Custom Charts for Jira Work Management

If you’re familiar with the Atlassian product suite, you’ll know that Jira Work Management is Atlassian’s expansion and rebranding of the Jira Core product for business teams. If you’re not, think of Jira Work Management as a whole new platform (because Jira Core wasn’t, ahem, all that good).

While the projects are still called business projects, they now have some extra functionality that makes them more friendly and targeted to business teams and non-technical users. This includes new visualizations, such as list and calendar views, and new customizations like the awesome lavendar background below. And since we love non-technical users here at Old Street Solutions, let’s talk about how you can use Jira Work Management with our flagship app, Custom Charts for Jira, which was also designed with business teams in mind.

Basic reporting in Jira Work Management

While it may look like a brand new product, the underlying structure of a business project has not changed. This means that your Jira Work Management tasks are still issues in Jira, and you can report on them like you would any other issue. Basic fields come with your project, but can be modified to include any other custom data points that you would like to capture.

From the project directly you have access to some of the basic board reports like Average Age, Created vs. Resolved, generic pie charts, etc. You still won’t be able to use the specific agile reports like on a Scrum or Kanban board, but this is definitely an improvement on old business projects. Those reports may cover a little bit of the reporting that you want to do, although it’s unlikely they’ll cover everything. That’s where Custom Charts for Jira fits in.

Let’s walk through a few simple reports that business teams can create with Custom Charts in a basic Jira Work Management project.

Due date tracking

The ability to track due dates comes included with most, if not all, of the business templates. This is a basic date field that can be used to track external and personal due dates. When I’m looking at due dates, generally what I want to know is:

1. Have I missed any due dates?

2. What due dates are coming up?

3. What are my longer-term due dates?

The basic calendar view in your project can give you a limited view a month at a time. However, Custom Charts for Jira can give you a more explicit view of these metrics using a simple table, such as the one pictured below.

Rather than viewing a single month at a time, you can group due dates, making it easy to look at the body of work rather than just the individual pieces. I’ve even customized the colors and ordered it to make it clear that the overdue issues need to be the first thing that I look at. Clicking on the blue links will pull up a list of the issues so I can see the work that I need to do.

Workload reporting

When you’re part of a team, it’s important to understand how work is distributed. As long as you’re assigning issues to team members, you can report on how many tickets each person is responsible for.

Chart by assignee and you can see how the work is broken down. You can use the out-of-the-box pie chart gadget to get a very basic view of each assignee’s issues, but there isn’t any ability to customize it.

Custom Charts for Jira uses only one gadget for all types of charts, so you can visualize the workload in various different ways, such as the bar chart above. You can also adapt it to display things like percentages, custom names, and different/more appropriate colors.

Status reports

Regardless of the type of work that you do, knowing the status of individual pieces of work can provide a high-level view of how your team is doing.

The basic Jira pie chart can work for you if you don’t have any complexity and are happy reporting on the data in a fairly raw state. If your project uses a more complex workflow, or you’re looking to report across projects that use different workflows, the ability to combine and show/hide specific statuses with Custom Charts can make life a lot easier.

In the example below, we’ve combined several statuses to display as one. For example, we’ve got an “In Progress” and an “In Review” status, but this distinction may not matter to the people viewing the report, so we’ve combined them to just display as “In Progress”. The same has been done with two statuses that represent completed work.

Label visibility

Labels can be a great tool for users who need to do some ad hoc reporting. The labels field in Jira works like a tag – it’s an open text field, so any user can create a label and assign it to issues. These informal data points tend to be particularly popular with business teams.

If you use labels to keep track of your work, using Custom Charts to display them in a tile chart can give you a quick way to drill into the issues, like the one above. Each of the tiles is a link that lets you review the issues with those labels at the click of a button. This chart can also be customized to display the number of issues with each label, exclude certain labels, and of course change the arrangement and color of the tiles.

Conclusion

Jira Work Management has the potential to be a great tool for business teams, Jira beginners, and other non-technical users. With simpler views, easy-to-use project templates, and less jargon built in, it’s clear that there’s now a very real opportunity to get everyone in your organization using Jira.

Combine Jira Work Management’s new features with some beautiful yet straightforward reporting with Custom Charts for Jira, and your teams can hit the ground running with functional projects and reports in barely any time at all.