DELA stands for “Draagt Elkanders Lasten” (Carry Each Other’s Burdens) and is part of a cooperative. DELA specializes in all aspects related to farewells, providing support to people during one of the most challenging times in their lives: the farewell of a loved one. Our organization has been around for over 85 years and has been present in Belgium since 1989, where it employs nearly 800 staff members who assist before, during, and after a funeral. DELA is best known as a funeral insurer but also operates around 70 highly qualified funeral homes across more than 120 locations in Belgium, three crematoria, and a repatriation center at Zaventem airport. Additionally, around 30 bereavement care consultants are available daily to help relatives with practical and administrative tasks after the funeral. DELA handles approximately 80% of repatriations and buries 1 in 10 Belgians. DELA is thus recognized as the funeral specialist of Belgium. In line with its social commitment, DELA established the DELAfonds, which supports initiatives aimed at making the difficult moments surrounding farewells more bearable.
Jira Software is a project management and ticket tracking tool that allows teams to manage tasks. This is used within DELA for various purposes, including for portfolio management of projects. Due to the increasing amount and variety of projects in different domains, it was not that straightforward to get a complete overview, leading to inefficiency and making it harder to monitor progress.
In addition, DELA was also looking for a way to show the evolution of project statuses and underlying tasks over time, something that is not stored by Jira itself.
There are also monthly presentations on the distribution of the current portfolio and statuses of projects and tasks, which had to be recreated manually each time.
There was a need for a solution that provides a faster and more structured overview of the various projects, as well as an efficient way to present this information quickly and clearly during meetings. In addition, DELA was also looking for a way to store and display the evolution of project statuses and tasks over time.
After a workshop to clearly establish what DELA PMO was looking for, a report was created in Power BI which was directly connected to Jira Software. The report shows the current distribution of statuses of all projects and underlying tasks in Jira. The real power of Power BI comes out here thanks to all the filtering possibilities, which allow users to easily customise which projects or tasks are displayed and thus get a more focused overview that can help them further in solving their questions.
Thanks to a smart implementation of workflows in Power Automate, the current distribution of statuses and other characteristics can be saved in SharePoint at any time with a simple push of a button. By subsequently loading this back into Power BI, a nice overview is generated of the distribution of statuses at different moments, clearly showing the evolution. Here, users themselves have the freedom to choose when the history is saved, so that it always matches the users’ schedules.
Our solution also removes the need to manually put together a presentation every month. Thanks to the Power BI report, a clear overview of the current projects and their entire history is given at any time. To integrate the visuals from the report even better with the rest of the presentation, we decided to embed the Power BI report into PowerPoint. Thanks to this implementation, a slide in a presentation can be replaced by an interactive Power BI report. Instead of manually creating and replacing a similar slide every month, the latest data can now simply be loaded from Jira and the presentation is always up-to-date, allowing more time for analysis and comments, rather than creating slides and copying visuals.
Before implementing the Power BI solution, DELA often struggled to get a clear overview of their portfolio. Whenever a project or task was moved to a different status, this information was also lost.
Today, thanks to the new Power BI report, all information around this is clearly and conveniently available in a central place together with all other reports. The overview of which projects and tasks are displayed can also be easily adjusted thanks to the many filtering options to display the necessary information. The history of all projects and tasks previously lost is now saved and visible in the report. In addition, the time-consuming process of manually preparing monthly presentations is a thing of the past. With the integration of Power BI into PowerPoint, reports are automatically updated and incorporated directly into presentations, ensuring DELA always has up-to-date and professional visuals.
