can be maintained by the finance team.
Attendees will learn techniques to ensure that their data is clean, accessible (by both Gen AI and humans!), enriched with metadata such as descriptions/ relationships and with appropriate business context embedded into logic. These are all essential elements to ensure that companies can take advantage of the Gen AI revolution in the finance sector and beyond!
Building a credit rating model in Power BI
This session will explore how to transform a traditional Excel-based credit rating model for countries into a modern, interactive, and scalable solution using Power BI and Microsoft Fabric. Participants will discover innovative techniques to enhance financial modeling and storytelling by leveraging advanced analytics and integration capabilities.
Hear from Power Platform in Finance specialist and Microsoft MVP, Rishi Sapra, as we delve into the following areas:
• Replicating Complex Rating Logic: Translating intricate credit rating formulas and methodologies from Excel into DAX to ensure consistency and accuracy.
• Interactive Insights: Using slicers, bookmarks, and contextual visualizations in Power BI to enable dynamic comparisons and highlight key drivers of credit ratings.
• Streamlined Reporting: Designing intuitive and user-friendly reports that empower stakeholders to explore insights interactively.
• Scalability with Microsoft Fabric: Harnessing the Medallion Lakehouse architecture to enable seamless data integration, metadata management, and collaboration at an enterprise level.
This session is particularly beneficial for finance professionals and analysts who are seeking to modernize their financial or operational models. Attendees will leave with practical strategies to maintain model accuracy, enhance interactivity, and scale their solutions to meet the evolving demands of modern analytics.
Tips and Tricks for working with Finance data in Power BI
Excel has always been the tool of choice for the finance team with the flexibility it provides for logic, formatting and presentation of numbers. But this flexibility has also caused Governance nightmares, performance issues and huge risks with manual processes. Is it possible to also achieve the desired outcomes and flexibility with Power BI whilst also having all the benefits of working in a more controlled, automated and feature-rich environment? Yes! In this session Rishi will show how you can have your finance cake and eat it, showing how to build dynamically formatted financial statements , waterfall charts and KPIs in Power BI to tell an engaging story with finance data. This will be based on the data and reports shown in the blog series at https://aka.ms/pbiincomestatement and the role play session at https://tinyurl.com/PPFroleplay
The Incidental Business Analyst (BA) – Designing a Finance Power BI Data Model to Tell a Story
There is a lot of focus on all the technical aspects of Power BI – including DAX and data modelling – but what about the starting point when it comes to building a report? How do you identify user stories, define the scope of a reporting solution and plan/design your data model so that it will support your reporting requirements (without the need for overly-complex DAX)? Join this session to learn the key steps in designing a data model: Know Your Audience (KYA), Complete a Scoping Template, Define the data granularity/scope and design a conceptual model. We will use time-tested methodologies based on Kimball Data modelling techniques, including a Bus Matrix and Starnet, complete with templates available for you to freely download.
The examples used in this session will be based on finance datasets, complete with a Trial Balance, Chart of Accounts and Journal entries. It will therefore be of particular interest to those who work in the finance sector or are interested in working with finance data, though the concepts shown will be applicable to any sector or industry.
Aggregations and What-if Scenario Modelling in Power BI
Power BI isn’t just a read-only historical view of your data - you can also enter parameters which feed into your model and drive outputs under different scenarios. In this session Rishi will show this process using a simple Power Apps form embedded into Power BI, supported by a basic workflow. This solution is made even more seamless by combining a Direct Query connection to the parameter table with an imported data model on the full dataset, utilising the new Composite Model feature of Power BI. Also learn how to utilise this feature to build aggregate tables – fast in-memory tables for viewing data grouped by one or more dimensions with an automatic switch to Direct Query when drilling down into transaction-level views. The sheer breadth of uses cases to which this can apply, and the performance/power it can bring to your reports is guaranteed to take your breath away!
Storytelling With Data
Communicating through telling stories is an innate part of what it means to be human. It’s what allows us to share beliefs and build connections in a way that the brains of other animal species simply aren’t wired to do. We’re used to telling stories through essays and creative writing, but when it comes to using data to tell these stories, people are often hesitant to adopt a stance and use data to argue it. If I’m a BI developer, how do I have the skills (or even the permission) to tell a data story for another part of the business? How can I tell a story over data that frequently changes?
But these are just excuses we make for not building the best data visualizations we know we can! By understanding the specific user personas who the report is for, we can make them the central characters of our data stories and highlight the “tension” (resolved through the storyboard!) that every good story needs.
In this session, Rishi will:
Walk through the core structure of a gripping story, showing how this translates into Power BI using techniques like pre-attentive attributes, presenting data as arguments (rather than just statements), and providing a “so what” conclusion to the story.
Showcase examples of visualizations he’s built for the community and highlight the data stories he was communicating with them.
Attendees will walk away with an understanding of how to communicate with data in a way that their audience enjoys consuming reports and is able to take action based on the contextualized data arguments presented.
This session is aimed at anyone who wants to understand the impact of data visualizations and how they can be used to effectively communicate what the data is really telling you, framed within the context that the author (report creator) injects into the narrative.
Month of Copilots Sessionize Event
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