One of Jira’s superpowers is its automation. Especially dashboards and reports. Here are some sample of dashboards and reports that I built in 2023.
About These Dashboards & Reports
What you’ll see here are real live Jira Dashboards and Reports that I built and used in 2022 through 2023 to allow our Scrum team and our leadership and customers, to have deep insight into our work. The only changes I made was to redact names, and so I also left out detailed lists of work, for example Epics and Stories, that are part of these dashboard designs.
Progress Dashboard
The Progress dashboard is intended to be the highest level of metrics and reporting. It has a Jira Version Report that summarizes the progress of the primary goals of the work effort, and projects when the work will be completed based on progress to date. It also includes other useful and interesting metrics that provide other slices or views of the work progress, such as Epics and Stories Done and in other workflow Status’.
In the upper left is a Learn More gadget that displays links to all of the important Jira project, wiki and file assets. For example all the dashboards, links to the Jira Scrum board and reports. This gadget is placed in the same place on all dashboards to provide easy to find and use navigation. This is especially useful because of the way Jira’s UX spreads assets all of the UX, making it difficult for anyone other than advanced Jira users, to find things. This gadget is intended to solve that problem. It is also rendered in Confluence UXs as well in a similar way.
FYI: Some screen shots of dashboards in this article have been edited for simplicity, but all of the real Jira dashboards do have this Learn More gadget on them.
Release Burndown
The Jira Release Burndown is another fantastic report in Jira for reporting on progress and projecting when work will be completed.
Velocity Charts
The Jira Velocity Charts are a great way to measure how well the team is doing with their planning. By comparing planned to actually completed work, you can see how accurate the team’s planning is, and therefore better understand the projections in Version and Release Burndown reports. And the team can use this to help them improve their planning.
Advanced Velocity Chart
Here is an even more sophisticated Velocity Chart that shows additional data for each Sprint, for even more insight into planning and its accuracy.
Backlog Dashboard
Here are some of the gadgets from a Backlog dashboard that is intended to provide views into the entire backlog. The red gadgets show backlog health metrics that impact the reliability and quality of all other reports and metrics. They surface data and practice problems like Stories not estimated and issues with no parents, which negatively affects the integrity of the backlog hierarchy and metrics quality.
Sprint Dashboard
The Sprint dashboard focuses on the active Sprint, and includes things like Sprint Burndowns, the Sprint Backlog, and other Sprint specific metrics and data.
This dashboard also has red gadgets showing Sprint backlog health metrics that impact the reliability and quality of all other reports and metrics. They surface data and practice problems like Stories and Sub-tasks not estimated, which also negatively affects the integrity of the Sprint metrics quality.
RAID Dashboard
RAID (Risks Actions Issues Decisions) is a common project management mechanism that is often found in organizations that use waterfall, or have recently adopted Agile methodologies. You might also see RAID used in organizations with a long history, even if they have fully adopted Agile.
I’ve often seen RAID tracked in spreadsheets, which silos this important data away and out of sight, making it less actionable and less useful. By tracking RAID in Jira as part of a backlog, it allows a team to keep this data visible and actionable. In Jira you can take full advantage of Jira’s automation and reporting, rather than having to manage it the old fashioned manual way. And you can much more easily take action by putting a RAID item in Sprint plans. Track it progress with Jira’s automated workflows. Much more easily escalate it. And include it in leadership and customer reports using automation.
Personalized Dashboard
This Personalized dashboard focuses on the work assigned to the user. It’s designed to dynamically adapt to the person and the active Sprint, so this 1 dashboard design can be used by everyone.
It also surfaces health problems specific to each team mate, so they can easier see what needs fixing, and easily keep an eye on their work backlog. It also displays time tracking data for use in timesheets, or other reporting.
Go Next Level with Confluence Integration
Because it’s Jira, a lot of this data can be pulled into Confluence pages. This allows even more sophisticated automated reporting and richer formatting then Jira alone can accomplish. I’ve designed automated reporting with rich formatting and data pulled for sources other then Jira, for customers, leadership, status reports (if the organization is still doing those), and more.