Introduction
When companies find it challenging to complete projects on time, their clients lose their trust and loyalty to the brand, resulting in customer churn. One of the most incredible things that has destroyed businesses is pure mismanagement—the lack of knowledge and ability to plan tasks appropriately and manage team members properly. Agile processes were invented to disrupt old project management styles and ideologies, empowering businesses with new procedures to supercharge their productivity and drive growth. The adoption of agile practices has fostered the growth of innovative team management techniques that managers in companies of all types can use to increase the productivity of both their employees and business overall. To help maximize the effectiveness of agile practices, business leaders can use embedded team management dashboards to track indicators that give them an accurate picture of their workforce’s performance, gaining insight into overall task completion rates and efficiency of work. In this blog post, you will learn the advantages of embedded analytics in agile project management and how Bold BI® can help team leads distribute work appropriately, create optimal outcomes, and make the business more successful. I will discuss the following topics:
- What is embedded analytics?
- Benefits of embedding a team management dashboard
- Bold BI’s Team Management Dashboard example
- How to embed analytics tools into an agile project management apps
What is embedded analytics?
Embedded analytics is the integration of analytical solutions and data visualization capabilities into a software application’s user interface to improve data comprehension and usability. Bold BI lets you easily embed an analytics solution into your everyday work applications using a JavaScript SDK and server application. With Bold BI, you can design a dashboard that gives you a comprehensive overview of your team’s progress, allowing you to ensure that projects are progressing on time and that tasks are allocated appropriately.
Benefits of embedding a team management dashboard
Embedding a team management dashboard in your agile project management software gives you easy-to-digest information on employee performance, helping you identify areas in need of change. Embedding a team management dashboard also helps team leads and members understand the current business situation. The following are some of the benefits of an embedded team management dashboard that we will explore:
Increase productivity
Every business leader, whether at the helm of a worldwide enterprise or a small business, desires to make their business more productive. Though there are various way to achieve this, it all boils down to one factor: employee output determines business productivity.
Embedded analytics helps team leads track metrics such as each member’s number of planned tasks, closed tasks, their closed task completion percentage, and the utilized work hours percentage across different projects. With this information, leads can easily see which members are most capable of completing their tasks on time and which ones are less productive. Leaders can then meet with engineers working on different projects to learn about areas where they are experiencing difficulties, discuss what needs to be done, and brainstorm ideas that will make the engineers more productive. Thus, the company will increase efficiency as workers accomplish their projects.
Identify talented personnel
Embedded analytics makes it possible for managers to identify unique talents among their teams. Knowing the quality of features implemented and bugs fixed by each employee within a given period of time, leaders can determine who has the right skills for a given task or project. Embedded analytics also helps product owners determine skills missing in the company by examining metrics like overall tasks and bug status based on priority. These provide insight into critical bugs or features that were resolved in a particular time frame. By comparing the skills of employees in charge of those tasks, project managers can identify skill gaps in the company and organize training or new hires based on what is needed. Leaders can also use the overall task numbers to assign employees tasks based on their current workloads.
Enhance decision-making
Proper agile project management allows product managers to have a firm grasp of their team members’ abilities, work capacities, and their activities across various projects. This information helps managers know when the company is exposed to risk when a project is exposed to risk and the potential for such scenarios. It also helps them predict future productivity by looking at trends in current workforce performance. Embedding a team management dashboard in your agile project management application enables you to track and monitor total resources and task status metrics. These give you an overview of your tasks’ current statuses and the company’s available resources. With this information, leaders can analyze past data to determine whether the available resources can complete current and upcoming tasks. This helps managers make better strategic plans that will help them accommodate more projects while maintaining the current level of resources, which will in turn increase profits for the company. The development of proper business plans also mitigates risks posed to individual projects and the company overall.
Promote time efficiency
Analyzing metrics such as total utilized work hours and planned versus actual tasks completed by project help leaders determine the total hours their employees actually use out of the scheduled hours for a given project. This helps them know the effort their members put into their tasks and a project’s actual complexity over its perceived complexity. With these metrics, managers can better plan the time allocated to complete future tasks, analyze the work involved in a new project more effectively, and draw accurate timelines for projects in the future.
Bold BI’s Team Management Dashboard example
The Bold BI Team Management Dashboard example helps project leads and managers track the status of each project with metrics such as total resources, overall task completion percentage, bug and feature task completion status, team roles, bug status, and task summary by resource to manage teams as efficiently as possible.
Key metrics and KPIs
- Total resources
- Overall task completion rate
- Features closed
- Bugs closed
- Team roles
- Planned vs. actual task completion by project
- Task by status
- Total utilized work hours
- Task summary by resource
- Planned hours vs. utilized hours by resources
- Bug status based on priority
Total resources
This number card shows the total resources available across all the projects.
Overall task completion rate
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This number card shows the overall task completion rate across all the projects.
Features closed
This KPI widget compares the number of features completed in the current and previous month. This allows team leads to spot weaknesses and take necessary action to close more features in the future.
Bugs closed
This KPI widget helps team managers to compare the number of bugs fixed between the current and previous month.
Team roles
This pie chart shows the composition of the teams based on member roles such as software developer, graphic designer, testing engineer, QA engineer, and support engineer.
Planned vs. actual task completion by project
The column chart compares the planned versus actual task completion percentage by a project to illustrate the level of workforce performance.
Tasks by status
This doughnut chart shows the percentage of tasks in each status, such as closed, in progress, validated, open, review, on hold, and testing.
Total utilized work hours
This radial gauge illustrates the overall utilized work hours against the planned work hours.
Task summary by resource
This grid shows each team member’s number of planned tasks, closed tasks, completion percentage, and utilized work hours percentage.
Planned hours vs. utilized hours by resource
This bar chart shows the comparison between planned and utilized work hours for each resource. It helps managers track resource performance and make accurate timeline forecasts for future projects.
Bug status based on priority
The stacked bar chart breaks down the overall bugs by status and priority, allowing you to quickly identify the percentage of critical, high, low, and normal bugs.
To learn more about key metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard demo, refer to the Team Management Dashboard.
How to embed analytics tools into an agile project management apps
Let’s see how analytics can be embedded into your agile project management web applications. Bold BI helps you embed dashboards on 18 web platforms, including React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, Vue with Go, Vue with ASP.NET Core, and more. In the remainder of this blog, I am going to explain how to embed dashboards in an ASP.NET MVC application. Consider a scenario in which your team has a website like the one shown in the following image.
You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself. Follow these steps to embed your dashboard successfully.
Prerequisites
Download and install the Bold BI server on your local machine and create a dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment instructions here.
Step 1: Create an ASP.NET MVC application.
Open Microsoft Visual Studio and click New Project. Then choose ASP.NET MVC Web Application, enter the project name, and click OK.
Step 2: Configure embedded properties.
After the ASP.NET MVC web application is created, you need to create a model class called EmbedProperties under Models and provide the dashboard RootURL, SiteIdentifier, Environment, UserEmail, and EmbedSecret.
| Properties | Property Value Descriptions |
| RootUrl | Bold BI dashboard server URL. For example: https://localhost:5000/bi. |
| SiteIdentifier | For Bold BI, it should be something like site/site1. For the Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, it should be an empty string. |
| Environment | Your Bold BI application environment. If using Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, you should use the cloud. If using Bold BI, you should use enterprise. |
| User Email | The Bold BI server will use an email to authorize the authorization server. |
Step 3: Generate embed secret.
You have to set the embed secret for authentication, and you can get it from the Bold BI server. Click the Settings icon in the left navigation bar and then click the Embed tab. Click Enable embed authentication and then click Generate Secret to generate the embed secret. Copy the secret key and paste it into the application. For more detail on how to do this, you can refer to this documentation link.
Note: Save the secret key, as it cannot be retrieved again. If you do not save it, you will have to generate a new one using the Reset Secret option.
Step 4: Create an authorization server.
You need to implement an authorization server in the ASP.NET MVC application to get authenticated before embedding the dashboard from the Bold BI server. You can also configure the single sign-on (SSO)-based authorization server, which is an authentication endpoint that enables users to authenticate multiple applications using unique embed secrets securely. This prevents the need for the user to log into different applications separately.
Step 5: Create a Bold BI instance.
Finally, create a Bold BI instance to load the dashboard using a JavaScript file. Reference required script files and CSS files in the HTML pages.
Step 6: Run the application to embed the dashboard.
After creating the ASP.NET MVC application, you need to run it. It will be launched with the dashboard details. Finally, you can see the dashboard created in the Bold BI server is embedded in your web application.
To learn more about embedding dashboards into your applications, please refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code required in the previous steps from our documentation.
Conclusion
Bold BI® helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, Angular, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. It will save you time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your application, refer to this blog and our help documentation.
I hope now you have a better understanding of Bold BI and how it can help in agile project management. You can create any dashboard you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 150+ data sources.
Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free trial and create interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support questions.
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