Learn how to use JIRA dashboards to keep an overview without plugins. A simple setup with summary emails reduces chaos and improves clarity.

At Yonder, the B2B SaaS company I co-founded, we are avid JIRA users.

Of course, we use JIRA for our product and development teams. But we also use it for our ISO 9001 risk register, our ISO 27001 asset management, and to track customer onboarding projects.

Recently, we had a change in the leadership team. Our new Chief Customer Officer wanted to stop using JIRA in his team. JIRA would not help him maintain the overview, so I agreed. The two of us then embarked on a massive JIRA cleanup session, deleting thousands of old, confusing JIRA tickets.

Do you think the cleanup session was the end? Not at all. Even after the cleanup session, it was hard to keep an overview in JIRA. Here is what we did.

One Dashboard per JIRA Project

I love dashboards that fit on a laptop screen. They cut the illusion that bigger is better – because you also need the overview on the move, not just in your James-Bond-style control center with huge screens on the wall.

Here is a screenshot of the dashboard we maintain for each JIRA project:

JIRA dashboard
Sample screenshot of our JIRA dashboard. Team member names and customer names are greyed out for privacy (source: author)

Let’s go through each element on this dashboard.

  • In the “open tickets assigned to me” tile, each user sees all the tickets assigned to them, sorted by ticket status. This makes it easy to keep the overview of what’s on my desk.
  • In the “open tickets watched by me” tile, each user sees all the tickets watched by them, sorted by ticket status. This makes it easy to watch the progress of tickets worked on by other colleagues.
  • The “all open tickets” tile shows all open tickets in the project, sorted by ticket status and issue type. It also shows the total number of open tickets in the project. This number visualizes whether the backlog grows or we keep up the close rate of tickets.
  • The “open tickets customer team” shows all open tickets in the project assigned to a member of the customer team, sorted by team member name. Most tickets assigned to a member of the customer team are bugs reported by customers that need clarification – not all reported bugs are real bugs.
  • The “open tickets dev/product team” shows all open tickets in the project assigned to a member of the development or product team, sorted by team member name. This helps the team lead and the product owner to plan the resources, as it is immediately visible who is overloaded.
  • The “open tickets by label” shows all open tickets in the project, sorted by labels. In contrast to the pre-cleanup era, we only apply labels to relate issues to customers, plus very few labels to plan dev work (e.g., backend/frontend, iOS/Windows/Android, etc.).

And that’s it. No fancy plugins needed, just standard JIRA dashboard elements. We created those dashboards in around one day.

Daily Summary Emails

Dashboards are great for seeing the actual state of a JIRA project. However, as a product owner or team lead, I also want to keep an overview of tickets that are created and closed each day.

In JIRA, there is a built-in automation feature. We use it to set up daily summary emails. For each project, two daily summary emails are created at 6 pm:

  • One email lists all the tickets that were completed in the last 24 hours, including a link to the ticket.
  • One email lists all the tickets that were created in the last 24 hours, including a link to the ticket and the name of the person who created the ticket.

The distribution list of those emails includes the CPO, the product team, the dev team leads, and the CCO. In this way, everybody has the same understanding of new and completed JIRA tickets.

Conclusion

Keeping the overview in a company is hard leadership work that never ends.

Given that setting up dashboards and summary emails isn’t that much work, what are you waiting for? The better your overview, the less hectic and chaotic your daily work will become.