Jira Dashboards in Confluence: Going Where The Leaders Are

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Hello everyone, Teodora here! 

When I don't write articles about my experience with Confluence, I work with super-skilled individuals to change how big organizations see and use their data. 

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If you manage teams in Jira, Jira dashboards are at the heart of everything you do. That’s why you should consider making dashboards in Confluence, too.

But you can’t make a Jira dashboard in Confluence… can you?

Let’s say you’re a software team practicing Scrum software development. Your Scrum Masters use Jira dashboards for sprint planning, daily standups, demos of work completed in sprints, retros, and reporting to leadership.

The main thing your leaders want to know is whether there are any impediments, i.e. anything blocked or at risk that would require them to allocate extra resources or address a production problem. But senior managers don’t normally work in Jira, and yet they need to see Jira reports to understand these impediments. Often, where you will find those executives is Confluence. So, to make sure they know what the Jira teams are doing, you can recreate your Jira dashboards in Confluence.

Because Jira and Confluence are both Atlassian tools, they’re super-easy to integrate so that you can report on Jira issues on Confluence pages. This enables you to recreate your dashboards on a Confluence page. You can use preconfigured native chart macros like Sprint Health, Sprint Burndown, and Average Age of Issues. And you can use Custom Jira Charts for Confluence for everything else you’d like to show. Custom Jira Charts for Confluence is the mirror image sister app of Custom Charts for Jira, which enables users to build from scratch or a template any kind of chart they like out of their Jira data. What’s particularly useful is that you can do it right there on the Confluence page, rather than in a separate platform.

Your VPs and directors might want to keep these Confluence dashboards open on one monitor as an information radiator, so they can continuously monitor things like sprint health and at-risk projects across all teams in real time. Then they can make sure, for example, that if a certain team is behind, that team needs to be left alone.

Using Confluence for better data storytelling

Some people who do reporting forget that it’s not enough to show your audience a bunch of pretty bar charts without any context or explanation. Once you’re done with the data visualization, i.e. the charts themselves, the next step is data storytelling, i.e. crafting a narrative that those charts demonstrate.

One of our customers started creating Jira dashboards on Confluence pages, then realized they could leverage Confluence to create better, more detailed data stories. So they started making “Updates from the Scrum Master” and “Sprint Goals” pages in Confluence, using the project templates, to provide an explanation for what is going on in the charts. For example, a 2D stacked bar chart built with Custom Jira Charts for Confluence can spotlight items that are at risk or may not be in progress yet, and the Updates from the Scrum Master notes can explain why the team is so far behind on them.

This customer started to prefer reporting in Confluence because there’s no way, natively, of embedding a Confluence page like the “Updates” ones in a Jira dashboard. However, they eventually created an Amazon Web Services solution to enable them to do this, and now their Jira teams enjoy the same clarity around their reports.

Talk about making the most of your Jira/Confluence integration!

Jira reporting in a few clicks

Recreating Jira dashboards in Confluence with the native macros and Custom Jira Charts for Confluence is a way of making Jira the single source of truth in your organization. If you have to export data out of Jira in order to report on it to your leaders, your teams' work is no longer being represented in the live system where it’s actually happening. And often it means the data has to be extensively massaged in order to present a good, tight view of what’s going on. This can be a tedious, time-consuming process full of duplication and repetition.

But, if you report in Jira and Confluence, you won’t have to spend hours building and maintaining charts and administering data in an entirely separate system just so your stakeholders can see what’s going on. They can just open a Confluence page and the same live reports your Jira teams see are right there.

In effect, it’s reporting in a few clicks.

Well, it is if you use Custom Charts. 🤩

If you want to know more about recreating your Jira dashboards in Confluence with Custom Jira Charts for Confluence, hit us up for a quick demo!