Building a Docs Dashboard

I did it. I FINALLY did it! I made a Document Governance and Effectiveness that actually provides useful information for our team to act on! It’s not perfect, but it’s a start, and I couldn’t have done it without my buddy Copilot. Here’s what we did.

  1. I started by coming up with a list of dream metrics I wanted to report on, and asked Copilot if they were possible given what it knows about my environment and my company’s data. I then asked it if there were any other metrics I should consider reporting on.
  2. Thanks to the suggestion of a teammate, I took our vice-president’s goals, and asked Copilot to match each metric to one of the goals. This way, we would ensure our data aligned with the VP’s.
  3. We then worked on acquiring data. We needed to gather document views monthly (not easy in a SharePoint environment), metadata from our primary document repository, and data from our Archive repository. This was not easy. Here are some of the challenges:
    • Because I want to automate as much of this as possible, it involved using Power Automate to gather this information monthly – but Copilot walked me through that process.
    • We needed to start collecting much more metadata on our documents. Fortunately, this metadata does not need to be updated very often, but we have over 300 docs in our library and no way I was going to enter all that data by hand. So Copilot wrote some PowerShell scripts that could collect most of that data, and then again walked me through creating a Power Automate to add that information into SharePoint.
  4. Finally, I started building the dashboard in Power BI and WHOOEY was this difficult. Even with Copilot writing all the queries, transformation code, and custom calculated measures, it was still pretty painful. But we got ‘er done!

And VOILA! after about 2 solid weeks of working on this, I was able to present it to my team, and then to my boss – all of whom loved it. And, we’ve already assigned action items to improve our metrics in future reports.

There are still some things I’d like to add. The most important one is tying our work to revenue generation, which is a notoriously difficult for technical writers. We have some ideas, but we’re not quite there yet.