How to create a dashboard in Jira

Jack Wallen walks you through creating a powerful dashboard in Jira to help your teams meet project deadlines.

According to Atlassian, 50% of Fortune 500 companies use Jira for project management. With good reason: Jira is user-friendly, flexible and offers everything from a single source for project management.

SEE: Hire Kit: Project Manager (TechRepublic Premium)

Like many project management platforms, Jira makes it easy to add powerful dashboards to your workspaces so you can get the most out of your account and the information it contains. Jira dashboards can add widgets to display things like:

• assigned to me
• Average age chart
• activity stream
• bubble charts
• Average frequency in status
• Created vs. resolved chart
• Remaining days in the sprint
• heat map
• output statistics
• problems in progress
• Jira Issues calendar

Let me show you how easy it is to create a dashboard in Jira.

What you need to create a Jira dashboard

All you need is a Jira account. Nothing else needs to be installed as Jira includes all the necessary tools to make this work.

How to create your first dashboard

Sign in to your Jira account, then select a project to contain the new dashboard. Click Dashboards in the top toolbar and in the resulting pop-up menu (Figure A), click Create Dashboard.

Figure A

A new pop-up window will appear (Figure B), where you must give the new dashboard at least one name.

Figure B

You can also give the dashboard a description and manage access control for viewers and editors. After you have taken care of the initial configuration, click on Save.

The new dashboard will appear immediately, where you can start adding widgets (Figure C).

Figure C

In the right column you can see all possible widgets that can be added. Scroll through these widgets – there are 31 in total – and either click Add to place the widget in one of the first two main columns.

As you add widgets, you’ll soon find that you’re not limited to just two slots. And after adding the necessary widgets to your dashboard (Figure D), you can arrange them the way you need them using the following controls:

• Minimize (two arrows pointing at each other): Minimizes the widget to a single bar showing only the title.
• Maximize (square icon): Maximizes the widget so that it takes up the entire main area of ​​the dashboard.
• Update (Circle with arrow icon): Refreshes the data for the widget.

Figure D

You can also choose a color for the widget, rename it, or delete it using the three-dot menu button.

After adding the required widgets to your dashboard, click Done and your dashboard is ready for you (Figure E).

Figure E

And there you have it, a brand new dashboard for your Jira account that helps you quickly see the progress of your projects without having to dive into different components of the platform. It’s that easy.

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