My name is Jeff Lumpkin. I spent 15 years working in Microsoft Finance as an analyst, controller and executive business partner.  An early adopter of Power BI, I moved from Finance to the Power BI engineering team, where my role was to work directly with customers to help the use Power BI effectively.  I have brought my passion for analytics, partnering and teaching to Blue Collar BI

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In January 2009, I moved from Seattle to Munich, Germany and took on the role of Microsoft’s EMEA Services Controller.  It was a fantastic job, looking after the consulting and support business across 6 areas and more than 40 subsidiaries stretching from South Africa to Finland and the UK to Dubai.  The role was fascinating to me because of its many components:  business partnering with senior leaders, training and mentoring the community of services controllers and the importance of analytics for managing the business.  ​

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Although I was a highly skilled Excel user, I had never thought of myself as very technical.  Excel came easily to me, but I had never learned to use databases like Access or SQL.  Around 2011, I began noticing a new kind of pivot table, called Power Pivot.  It differed from the original pivot table in that fields were available from several data tables.  Although I didn’t realize this originally, I had encountered my first data model. ​

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The utility of Power Pivot quickly became apparent to me.  It provided a means of joining different data sources together in a single file.  The first data model I built in Power Pivot linked data from HR (time in role) to quota and to sales.  Using this model, I was able to determine that seller productivity increased sharply after 18 months in role.  Further exploration showed that a small cadre of managers excelled in keeping their teams intact over long periods of time (e.g. 2 years) and in build teams of high performing sellers.  This insight resulted in a program to increase seller retention and in a second to improve manager performance through increased training, mentoring and best practice sharing.  As a result, average seller tenure increased by 6 months and seller productivity grew by 15%.  ​

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That initial success was thrilling to me.  It demonstrated the power of using data effectively, and the impact that I could have on business performance.  I became a student of analytics, teaching myself about data tables, primary keys, One to Many relationships, calculated columns and calculated measures.  This learning did not come easily.  I was by myself in Germany, there were no online courses available and no YouTube videos.  I just read whatever I could find, cajoled Power Pivot experts on the excel team to meet with me to answer specific questions and, through trial and error, finally came to understand the conceptual underpinnings of data modeling.  Often I think that because it was such a struggle to learn Power Pivot, the lessons were learned at what feels like a molecular level. ​

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Returning to Redmond in 2013, I was an early adopter of Power View (an data visualization add-in to Excel) and Power BI.  I began presenting to customers at Microsoft’s Executive Briefing Center and, having begged my manager for time-off, going onsite to work directly with customers and their analytics teams.  By 2015, I left Finance to join Power BI’s Customer Advisory Team, where my full time role was to help customers start using Power BI, and to provide feedback to the engineers working on the product.  ​

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Eventually I gave over 500 presentations at the EBC, and spent 3 years traveling around the world helping  with customers design and build analytics programs.  My autodidactic experience served me well in this role, because I understood so well the challenges faced by analysts as they struggled to switch from Excel to Power BI.  By partnering so closely with senior leaders in Microsoft Services, I learned to listen, to ask precise questions and to put myself in their shoes – to imagine the type of analysis they needed.  These skills, taken together, have been the inspiration for Blue Collar BI. ​