Why every dashboard crisis starts the moment “the DAX guy” leaves.

If your KPIs collapse when one person exits... you never had KPIs. You had a hostage situation.

Author

Glenda Carnate
December 12, 2025

Read time: 2.5 minutes

“Redo the KPIs — the DAX guy is gone.” Nothing strikes fear in a team faster than that sentence.

A manager I know panicked when the sole DAX expert resigned. Suddenly, every metric looked wrong. Sales dashboards froze. The CFO’s favorite report returned #ERROR like a rebellious teenager.

Then came the classic executive ask:
“Can someone translate these DAX hieroglyphics?”

Everyone stared at the formulas like they had been carved into a tomb wall in ancient Power BI Egypt.

And that’s the real issue: not the code, but the dependency.

How to Fix KPIs Without a DAX Decoder Ring?

1. Start with plain English.
Before rewriting anything, document the KPI in one simple question:
What is this actually supposed to measure?
If you can’t answer that, no formula will save you.

2. Freeze the old logic — then validate it.
Export the existing DAX. Treat it like an artifact.
Don’t edit. Don’t refactor.
First, understand what it thinks it’s doing.

3. Rebuild using business logic, not magic tricks.
DAX is not sorcery. Most KPIs boil down to:
Counts. Sums. Averages. Time filters.
Reconstruct from fundamentals, not shortcuts.

4. Implement peer review for every measure.
No more “one person owns the entire semantic model.”
Reviewing KPIs should be standard, not a rescue mission.

5. Automate your documentation.
Tools like external metadata export, measure catalogs, and semantic model docs ensure that your KPIs never become ancient scripts again.

💡Key Takeaway: 

If your business logic disappears when someone leaves, you don’t have a data team...  you have a dependency problem.

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