General Dashboards for team updates
FeaturedHello!
I work remotely as a producer for software engineering team and wanted to share a dashboard tip that my team has found very useful for our day-to-day. I am certainly the Wrike nerd of our team and as such have no issues searching for information I need rather quickly, however not everyone on my team shares that level of comfort. As a result, a good deal of information shared between colleagues was happening across various platforms such as Wrike, Slack, and email. In an effort to keep things organized and transparent, I created a General dashboard for the team to allow them to see both workload related updates as well as general team notifications.
This started by created an Admin folder in our space and added sections for non-project related items such as PTO, work events, and major 'housekeeping' tasks. With those in place, I created a Dashboard that highlights a quick overview of our sprint progress (tasks by status, effort remaining), a starred tasks widget that highlights our current sprint's notes for easy access, and a variety of calendar widgets that display "This week's PTO", "Upcoming events and deadlines", and "upcoming active project milestones".
Having this all information accessible with one click has increased my team's use of Wrike in general ("I already updated my tasks this morning since I was already in there checking the dashboard") and has greatly increased the team's overall awareness of what's coming up. While the information has always been visible and accessible, maintaining it in a space that only requires 1-2 clicks at most and giving us the freedom to organize information into manageable chunks has been beyond helpful. This is not to say that it's the perfect solution - I still field questions about upcoming events from time to time, but it has alleviated a lot of that burden and given me a tool to direct the team to as the source of truth instead of taking on that role myself.
And because I'm a visual person, here's a quick peek at what some of that dashboard looks like
Huge thanks for sharing Crysta Cadella 💚
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Thanks for sharing Crysta Cadella! I believe my team may find some of your widget suggestions helpful with our own dashboard.
Ohhh this is very helpful! Thank you for sharing. Do you guys use something like GitLab/GitHub for code repository? Because that's where most of the software engineering team's tasks live in my world. We have the GitLab to Wrike sync setup but it's kind of clunky (probably mostly due to our security measures in place that times out the link/token from Unito to GitLab every 6 weeks or something, so we have to re-connect and re-sync a lot). Would love to see how other folks are managing software development in Wrike.
And another question - how does your dashboard know which sprint is "this sprint" - do you have a folder for each sprint that your Ticket Status is referencing? Who's in charge of un-starring last sprint's sprint notes and starring the new sprint notes task?
(We have quite a large backlog built out for some of our projects, so the circle graph would have a big ol' chunk of "backlogged" tasks and the other statuses would be tiny in comparison, so not very useful.)
Hi Michelle Merwin!
Thanks for the reply - I'm glad you found it helpful. We do use GitLab/GitHub, but as we're currently migrating repos, we haven't yet set up the integrations. That is one of our initiatives to make our work more visible across Wrike & Slack as we complete this migration. I'm curious to see how our experiences compare!
For the sprint tracking metrics on the dashboard - we have "active sprint" and "archived sprints" folders set up, so when I move those sprint projects around, the dashboard will auto update for us based on what is under the "active sprint" folder. For our sprint notes, I host those in a specific admin folder and I have that "starred tasks" widget to display only active tasks within that folder.
We also have an enormous backlog of tasks since we handle mostly long term projects that we work on concurrently. To alleviate that stress, only the tasks that are associated with the sprint project tag are accounted for in the dashboard I displayed. I do generate project reports that focus entirely on tasks within an individual project, but those don't get regularly shared during broader team meetings as the general dashboard does.