Jira Heroes: How Amit Bansal drove consistency in company-wide reporting using Jira dashboards

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At Atlassian, we take great pride in the software we ship, and even greater pride in the success our customers achieve when they use our products. #JiraHeroes is our monthly spotlight series where we ask customers to share their success stories with Jira Software. We hope that customers will find inspiration on how to overcome their own challenges by hearing how our #JiraHeroes overcame theirs.

This month, we’re featuring @Amit Bansal, who shares how he created consistency and improved adoption of Jira by configuring Jira dashboards for status reports across teams in order to serve clients, project managers, and executives with live data for reporting.

Please introduce yourself! Tell us about where you work, your role, and the team you’re on.

My name is @Amit Bansal. With rich work experience of more than 2 decades, I am currently Director, Delivery at AVIZVA. I’m primarily responsible for standardizing processes and tools within the organizational landscape.

As an experienced IT professional and ambassador of Program Management, Agile Transformation and Global Delivery, I have a track record of spearheading teams in order to render techno-functional solutions and scale up IT operations & growth across multi-million-dollar organizations.

Tell me about what your company was trying to achieve and how that informed the way you thought about configuring Jira Software.

The challenge: Although Jira was being used for all active projects within the organization, we were struggling with different status report templates for each project.

As a result, our status report templates lacked consistency and there was a lack of awareness that Jira dashboards could collect the same information. In addition, some project information was being recorded in Excel instead of being tracked in Jira, and the information pulled out from these status reports wasn’t live at a certain point of time after delivery.

All of this affected our ability to provide consistent status reports and as a result, communicate transparent scrum progress to all business stakeholders. It also impacted our capability to perform organizational level project reviews.

The need: There was an urgent need to drive transparency and consistency in our status reporting as well drive the predictability of our delivery. These status reports are not just used by our organizational leadership for a weekly sprint progress review, but also by our clients (including executives) who analyze these reports to get regular updates on sprint progress.

What specific processes did you implement in Jira to bring visibility to each team’s work?

Solution: After reviewing and consolidating all the reporting requirements for our various teams, we mapped them to available Jira dashboard widgets. This helped us identify nine widgets that could provide the necessary information for all status report consumers. 

Subsequently, we documented the list of widgets and the JQL queries required for those widgets to help us ensure that all projects adopted the new dashboards for standardized status reporting. This facilitated consistency in our scrum progress reviews at an account level. 

Some examples of the widgets on these dashboards included:

• Days Remaining in Sprint Gadget - To show the count of remaining Days in the Sprint

• Sprint Burndown Gadget - To highlight the burndown chart

• Filter Result - To present a few key details:

  • Key risk/issues on the sprint and project

  • A list of all sprint work items (story, task, subtasks) which missed their due date

  • Project key milestones

  • Issues without due dates

  • Missed sprint goals across sprints

• Two Dimensional Filter Statistics - To emphasize a list of open bugs

• Workload Pie Chart - To convey the workload distribution

• Calendar View - To display issues that were due

These dashboards enhanced the efficiency and transparency of the status reporting process. Now, all the stakeholders could view the latest updates at any given point in time rather than going through Microsoft Word or Powerpoint formats for their status reports (which were relevant only a few hours following their delivery).

This also saved an enormous amount of effort for Project Managers, because all they needed to do now was to update the sprint number in the right filters for the Jira dashboard to reflect live, updated information.

Thinking back, what are some best practices you share to help others as they think through similar problems?

Try to drive adoption of Jira for all project tracking purposes. This eventually leads to collection of the right information to be used for status reporting. Adoption of Jira was a three-step process for us:

• Identifying and aligning all information needed for the status report

• Identifying, documenting, and mapping the information relevant for all scrum masters

• Refining based on the issues we faced while implementing/setting up the dashboards and retrieving information from them

• Repeat!

Documenting the process helps in driving consistent adoption for organizational level Jira dashboard report rollouts. 

In order to ensure that the teams didn’t lose any functionality that they had before, we also made some customizations including the addition of “Risk” as a new issue type and creating milestone tasks with all milestones as sub-tasks to pull them into a filter.

What’s a pro-tip you could give to someone who’s a new Jira admin?

Drive a consistent culture of adopting Jira from the very beginning. For instance, establish a foundational set-up for all projects from Day-1 with agreed workflows, issue types etc. This will help immensely in driving long-run organizational initiatives.

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Thanks so much, Amit! We love how you drove organizational adoption of Jira by aligning teams using dashboards. Best of luck to your teams and their success!

Are you inspired by Amit's story? Have you used Jira in a way that impacted your team? Check out our call for submissions, and let us know you’re interested in the comments! 🙌🏼

[Nathaniel Elliott]

Thanks for the insight on this! Very helpful and looking forward to taking some of these ideas forward to the organization I work at!

[Summer Hogan]

 @Amit Bansal - thanks for the great information and recommendations! Congrats!

[Srinivaas]

Gadgets are very old and from years same widgets. I do not see any great perfect data retrieval Gadget by selecting the Sprint number.

Some thing like Metrics Gadgets and Time log widgets required.

Multi dimentional gadgets will be helpful than using 2 dimentional widgets multiple times for same data for different views.

[Gautami Shinde]

Hi,

Thanks for the insight.

[David Yu]

Good advice though I do wonder where that leaves "Team Managed" projects, which seems to be the antithesis of consistency.