Hansoft’s dashboards and reports simplify progress reporting and help teams stay on track. That’s because they are:
- Easy to Build. They require no complex math formula and are easily customized.
- Exportable and Sharable. Easily share your reports or export dashboards as spreadsheet or a powerpoint to let stakeholders know how your project is going.
- Quickly Understood. So you have confidence at a glance.
Let’s look at how a project manager might use data from an Excel spreadsheet to create charts and reports to share with stakeholders.
How to Create a Dashboard
There are many ways to input data into Hansoft. For an Excel spreadsheet, the import functionality will automatically map your columns in the software.
With your data at the ready, you can create charts to show any kind of information you want to track or share to meet your goals. You’ll see that charts are easy to create as we walk through building a chart to visualize developer workload.
In this case the plan is structured under the sub-project “The Project Plan”.
To create a chart, right-click on the sub-project and select “New dashboard chart.”
We’ll make a bar chart that displays the duration - or how long the tasks are – for each developer, or assignee.
Now we see the chart in our dashboard. By selecting various meta data and other options, we can tailor the chart exactly the way we want, and all the information will be updated in real time.
How to Create a Report
Hansoft also lets you create many different kinds of reports. You can build various reports with the exact information you and your stakeholders need. Let’s create a specialized report to show the current tasks in focus.
From the planning tab, click on My Reports and select New. Once you’ve named the report, you can add various criteria.
The top box tells you how many items are in your view, the middle boxes are all criteria you set, and the bottom box reveals how many items will appear in the report based on the criteria.
To set your first criteria, click into the middle box.
There are many to choose from, some of which are quite intelligent, like ongoing work. This figures out from a wide range of different conditions what can be considered ongoing right now.
By clicking the Plus Sign, you can create an “And” statement. For example, from the ongoing work list, you may only want to see the tasks that are assigned to the developers on your team.
On the right, you can see the report query you are generating as you build the report.
We also want to create an “or” statement to show any tasks with a duration longer than 5 days. To do this, we add a new find criteria, and place it along side the Ongoing Work box.
Now we simply adjust the flow of the arrows to generate the report query. With the new find criteria box selected, we again use the dropdowns at the bottom of the report generator to define the parameters of this criteria.
With our information selected, we can now sort and group – in this case, we will group by who it is assigned to, and sort by the start date.
Once you save your work, your report is added to your toolbar by default. Select the report to view.
Too add a report to a dashboard, click the Dashboards tab. You can add it to My dashboard Page, or to a new dashboard. To do this, click the Plus tab and name the dashboard.
Customize your view and layout. Select your report from the filter, and choose the columns you’d like visible from the dashboard.
You can adjust the text if you like.
Each item is clickable, so you can easily jump to any place in the plan to make updates, which are again shown in real time in your report.
How to Share a Dashboard
If you want to share information, for example at a stakeholder meeting, there are several ways to do so. One way that Hansoft makes presentations easy is by exporting your dashboard as a PowerPoint.
Here is our original dashboard. You see we added charts to show backlog progress and remaining items in each project, as well as a Blocked Items report.
Use the toolbar to select the export option, and save it to the location you desire.
When you open the file, you will see each item in the dashboard on its own slide. The titles match the name you gave it in Hansoft. You now have a fast and easy way to prepare this data for a meeting.
Conclusion
Dashboards and Reporting are just two of the many ways Hansoft makes it easy to collaborate, plan, and scale — especially for Agile teams.
If you’d like to see more of what Hansoft can do, you can watch the recorded demonstration, or try it out for free. Click below to take the next step towards to becoming an Agile master.