What is behind those numbers in a PPS 2010 Grid Report, and why can't I see my newly created drillthrough actions in SSAS 2008?

In order to cleanly validate the numbers behind the measures in a PPS report, I designed several new drillthrough actions in SSAS 2008. I use these actions so the user does not see the dimensional surrogate keys, and cleanly brings up the meaningful detail attributes and measures in a tabular format. The report has three filters, and selecting each measure brings up a separate drillthrough action via the "additional actions" by right-clicking in the measure cell.   Well, the only problem is, I could not access them from a previously created report.  I could view them in Excel and SSMS, but not in the PPS Report.  Ok, I am not a fan of providing a ton of detail in a PPS report since I consider it to be a "Performance Tool" with high-level aggregated values. Not to mention excel should be the first choice, as most likely the user is just going to save the detail anyway in Excel for tabular analysis.

At any rate, the only fix was to recreate the report, even after saving (publish in 2007) the datasource, report, and filter again.  What a major bummer!

Hopefully the RTM build will have the fix ....soft in the middle.

I am currently working with SharePoint Rx to provide various training courses covering the complete Microsoft Business Intelligence Stack. I will be presenting the first of many Business Intelligence In-A-Day classes. These are going to be at a low cost to our students, but will provide enough detail to get them pointed in the right direction to help your organization. The owner, Russell Wright, and I worked together at Raytheon and Texas Instruments about ten years ago.  He has been a trainer and consultant with SharePoint since it was first released. When you get time, please visit SharePoint Rx to get a list of upcoming training courses on SharePoint.  It will definitely be worth the investment since all the trainers are consultants.

I am explaining several strategies when setting up a scorecard, such as the balanced scorecard and/or using leading-to-lagging relationships from a bottom-up approach. In this example we are monitoring parent involvement hours, student and teacher assessment, teacher training hours, GPA, Parent and Teacher satisfaction, Projected Graduation Numbers, as well as revenues and expenses.

As with any Dashboard, we need to articulate our critical success factors we are monitoring, and those metrics and/or KPI's. For this presentation, we correlated the lack of parent involvement hours to the reduction of graduating seniors, increased expenses, as well as crime rates for teenagers in the area, once we integrate with the source system.

Here is a link to a white paper I wrote, which is my personal strategic spin on incorporating Kaplan and Norton's balanced scorecard (here) and setting-up an EPM office for a Restaurant Chain.   Tell me what you think.

This was a fantastic presentation with some great feedback from the audience.  And again, I want to personally thank Susan Conway and Marv Weidner.