Replacing the PM Tool with a live PM Dashboard

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People have been sharing with me the PM Tool was a very helpful way of getting a high-level summary of our project for the weekly PM Team calls.

The problem with this tool was that it required some developer effort to maintain. It’s out of date without regular developer effort, and TBH, a non-technical PM like me can’t maintain it easily.

The good news: Jira dashboards have a lot of this functionality. Here’s a prototype that we’ve started looking at with the PM Team - feedback welcome!

Use case

The PM Team reviews the dashboard on our weekly PM Team call. Goal: make sure we’re all aware at a high level of what’s going on with our builds, tickets, and teams/squads across the community.

Before: The PM Tool

The “PM Tool”, available here: https://pmtool.openmrs.org/

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There were several key components in the PM Tool. We set out to discover if we could cover these needs with a Jira dashboard:

  1. Builds Summary: Information on recently failed builds
  2. Summaries of Key Ticket Labels and Upcoming Releases: Overview of RefApp and Core releases, Available Community Priority tickets, Available Curated Intro tickets, Community Priorities closed this week, and Community Priorities that need attention.


After: OpenMRS PM Dashboard in Jira

Live version available here: OpenMRS PM - OpenMRS Issues

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  1. Builds: Shows build summaries for projects we select (annoyingly I can’t see to hide the successful ones) - this is thanks to the fact that we happen to use Bamboo, which seems to auto-connect to our Jira instance by virtue of being an Atlassian product.
  2. Tickets & Releases: Shows the remaining backlog of issues to be handled in the next RefApp and Core releases; community priority tickets, and intro tickets.
  3. (New!) Squad Projects & Sprints: The far right hand side shows a list of projects actively being worked on via our ticket system, and if any of these squads have an active sprint running, we’ll be able to see that here.

It’s a work in progress, and we might find it needs to be way simpler. We can always throw it out if we don’t find it helpful. Looking forward to trying this out together!

FYI: @dkayiwa @herbert24 @burke @jwnasambu @tendomart @gcliff @mozzy @sharif @jennifer @gracebish @suthagar23 @ndacyayisenga @darius

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thanks @grace for sharing out this

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Thanks @grace for updates, its awesome

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This looks fantastic! And it’s very nice to have a tool that relies on built-in JIRA features rather than custom code we need dev resources to maintain. I have to say @grace that I’m really impressed with the dashboards you’ve been able to setup in JIRA. It’s really transformed the utility of the issue tracker, at least for me.

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This is awsome @grace when is it going live ? It makes tracking / searching almost spontaneous !

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Thanks @tendomart! It is already live :smiley: Feel free to start referencing it! The only this is that not all builds are included in the build list (because there are so many no-longer-relevant examples in the Bamboo dashboard) so if you see one that’s missing that should be there, simply let me know and I can show you how to add it to the dashboard :smiley:

Thanks @ibacher, very kind of you! Jira dashboards are actually very easy to set up, LMK if you’d like a crash course some time :smiley:

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