Best Practices for Structuring Power BI Service Environment

[Thaumaturgist]

Hi all,

Looking for recommendations on how to best structure a Power BI Service environment.

Imagine we are a mid- to large-sized organization with analytics teams embedded in major departments (Finance, Marketing, Operations, etc.). Each team manages its own reports, maintains separate data models, and all reporting is consumed internally — no external users.

Some key details:

• Reports are refreshed on a scheduled basis

• We are licensed under Power BI Premium Per User (PPU)

• Stakeholders mostly view reports; interactivity is minimal

Questions:

1. What is the recommended way to structure workspaces in this type of decentralized model?

2. How should reports be distributed effectively within and across departments?

3. How would you handle executive-level reporting — centralized or departmental?

Any input or examples of what’s worked well for similar setups would be greatly appreciated!

[v-dineshya · Accepted solution]

Hi @Thaumaturgist ,

Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Community Forum.

Please check below things, best Practices for Structuring Power BI Service Environment.

Workspace Structure

1. Create separate workspaces for each department, Finance Workspace, Marketing Workspace and Operations Workspace. Each workspace should be managed by the respective analytics team. This will give clarity and security.

2. Create shared workspaces like Sales & Marketing Insights or Operations & Finance KPIs. Use cross-functional access controls to manage permissions.

3. Executive Insights Workspace, Managed by a BI team, Pulls data from departmental models or centralized datasets.

Report Distribution

1. Each department publishes an app from its workspace. Stakeholders subscribe to relevant apps. Apps provide a user-friendly interface and version control.

2. Set up email subscriptions for key reports. Schedule delivery post-refresh.

3. Embed reports in Microsoft Teams channels for contextual access, Finance reports in Finance Team channel. Use tabs or adaptive cards for visibility.

Data Model Management

1. Reuse of datasets, use shared datasets across workspaces. Use certified datasets for consistency in KPIs and metrics.

2. Use Dataflows for Centralize transformations and it reduce redundancy across departments.

Governance & Security

1. Use role-based access control, Viewers, Contributors, Admins per workspace. Limit access to sensitive data via row-level security.

2. Prefix workspaces with department, Use versioning for reports.

3. Use Power BI Audit Logs and Usage Metrics Reports to track report usage.

Executive-Level Reporting Centralized vs. Departmental?

Centralized dashboards for strategic KPIs and board-level insights. Departmental dashboards feed into centralized views via shared datasets or dataflows. check consistency while allowing departments to maintain ownership.

I hope this information helps. Please do let us know if you have any further queries.

Regards,

Dinesh

[lbendlin]

Imagine we are a mid- to large-sized organization 
...
We are licensed under Power BI Premium Per User (PPU)

Does not compute.  mid to large sized organizations have Premium/Fabric SKUs and (some) Premium Licenses, not PPU

[Greg_Deckler]

@Thaumaturgist This might help you sort out some advantages and disadvantage of different approaches. Power BI Usage Models in Pictures! | by Greg Deckler | Jul, 2025 | Medium. Would need to understand if your analytics teams tend to separate semantic model creation from report creation. That would often argue for 2 workspaces per team, one for the semantic modelers and one for the report developers. Otherwise, just use 1 workspace per department/team. You could consider one pair of gateways per team or centralize everything to a central pair of gateways for refresh. Use Apps to distribute reports. Executive level reporting could be done in a separate workspace and you could use dashboards that pull tiles from departmental reports, reports that connect to underlying department semantic models or fully new reports. My book "Mastering Power BI 2nd Edition" gets into a lot of discussion around this topic.