philosophical question - What is the purpose of dashboards?

[mmavis]

We are configuring Workfront for rollout. I am helping with creating dashboards and reports. At one point, I asked my team this: Thinking globally, everyone is dealing with tasks and issues, plus proofs -- as far as things they have to do. So we could have reports and dashboards that would work for everyone if we did something like the list below. One person said that the Home tab does a lot of this so it's not needed in the dashboards. (We are trying to ensure everyone uses their Home tab effectively). So my question is, what really are the dashboards for? The Home tab is where you see everything (tasks, issues, requests, proofs, etc.) that are assigned to you. What should you see -- describing it at a high level -- in the dashboards? My Tasks due today or overdue - sort by type My Tasks due this week or overdue - sort by type My Tasks due next week - sort by type My Tasks all grouped by week and type All tasks assigned to my job role grouped by week and project owner and same for issues and proofs. Mavis Moon

[VicAl]

Hi Mavis, Dashboards are simply a way to group and view a set of reports in one sitting (without having to open 6 different reports or try to find them). So your reports below are a good example to put in a dashboard, then everyone has one stop shopping to see them all. We do something similar and put it in a tab in the Project. So they can see which tasks in the project are due this week, next week, etc. We also have one for our Helpdesk that has some pretty bar & pie charts etc.

[TegwynSt]

Hello - Vic's example and what you want to display are what we do too...and some of our people like to default to chart views if they are statistical in nature. I have set up dashboards with as few as 1-2 reports (external vendors who don't need to see much) and up to maybe 10/15 (they can get too be too big so it depends who it's for) if it's too much info they can get overwhelmed and it defeats the purpose. We also have "tabs" for specific types of dashboard reports....creative production can check on design dash and copywriter dash by clicking on those tabs - so we don't need them on our main dash. our big one is "good to go" - as that is often the only way to know what is truly with you and ready to work on, at least with waterfall projects. I have set the "home" button to default to dashboard views because I find it cleaner....but, a lot of people still resort to the "My Work" view for some reason. Tegwyn Stockdale Workfront System Admin / Production Coordinator BayCare Clearwater, Florida

[BenettaPe]

Since attending the Leap Conference in 2019 - we now use dashboards extensively. My team (mostly managers and executives) do not like to navigate to find a particular report out of tons of reports. So I created a dashboard to put their most popular and highly used reports on - so there is no more clicking and navigating and looking for those few reports that they want to see pretty much on a daily basis or at the least on a weekly basis. Having to find reports to run is a headache and a dashboard is an NSAID. Thanks. Benetta Perry APS

[MichelleJa]

We have weekly meetings with what we call Core Teams. We use the dashboards to pull together reports showing: Projects that will be starting in the next couple weeks, so they can have creative and brand goal discussions Late task report with all the Core Team tasks to discuss internal issues (or mark things done because someone "forgot") Projects in process to go over any questions Projects that were completed (hooray/feel good) Our Account Managers look at this daily to confirm things are moving along smoothly. We also have Manager dashboards to view tasks and issues assigned to those who report up to them. Michelle Jackson

[bpilarski]

We use dashboards for some of the same reasons others have mentioned, but we also use it to help us manage activity in request queues. Being able to see new items in multiple queues all in one place is extremely helpful for our PMs. Barb Pilarski

[mmavis]

Thanks, all! Really helpful. Mavis Moon mmoon@pivotinteriors.com

[Heather_Kulbacki]

We similarly have quite a few Dashboards and many of those are set up on the user's Layout Template, so that the Dashboard is the first place they land on when they log into Workfront.

[BrianMa2]

Hi, not to take this chat in a new direction, but @Vic Alejandro I'm interested in your Project level dashboard. I know how to get it there (layout templates), but how are you making the reports contextual to the viewed project ? I only know about date & user wildcards. Is there a concept of $$Project out there that I'm not aware of? Or what am I missing? thanks! Brian Brian C. Mauger

[VicAl]

Hi Brian, Ah that's actually the beauty of WF's design in this case. You don't need a wildcard or anything. You just create the report and filter on what you want (i.e. Tasks scheduled for this week). When the reports (in the dashboard) appear in the tab in the project. It inherently filters on that project that you're in. So if you opened the report/dashboard by itself, it would display every project (so I don't recommend that 😊 ). But when you display it as a dashboard in the project it only displays for that project.

[SarahLe1]

Hi Mavis, The highest level difference is that the home area is specific to users on an individual level, the "me" level. What is assigned to me? What are my late projects? We don't create user reports or dashboards for individual users because the info is available to them in Home. You would create a report to show the Manager, PM, etc. the details of the team in once place, the "us/they" level. What is everyone working on? Who on my team has late projects? How many of XYZ did we create last year? You would use a dashboard simply to host a collection of reports so that the user can head to the dashboard and have their reports in once place. Sarah Lemoncelli