For the first time in Switzerland, we organized the Power BI Championship which crowned the top 3 teams based on their solution. In this post I’m going to share what the Championship is all about, what the challenge was (feel free to challenge yourself and create a report on your own), and how the jury scored all the amazing solutions we got. Lastly, I’m going to share the Top “10” solutions in the GitHub repo so everyone can get inspired about the different ideas and solutions.

What is the Power BI Championship

The whole idea of the Championship was to enable everyone to work with Power BI and get to see what’s possible within just a few days. We organized a Briefing Session on the 20th of May 2022 to explain everyone who registered how the Championship will look like and how – even if you’re a new enthusiast – you can skill yourself during the upcoming days and weeks. Starting from the 20th we posted every day for the upcoming two weeks a new enablement Guy in a Cube video to make sure you know the basics about Power BI and how to create reports. (See All Enablement Videos from Guy in a Cube down below).

On the 2nd of June we finally had our Kick-Off where we introduced the Dataset which all Champions have to use. We gave each individual and team the choice between the GHO OData API (https://www.who.int/data/gho/info/gho-odata-api) and the Swiss Open Data about rent prices (https://opendata.swiss/en/dataset/durchschnittlicher-mietpreis-pro-m2-in-franken-nach-zimmerzahl-und-kanton2). The goal was to use at least one of these two datasets and create a report on top. Everyone was free to add more, publicly available data to enhance the report and provide a solution until midnight 7th of June.

Once all teams have submitted their solution a jury of three technical Microsoft FTEs went through the PBIX files to score the solution based on a scoring system. This made sure scoring was as objective as possible and the winner was really determined based on neutral criteria, not personal preferences. All three jury members scored different aspects of each report and the average was taken as final points, e.g. How is the Layout? How is the Data Model? Did the team follow Best Practices? Are all columns / tables from the Data Model used? How is DAX structured? How complex is the DAX used? Did they think about a mobile layout? And so on. Nevertheless, some criteria are still more important than others. Therefore, we decided to weight the different categories. An overview can be found in the image below.

The main idea was to determine a Top 10, announce them on the 10th of June, and invite them to the Finals on the 17th of June. But there was one “issue” – the different solutions have been so amazing and the scoring so close we just couldn’t do a hard cut and invite only the Top 10! We decided during the scoring that we invite even the Top 14 plus 3 Golden Buzzers to the Finals! Golden Buzzer in this case means that each jury member had a Golden Buzzer to vote for a solution once to see them in the Finals regardless of their score. This way we had 17 great teams presenting their solution on the 17th of June.

Once the teams have been announced they had seven days to prepare for the live demo and also collect some extra points through LinkedIn. This means each team had to collect Likes, Comments, and Shares to score more points at the end. Idea behind this was to check if others also like the team’s solution or was it only the jury. But again, we wanted to make sure that just because someone had a huge LinkedIn community, they will not win based on this. So, we weighted again all Teams. The team with the most Likes, Comments, and Shares got 10 points, the second best got 9 points, etc.

Lastly each Team had to sell their solution to the jury who represented a CEO, CIO, and CMO within a 10min live demo. Again, all teams have been scored and weighted (best team 10 points, second best team 9 points, etc.) to make it as fair as possible.

In a last step, we weighted each score (Solution Score 70%, Social Media Score 10%, Live Demo 20%) to determine the Top 3.

Based on these criteria, the winners of the Power BI Championship Switzerland 2022 are:

1st Place: Team BIdventure, Members: Karim Abdrakhmanov & Anthony Haberli
2nd Place: Team Clouds on Mars, Members: Greg Stryjczak & Wojtek Bak
3rd Place: Pascal Kiefer

I want to highlight one more time that this doesn’t mean the other solutions haven’t been good – contrary! All finalists have delivered awesome and outstanding reports and it made the jury’s life really hard to have “only three winners”! But the small details in the end decided the scoring – like a Championship should be. If you’re interested in how close it really was, check the GitHub repo with all the final solutions and write in the comments which was your favorite one.

All Enablement Videos from Guy in a Cube

• Do I need to be an expert in Power Query M?
• Data Modeling best practices
• From Flat File to Data Model
• Mastering Power BI Bookmarks
• Conditional Navigation
• Everything you wanted to know about Power BI Tooltips
• Next Level Conditional Drill in Power BI
• 5 ideas to take your Power BI report to the next level
• Can What If Parameters help in Power BI reports?
• Do you want Dynamic legends in Power BI?
• 3 signs it’s time to optimize your Power BI report
• Why is Power BI slow?
• Power Apps and Power BI can do what?
• Exploring the Power Automate Visual in Power BI

Please let me know if this post was helpful and give me some feedback. Also feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

If you’re interested in the files used in this blog check out my GitHub repo https://github.com/PBI-Guy/blog