Tech Leaders: What standard and custom reports do you use in Jira to manage your team and staff?

[Pratik Acharya]

I manage team of 20+ engineers, and face huge challenge in managing my team and their work accurately. I have used JIRA for 8 years, but I always struggle with creating custom reports for things like how are different teams delivering, what is the performance of particular individual in a team, how long is it taking our team to deliver on projects, our deadline meeting %, etc.

I know many of you manage way larger teams, and would have built your reporting structures.

I would love to know what sort of reports you use, how you have built your own dashboard (if any) and what kind of custom report has been really valuable for you.

[Natalia_Kovalchuk_SaaSJet_]

Hi @Pratik Acharya !

Here are some Jira built-in features and tools for tracking team activities:

1. Created vs. Resolved Issues report - helps to monitor the team's workload and progress over time.

2. Activity Stream gadget - allows you to see the latest updates, comments, and transitions between the chosen projects or users.

3. Control Chart -  displays the time spent by each task in a particular status (or statuses), and maps it over a specified period of time. 

4. User Workload Report - helps in identifying the number of tasks assigned to each team member.

Also, you can try to use Issue History for Jira app from SaaSJet team, as it helps: 

• Find out who changed statuses and when.
• Count the number of times that a task was reopened.
• See the history of past due date changes or who updated them.
• Compare actual vs. planned time on numerous tasks.
• Export the complete Jira task change history in Excel, CSV, or PDF formats.

In general, using this app, you'll be able to track all Jira project changes in one place:

Here are some articles that may be helpful:

• Team Activity Tracking in Jira: How to Monitor Work, Progress, and Accountability
• How Not to Get Buried in Jira Data: A Project Manager’s Story of Finding Clarity
• Jira Reporting: How to Detect Workflow Bottlenecks and Missed Deadlines

[Rustem Shiriiazdanov _Actonic_]

Hi @Pratik Acharya ,

Managing Team of about 15 ppl I use Jira per-project Timelines to track the overall progress on projects against deadlines (we have pretty mature culture of establishing the deadlines and estimates).

And that is pretty much it from the standard reports. Long time about we developed an application for ourselves to create custom reports (and later even published it on the marketplace Report Builder), so the rest of things we do in our own application. Examples of reports I am using are below. I understand they may not be suitable for you as we effectively do most of them in the app made for ourselves, but I hope I may provide some value to you showing what are reports themselves, and what visuals do I use. 

Timesheets reports

I use it to manage who and what is doing during the month typically. The timesheet (filtered only for me) itself is below

Except the high-level view required for me as a Teamleader of the entire team, I also oversee a certain project in details as a project manager, and for that i change the view like below

I use similar report to track vacations, sick leaves etc as we log them in jira too:

To roughly estimate new projects we use pretty brutal, but effective custom report we also created ourselves. It takes Jira data (estimates, average time logged into work tickets etc), some parameters we enter (names of tea members, management overhead % etc) and calculates how much time most probably it will take to do something. Below is, again the real report with real data:

To oversee on a bigger scale i use the jira dashboard with custom reports on Created vs Resolved and how much time things take across multiple projects. Below is DEMO example only, but the real one looks almost the same way:

The same is for risks assessments for our monthly risks review

We do also actively use Whiteboards To draw Team structures, high-level roadmaps, links between major projects etc. 

We do not use GOALS from Jira yet, and we did not try using new Atlassian Home Dashboards though.

Regards,

Rustem

[Rahul_RVS]

Hi @Pratik Acharya 

Welcome to the community !! 

If you are open to try out a mktplace app for a complete solution to manage your projects and track your teams, take a look at our app:

Agile Tools

Below are the main features of the app:

1) Links/Portfolio/Advanced Roadmaps Hierarchy :- View/Manage roll up for hierarchy (up to 10 levels), based on your Portfolio/Advanced Roadmaps/Issue Links parent child relationship.

2) Epic Hierarchy :- View/Manage roll up for standard Jira hierarchy. Epic -> User Story -> Subtask

3) Time in Status :- More than 7 types of Time in Status reports to track issues.

4) Worklogs Report :- Track time spent by resources with multiple filters / category / grouping features

5) Timesheet :- View/Enter your time spent for multiple days

Disclaimer : I am one of the app team member

[Birkan Yildiz _OBSS_]

Hey @Pratik Acharya

Welcome to the Community!

Managing a team of 20+ engineers is exactly the Rubicon where native Jira reporting often stops being enough. You need granular data on flow and efficiency, not just simple burn-down charts.

For a tech leader, the most valuable reports are usually centered around Cycle Time, Bottlenecks, and Resource Load.

Full disclosure, I'm on the team that makes Timepiece - Time in Status for Jira, and it’s designed to provide exactly the kind of deep-dive metrics you are looking for.

Here are three specific custom reports you can build with Timepiece to answer your questions:

To track "How long it takes to deliver," Accurate Cycle Time and Lead Time reports are crucial. Timepiece's Status Duration and Duration Between Statuses reports are key to getting this data. You can define exactly when the clock starts and stops (e.g., "In Progress" to "Ready for Prod"). This gives you a clear, historical trend of your delivery speed.

To track "Individual Performance": Use the Assignee Duration report. This breaks down exactly how long tickets sit with specific engineers in each status. It’s incredibly useful for identifying who is overloaded or where hand-offs are slowing.

To ensure "Accuracy": One of the biggest struggles with native reports is that they count 24/7. Timepiece allows you to set Custom Calendars to exclude nights and weekends. This means your data reflects actual working hours, giving you a true picture of performance.

You can place all of these reports directly onto a Jira Dashboard as gadgets, giving you a live "Team Health" view every morning. Plus, you can automate these reports and create alarms to alert you only when your attention is truly needed.

To learn more about Timepiece and what it offers, visit its Atlassian Marketplace page.

[Danut M _StonikByte_]

Hi @Pratik Acharya,

My top recommendation is to use Jira dashboards for tracking the team work and performance. Jira offers some useful native gadgets, but you can add more, depending on your needs, by installing apps from Atlassian Marketplace. 

A good tool for this purpose is our Great Gadgets app, which offers many useful gadgets for achieving this: pivot table & pivot charts, heatmap tables, time-in-status, custom math formulas, trend charts, burndown, work-distribution, etc 

Here are few examples on how to use these gadgets for tracking team members performance: 

 

A good alternative to the Jira dashboard would be to use custom reports in form of Confluence pages, with macros that are capable to display data from Jira.

Danut.