How about a Jira report that shape-shifts into whatever you need?

[#1]

Picture this: you are a project manager and in the upcoming status meeting, three different stakeholders want different information on your projects:

• Your boss wants to know how the overall progress looks like

• Your team is asking about the open tasks they still need to do

• Your client only cares about any potential risks

Three insights from one report

Now, wouldn’t it be great if you could create a cross-project report that will cover all three of these cases in one go? A report that can freely transform to provide three different context-specific insights, depending on who you speak to? A report that can react to changing requirements on the fly – and in real time? (And don’t tell me you’ve never been in a situation where your boss suddenly wanted more details after all.)

Unfortunately, native Jira reports are quite static in nature and they are usually made for one purpose only. Sure, you can change certain things in the configuration, but the options are limited. Jira Cloud's list view might be a viable solution in some instances, but it lacks exporting capabilities and only shows issues from one project at a time.

Luckily, Report Builder: Custom Reports and Dashboards for Jira provides an alternative.

So, let’s have a look at how to set up a project progress report, a task tracking report and a risk management report, all in one.

The set up, step by step

First, we’ll select which set of issues we want to report against in the “Get data” panel:

Add as many projects as you want. You can also select epics and their corresponding tickets, individual issues or pre-made filters.

Next, we’ll go to the “Set data” panel and select the data points to include. These will be the “building blocks” of the report. For this example, we’ll use:

• Project

• Issues

• Issue status

• Progress by time

• Remaining Estimate

• Count of issues

These can be arranged and distributed between rows and columns in a multitude of ways, just by dragging and dropping them around in the “Set data” panel:

Insight #1: high level project progress overview

For the project overview, we really only need two of these metrics: the project and the “Progress by time” metric. So, let’s hide everything else by clicking on the eye icon next to the metric name.

This will show a progress bar for each project selected in the “Get data” panel. The progress is calculated by comparing the original and the remaining estimations of all the contained tickets. If your boss really only wants a high-level overview, this should do nicely. 😉

Insight #2: open team tasks surfaced

For the next insight, let’s display the project data in another way. Let’s hide “Progress by time” and instead show “Count of issues” and “Status”. To be meaningful here, the “Status” metric needs a filter to only show tickets that are currently in “To Do”.

Once that is set up, we will get a numeric value of how many tickets are still open for each project. I’m assuming however, that the team will also want to see the actual issues themselves, so let’s just unhide “Issue” as well to get a full list of action items:

Insight #3: visualizing project risks

For the last insight, we will hide “Count of issues” and “Status” and unhide “Sum of Remaining Estimate”. This will show us how much time is still needed to complete the listed tasks. To effectively analyze any risks, we have to make them visible. Let’s assume that there are four days left until the deadline. That means that we need to highlight all tickets that have a longer remaining estimate than that. To do this, we will configure a condition like so:

To get a better feeling for the overall risk, we can now add a second condition to highlight all tasks that will be finished before the deadline, but could potentially breach it, if things don’t go as planned. For example by setting a 3 day limit for those:

A third condition could also be set up to implement a full red, amber, green (RAG) reporting system. The result is a list of all issues with highlights added accordingly:

What I would recommend here is to add “Assignee” and put it between “Project” and “Issue” in the hierarchy, to see which team member has the most high-risk tickets assigned to them. By doing this you’ll also be able to identify tickets that don’t have an assignee yet. And with four days to go, I’d say you better do some assigning here. 😉

Conclusion

Modern work is dynamic. Circumstances change, requirements change and unexpected things happen all the time. So why should you rely on static and inflexible reporting? Luckily, you don’t have to. Give Report Builder: Custom Reports and Dashboards for Jira a try and let us know if you need any assistance or new features.

To do that and/or to learn more, feel free to schedule a meeting/demo with us: https://actonic.de/appdemo

Alternatively, join our weekly office hours (no sign-up required): https://actonic.de/en/report-builder-office-hours

Happy reporting!

[Patricia Modispacher _appanvil_]

Thanks for this article, @Andreas Springer !

This app looks like a super easy to use and well-designed reporting solution! And what is office hours? Like say "Hi, I have a problem?" :D 

[Andreas Springer _Actonic_]

Thanks, @Patricia Modispacher _appanvil_!

Yes, anybody can just drop into the office hours at any time. We can look at use cases, explain features, conduct a general demo, answer questions... whatever is needed. 😊

[Patricia Modispacher _appanvil_]

Never heard of something like this, @Andreas Springer _Actonic_ ! Amazing! 😊