One repository for Power BI, several suppliers

Context

Power BI in the group was built by a small internal team, another external supplier and me. Each worked in their own files. Which version was in production was known by whoever published last, and the history of a measure left with whoever left.

What I did

• Proposed the model: a Git repository in Azure DevOps, connected to the client’s own tenant - not the supplier’s, not mine. GitHub as the alternative.
• Access through groups: external developers join as guests; two security groups decide who administers and who contributes. On- and offboarding become an identity task anyone in the client’s IT can do.
• Production follows main: every change through a pull request; the Fabric workspace syncs from main and never writes to it.
• Ran it myself first: the whole set-up in a lab in my own tenant - me as administrator, another account as the external guest - to answer the awkward questions before anyone depended on them.

Result

The set-up is live at the client, and the same set-up runs in my own tenant. In the lab, a guest added to the group had working access within about five minutes - without anyone handing out individual rights.

Why it matters

Version control for Power BI is an ownership decision more than a tooling one. The details are in the note on repo ownership and the step-by-step set-up.