Creating effective dashboards

Determine the dashboard goals

Before you can create an effective dashboard, you must decide its purpose and how it is to achieve goals. Without this information, you cannot be sure that you are showing the correct data, or that it will help the intended users by supplying them with information that they need.

To keep dashboards focused and organized, use separate dashboards for different purposes. For example, if you choose to focus on a specific set of operational objectives, create one dashboard for that purpose. If you also want to focus on a set of practice-based objectives, then create a separate dashboard for that purpose.

The following issues can be considered:

• Business objectives: What is the purpose of the dashboard? What problems or issues will it address? For example, you might be interested in operating costs or customer satisfaction.
• Operational objectives: What process improvement goals will the dashboard address? For example, in order to address the operating cost objective, you might want to assess productivity. If you want to address customer satisfaction, you might want to assess product quality achievement.
• Operational measures: What metrics will it display to measure progress against the operational measures? For example, to assess productivity, you might want to monitor information on things like iteration velocity and burndown rates. To assess product quality achievement, you might want to monitor defect density and repair rates. You can create a dashboard that displays reports based on a variety of predefined report templates such as Team Velocity, Release Burndown, and Closed Work Items.
• Practice-based objectives: What practice adoption or improvement goals will the dashboard address? For example, your organization might want to implement the Release Planning practice, so you can create a dashboard that shows progress in implementing that practice.
• Practice-based control measures: What metrics will it display to measure progress against the practice goals? For example, to assess progress with the Release Planning practice, you could monitor release burndown information and defect trends. You can create a dashboard that displays reports based on a variety of predefined report templates such as Release Burndown, Closed Work Items, and Deferred Work Items.
• Usability concerns: Who will use the dashboard? What will they be trying to accomplish with it? How should it be organized in order to be used effectively for achieving goals? Who will need permission to view or edit the dashboard?

Determine how the dashboard addresses the goals

When you are confident that you understand the goals of the dashboard, you need to specify how the dashboard will meet them. There are a variety of widgets that you can display on a dashboard, such as reports, web pages, and RSS feeds. Reports (the primary channel for metrics information) can be charts, small tables, cross tabulations, or trend indicators.

Decide if you want to create a team, project, or personal dashboard. Each team or project can have one dashboard associated with it, and that dashboard is automatically viewable by members of the respective team or project areas. A team or project dashboard can also be edited by team or project members whose assigned process roles have permission to edit. Personal dashboards are private by default but can be shared with a team or project area so that members can view the dashboard but not edit it.

Generally, a dashboard presents information that is intended to quickly convey high-level concepts without overwhelming the viewer with details that might not be necessary. A viewer is able to grasp the meaning of the data at a glance. Providing low-level, detailed data at the top level can take up too much space. Screen real estate is limited, so reports must be small. Charts and trend indicators are generally more effective than data tables for achieving this goal. For access to more detailed information, you can use reports that have drill-down capabilities, so that you can choose to look at more granular data if you need it.

To make the dashboard easier to view, try to arrange the page to avoid scroll bars when the dashboard is viewed in a typically-sized window. Some vertical scrolling is usually acceptable, but horizontal scrolling can slow down viewers.

Choose reports to display metrics

When you have specified what you want to display in the dashboard, you are ready to construct it. Reports that display the information you need might already be available. To explore available reports, perform step 1 in Adding a widget. If the reports that you need are not available, you can modify existing report templates, or you can create new report templates and then add the templates to the project.

Before attempting to create a new report template, check the report descriptions. There are many report templates that might supply exactly what you need or something similar. Only report templates that have micro versions can be displayed on the dashboard. Generally, it is simpler to create a report from an existing report template than to create a new template, so look for one that is relatively close.

Create and configure the dashboard

If you plan to add reports related to certain applications, verify that you can log in to the applications with the login that you use to create the dashboard.

1. Using the web client, log in to the Jazz Team Server on which you want to host the dashboard.
2. To create the dashboard and edit the title, follow the steps in Creating personal dashboards. If you create a personal dashboard that you want other members of the project or team area to view, you must share it.
3. To access a project or team dashboard, see Accessing project and team dashboards.
4. To add widgets (report widgets that display metrics of interest) and specify any necessary parameters, see the topics in the Adding and configuring widgets section.