How to Create a Jira Dashboard for Project Planning with Custom Fields and Effort Calculation?

Rahul.Chaudhary

 

 

Hello Community,

I am trying to build a project planning dashboard in Jira that shows workstreams grouped by releases, with timelines and effort distribution. Below is what I am aiming for:

Current Setup

• I have created custom fields:
  • Planned Start Date (Date Picker)
  • Planned End Date (Date Picker)
  • Resources (Multi-user picker) – to assign multiple team members to a single issue
  • Effort (hrs) (Number) – to calculate workload
• Issues are linked to releases using Fix Version.

Goal

• Display a dashboard that:
  • Groups issues by weeks or months based on Planned End Date.
  • Shows Effort per Resource per time bucket for a selected release.
  • Visualizes something like a heatmap or Gantt-style view (see attached example image for reference).

Effort Calculation Logic

• Effort (hrs) = Remaining business days until Planned End × 8 (working hours).
• I want to calculate this efficiently (preferably via Jira Automation or any recommended approach) and keep it updated daily.

Challenges

• Native gadgets like Two-Dimensional Filter Statistics only show issue counts, not sums of numeric fields like Effort.
• Need suggestions for:
  • Best way to calculate Effort dynamically (excluding weekends/holidays).
  • How to group by weeks/months and aggregate Effort in a dashboard.
  • Marketplace apps or advanced configurations that can sum numeric fields across dimensions (Resources × Week/Month).

Sam Okell

Hi Rahul,

 

Based on your requirements you will probably be better off using Atlassian Analytics Dashboards. The Jira dashboards, as you mention, don't allow you to show exactly what you need properly, without splitting the data over multiple widgets.

 

With Analytics, you can build the logic and structure into the query.

 

For your automation rule, you'll want to use a smart value to calculate the Effort, and then update the field with that value.

Within an action on an automation rule, you should select Edit work item field and then find your Effort field. Using this smart value should get you the right result

{{Planned End.diff(now).businessDays.abs}} * 8

 

That will calculate the business days between the data in Planned End and Now (say 4 days) and then multiply the answer by 8, giving 32 hours.

You can run the automation rule on a schedule (say 8am every day) so it's up-to-date each morning for your team(s).

 

Using Analytics for your dashboard is a bit more involved.

A SQL query that should get you most of the way there:

 

Select   Date_Trunc('week', PlannedEnd.value) `Week`

, Sum(Effort.value) `Total Effort`

From jira_project_live JP

Inner Join jira_issue_live JI On JP.project_id = JI.project_id

Inner Join jira_issue_field_live PlannedEnd On JI.issue_id = PlannedEnd.issue_id

Inner Join jira_issue_field_live Effort On JI.issue_id = Effort.issue_id

Where   JP.project_key = '' -- Add your Project Key here

And PlannedEnd.name = 'Planned End'

And Effort.name = 'Effort (hrs)'

Group By Week

Order By `Total Effort` Desc

Your question says you are on the Standard Plan, which I believe means Analytics wouldn't be available, in which case, 3rd Party apps would be the way to go.