Advanced insights

The advanced insights app that's available with Microsoft Viva Insights gives analysts (often at the behest of business leaders) unprecedented insights about how people spend their time and who they spend it with. These insights empower leaders to drive strategies for sales, employee engagement, and productivity initiatives.

Analysts can explore organizational data with advanced insights and dive deeper into their company's behavioral metrics with the Query designer.

Requirements for analysts

Before analysts can get to work, they must have the proper role. Each analyst must be assigned the Analyst role. A Microsoft Entra ID Application Administrator assigns roles, and can learn more about this task in Assign roles. For general information about user roles for Viva Insights, see Roles in Viva Insights.

Licensing notes

• To use the analyst features, you must have the Analyst role assigned.
• The predefined templates available in Query designer require the use of the Power BI desktop. You do not need a license for Power BI desktop; you can download it for free at Getting started with Power BI.

Analysis options

The advanced insights app provides advanced analysis tools for deep diving into the data shown in the Microsoft Viva Insights app.Analysts can analyze and explore data in the following ways:

• Advanced insights provides analysis scope information and research-based behavioral insights into how an organization gets work done, such as enhance organizational agility, boost employee engagement, improve agility, and foster innovation. If you're new to advanced insights, you will only see the new Admin setup experience until you get it set up.

• Analyze includes the following data-analysis tools within the app:

  • Query designer helps you investigate organizational data to answer specific questions. A number of different templates and options, such as person, meeting, group-to-group, and person-to-group queries give you flexibility to look at data from multiple perspectives and generate powerful insights.
  • Business process analysis helps you analyze and improve your well-defined and undefined business processes. For example, by measuring their cost in time and money.
  • Peer analysis helps you discover the unique workplace collaboration patterns that the most effective people in your organization use to succeed. You can then use these insights to teach and foster these work patterns throughout your company.

• Explore the stats data helps you analyze organizational data trends that are summarized by week, for meetings, by network connections, for management and coaching, and for external collaboration.

• wpa R package is an open-source repository of more than 100 functions that provide low-code pre-built analyses that can help leaders use the data that the Viva Insights provides to solve more specific problems.

• Workspace Collaboration Optimizer is an open-sourced set of Python-based web apps (Jupyter Notebooks) that can help you create seating plans that are optimized for innovation and cross-team collaboration. The underlying algorithm minimizes the distance between teams who collaborate the most with each other.

• Plans provide plans such as the Teamwork improvement plan that enables teams to build better collaboration habits and master their time by using Viva Insights. You can use advanced insights to discover what challenges teams are struggling with, such as collaboration overload, and then enroll them in action plans to help address these challenges.

• Controls in the advanced insights app includes the following:

  • Data sources – View information about the Microsoft 365 and organizational data that's been uploaded into advanced insights.
  • Leader and manager settings – Configure leader and manager privacy and other manager settings.
  • Analyst settings – Configure system defaults, privacy settings, and exclusion rules to help ensure data accuracy.