“If you can’t measure your team’s performance, how can you improve it? In a world driven by SLAs and user satisfaction, dashboards are no longer just visual aids—they’re your team’s compass.”
“According to Forrester, 61% of service teams say they lack visibility into their own performance metrics. That’s where Jira Service Management steps in.”
In any service-driven organization, be it IT, HR, or customer support, tracking performance is key to continuous improvement. Atlassian’s Jira Service Management (JSM) offers powerful capabilities for generating customized dashboards and reports that track KPIs. But an effective implementation calls for more than just putting a few charts together. The KPIs require planning, realistic interpretation of data, and alignment with the team’s purpose.
Let us discuss the practical use of Jira Service Management’s dashboards and reports in KPI tracking.
Why KPI’s matter in service management?
KPIs are more than mere numbers; they tell you about service quality, team performance, and customer satisfaction. For example:
- A first response time tells when the users start getting acknowledged
- Issue resolution time indicates the fastness of problem-solving
- Ticket backlog tells about staffing or workflow gaps
- SLA compliance means to signify whether your team is acting according to the commitment
Tracking such KPIs in real-time helps the service managers to allocate better resources, be able to identify broken processes and make their teams accountable.
Understanding Jira Service Management Dashboards and Reports
Jira Service Management doesn’t come with all the KPIs preloaded, but it does give all the tools to build your own. Here is how the two main tools work:
- Dashboards are customizable home pages showing several visual gadgets (charts, lists, etc.). You can add gadgets that notify you about quite a few things: open issues, SLA breaches, team workload, etc.
- Reports are visual summaries of issue data in greater detail, covering time to resolution, created vs. resolved issues and SLA metric. Additionally, you can create custom filters to gain very specific insights.
Dashboards and reports provide real-time and trend-based views of performance when used together.
Getting Started: Set clear goals
Before setting up any dashboard, clarify what you want to track. Avoid clutter by focusing on KPIs that can actually be acted upon and are relevant to your team. For example:
- If you’re running a help desk, track ticket volume, response/resolution time, and SLA breaches
- For a DevOps team, focus on incident resolution time, change success rate and mean time to recovery (MTTR)
The key is to track what matters most to your team’s success.
Building a Practical Dashboard
- Using Saved Filters: Start by saving filters for the type of issues or tickets you want to keep track of: high-priority incidents, requests yet to be responded to, and tasks client overdue.
- Picking Gadgets: JSM has quite a few gadgets, such as:
- Filter Results—to list tickets from saved filters
- Pie Chart—to visualize tickets by status, assignee, type, etc.
- Created vs. Resolved Chart—to keep an eye on backlog
- Average Age Chart—to find out how long tickets have been open
- Arrange for clarity: Metrics that matter the most (like SLA breaches or overdue tickets) should be at the top. Use space adequately to separate distinct categories—i.e., operational KPIs from performance KPIs.
- Sharing and Evolution: Make the dashboard viewable to the team or management as a whole. Keep up with the change by reviewing and updating the filters regularly.
Using reports to dig deeper
Reports dig into deeper analysis of trends that dashboards provide at a glance:
- Time to Resolution helps interpret the mean time that different issue types take for resolution.
- SLA Goal Reports help measure if time-based commitments are being met consistently or not.
- Run reports on specific projects, teams or time periods via Custom JQL filters.
- Export them to share with stakeholders and during review sessions or planning sessions.
Best practices for valid KPI tracking
- Don’t track vanity metrics: High resolution tickets are meaningless if the customers are still unhappy.
- Automate wherever possible: Use automation to tag, prioritize and escalate issues so your KPIs reflect real urgency.
- Limit dashboards to core users: Tailor dashboards for different use roles-agents, managers, executives.
- Review regularly: Discuss dashboard insights in sprint reviews, sessions and monthly check-in.
Making custom dashboards and reports to visualize KPIs is an amazing feature of Jira Service Management. But real value is realized only when a team focuses on relevant, outcome-based metrics instead of just numbers for the sake of numbers.
When put to use well, dashboards become much more than just a display screen. They provide direction, facilitate accountability and keep teams aligned with what truly matters: reliable and efficient service delivery to users.
So don’t just build a dashboard; build a better way to work.
CRG Solutions has been helping organizations transform the way they work by delivering expert guidance and software solutions to help improve business management & performance. Take the first step towards smoother and smarter collaboration with Atlassian JSM.
Connect with us if you would like to learn more about the benefits of working with CRG Solutions experts.
“After building role-based dashboards in JSM, our service desk became a well-oiled machine. We now spot backlogs before they grow.” – IT Ops Lead, MediConnect Solutions
We used to track maintenance SLAs manually in spreadsheets, and it was impossible to get a real-time view. With JSM dashboards, we now track open requests by site, resolution time, and overdue tasks—all on one screen. It’s helped us cut our backlog by 40% in just 2 months.” –Facilities Manager, UrbanEdge Properties
“JSM dashboards helped us stop flying blind. Now every agent can see their ticket load, SLA timers, and performance goals. Our leadership team uses the same data to make weekly planning decisions. It’s brought transparency and focus to every level of our support operation.”
—Head of Customer Success, FlowSuite Inc.
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