Introducing the new Dashboard builder

In last week’s post, we introduced you to the new Home section and highlighted a few ways you can customize it to help you be more focused and productive. This week, we’re taking a closer look into our newly-designed Dashboard feature and how it can help your team. We’ll be rolling out the new Dashboard builder to all users from September 19th, but you can enable it sooner by going to your Settings and switching it on in the Beta program section.

What are dashboards? 

Dashboards allow you to build custom views based on the metrics that are most important to you. With the easy drag-and-drop interface, you can create one or multiple dashboards made up of different metrics, such as tasks, project statuses, team activity, milestones, risks, and more, so you can see at a glance how your team is progressing with certain projects. You can build up any number of saved dashboards and switch between them for quick and easy updates on your chosen metrics and selected projects. 

Building a dashboard

When building a dashboard, you can select one from the pre-built dashboard templates, or choose the custom build option. To populate your custom dashboard, just select which panels of information you’d like to see. Panels are available for almost every type of data in your site – like tasks, milestones, project health, project updates, time logs, events and risks. You’ll see data presented as charts or lists, depending on the purpose. You can also choose which source projects you want to show data from and filter these projects by criteria such as starred projects only, tag type, project health and more. Once these are selected, you simply add a name and description for your dashboard and it will spin up a view of your selected panels.  You can drill into the metrics on your panels by simply clicking on the sections of the charts you want to see more information on, allowing you to dig in deeper without leaving the dashboard.

Each dashboard will also display a list of all its source projects, allowing you to quickly view project updates or health scores for each one.

So how can I use them?

1. Dashboards by client If you’re an agency or in a business delivering a lot of client projects, it can be useful to set up an individual dashboard for each client. That way, you can get a quick overview of how their individual projects are progressing and always have the important information right at your fingertips.  If you have multiple projects ongoing for that client, you can chose to include these in one dashboard as a rollup of their account. This lets you see the following:

• Number of tasks assigned to each team member across all projects for that client

• A breakdown of what tasks are overdue

• Billable vs non billable time on all projects for that client by all users over a certain time period

• What work has been billed for vs not yet billed

• Top risks in all projects for that client — so you know what you need to keep an eye out for 

• A roundup of all relevant project health scores and updates in one place

2. A Project Manager’s dashboard If you’re a project manager and you want to see how a certain portfolio or group of projects are tracking, you can create multiple dashboards for each group of projects.  Then, you can use them to quickly get an overview of the following information: 

• Project health scores

• Task counts across the team

• Amount of overdue tasks

• Milestone counts for people on the team 

• Upcoming milestones for people on the team across all projects 

• Upcoming events for people on the team 

• Risks across the projects

3. A team manager’s dashboard If you’re a manager and you want a quick way to see how your team’s time is being split out across all their ongoing work, you could set up a dashboard which shows you:

• All task counts across the team

• Amount of overdue tasks

That way, you can quickly see who is at capacity and who might be available to jump in and take on more work.

You can learn more about how the new Home area and Dashboards feature will supercharge your workflow by watching our on-demand webinar. Still have questions? Reach out to us at support@teamwork.com — we’d be happy to help!