How to create a dashboard in Jira

Jack Wallen walks you through creating a powerful dashboard in Jira to keep your teams on target for project deadlines.

According to Atlassian, Jira is used by 50% of Fortune 500 companies for project management. This is with good reason: Jira is user-friendly, flexible and offers a one-stop shop for all your project management needs.

SEE: Hiring 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 contained within. Jira dashboards can add widgets to display things like:

• Assigned To Me
• Average Age Chart
• Activity Stream
• Bubble Charts
• Average Number of Times In Status
• Created vs. Resolved Chart
• Days Remaining in Sprint
• Heat Map
• Issue Statistics
• Issues in progress
• Jira Issues Calendar

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

What you’ll need to create a Jira dashboard

The only thing you’ll need for this is a Jira account. There’s nothing more to install, as Jira contains all the tools necessary to make this work.

How to create your first dashboard

Log in to your Jira account and then select a project you want to house the new dashboard. From the top toolbar, click Dashboards and, in the resulting popup menu (Figure A), click Create Dashboard.

Figure A

A new popup window will appear (Figure B), where you must, at minimum, give the new dashboard a name.

Figure B

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

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

Figure C

You’ll see all of the possible widgets that can be added in the right column. Scroll through those widgets — there are 31 total — and either click Add to add the widget into one of the two initial main columns.

As you add widgets, you’ll quickly realize you’re not limited to just two slots. And once you’ve added the necessary widgets to your dashboard (Figure D), you can arrange them how you need them with the following controls:

• Minimize (two arrows point to one another): Minimizes the widget to a single bar displaying only the title.
• Maximize (square icon): Maximizes the widget so it takes up the entire dashboard main pane.
• Refresh (circle with arrows icon): Refreshes the data for the widget.

Figure D

From the three-dot menu button, you can also select a color for the widget, rename it or delete it.

After you’ve added 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 will help you quickly see the progress of your projects without having to dive into various components of the platform. It doesn’t get any easier than that.

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