Using Jira dashboard reports to prevent people from bothering the content team
Tempo Team
If you stumbled across my previous article, you already know our team loves challenges. That’s why we overwhelm ourselves with multiple known and unknown things on a regular cadence. For instance:
How are our apps performing this month?
Is there good traction on our latest blog post?
Is George Lucas agile? *
Wait… what?!
It’s an endless Easter here in Old Street because we constantly carry too many eggs in one basket. It’s usual for the marketing team to simultaneously work on 10-15 content pieces per month while dealing with various other activities. With most of the content is written by the one and only Christopher Berry, there’s always an unavoidable wave of questions about what’s finished, reviewed, or in progress.
Our team actively collaborates in Jira and Confluence, which allow us to track activities end-to-end. But that’s not always the shortest path to a quick status check.
How we identified the origin of an upcoming issue
Except for Mr. Berry, other team members got involved in content writing only recently. This change doubled the existing Jira issues and Confluence pages.
People were distributed around specific areas: product features, customer use cases, or ecosystem best practices. It often means they write in different spaces and even follow different workflows.
Slack was louder than usual.
How we created the fastest shortcut to our content’s progress bar
Having a customized Jira dashboard for marketing has helped us improve our monthly sprint planning, tracking, and load. It positively impacts our performance by giving us essential cues for the team’s progress. It was easy to ask ourselves: “Is it possible to make a progress dashboard for content?”
It’s good that we didn’t ask this question to Morgan, our Product Manager for Custom Charts for Jira. She would probably roll her eyes, saying,“You think there is a way for Custom Charts NOT to fit this simple use case?! Pfft”.
We released the first version of the Issue List gadget and macro not long ago and have since expanded its capabilities even further. It was also the obvious choice for our content use case. A comprehensive list that shows the type and status of our content items – what more do we need!
There are two major settings we adjusted to get the desired outcome: 1. We used our pre-existing Kanban filter as a project source to filter only the content-related items. Not much creativity in the columns since we used the primary structure of Status – Summary – Issue Type – Key – Assignee.
2. Using custom Jira Query Language (JQL), we created a second Issue List to show all finished content tasks for the current sprint. This is particularly useful for ad-hoc social media posts and weekly/monthly status updates. Not to mention how pretty it looks on a shared Zoom screen. 😉
The third component of our dashboard is the all-time favorite status report, presented here as a pie chart (we eat the middle of our pies, so technically it’s a donut, but let’s not get into chart semantics). It tracks 2022’s content progress and makes us feel better when stuck on not-so-smooth writing.
As you see, Jira dashboards are not only for support team leads.
If you want to build some charts and dashboards yourself, and see how easy it is, have a go in our online Custom Charts playground.
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