Dashboards often provide at-a-glance views of KPIs (key performance indicators) relevant to a particular objective or business process (e.g. sales, marketing, human resources, or production).
- Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashboard_(business) )
Current Scenario:
The current dashboard for PM acts more like a menu to access various functionality within PM. But it has been implemented as a page. So as soon as you click on it you move to another page and thus it vanishes. To add a project while on Organization page you would have to come back to Dashboard again and then click the add button.
Possible Improvement.
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Move Dashboard to block so it could be made available site wide.
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Use navigation menu to access pm pages. Also use navigatin menu's content add child links to add PM nodes.
Current Dashboard Page
Dashboard Page exposed as blocks
If any of the above is implemented, Then we can have a Dashboard which would agree more with the wiki quote i had pasted in the beginning.
Discussion points are,
- What would be the key performance indicators?
- Timetracking reports
- Tasks & Tickets
- Projects
- Requested Holidays (current not included in PM)
- News (current not included in PM)
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Layout suggestions for various data.
- Optional (recommended) Homebox integration.
- Provide various Views blocks.
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Whatever comes to your mind :) about this, even if it goes against the proposed idea.
The implementation of this feature can be considered to be a long term goal of improving User Experience.
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Comments
Great idea. Layout: I wonder
Great idea.
Layout: I wonder whether the new dashboard could use Homebox, like the Drupal.org dashboard - so that users could add blocks from a selection, to suit themselves.
Ideally of course, other modules should be able to contribute those blocks, so that it is easy to customise and extend.
My site: http://julian.granger-bevan.me.
Maintainer of: Drupal PM (Project Management).
You can contribute towards my Drupal work at http://www.gittip.com/juliangb/.
Ideally of course, other
As far as I know, with Homebox you can add every kind of block. You only have to make the block available to Homebox in the settings.
If we use Homebox we actually only have to provide views, which would make things pretty easy, I think.
Dashboard Block
Using Storm in D6 the dashboard can be displayed as a block. Moving forward IMO this should be part of the core dev now underway. The size of the block would then vary per PM person depending on their roles/access.
Having the Add button on the dashboard block would be a great way to minimize Navigation clicks.
Regarding Layout Helper
Dashboardify- Each user with proper permissions can add any block to dashboard and rearrange blocks order on his or her dashboard page. There is one dashboard with predefined regions available for each user. User can add unlimited instances of the same block which can be useful for views blocks with different contextual filters applied. Along with block information module stores data what contextual filters were used while adding block to dashboard. Block order is autosave via AJAX.The reason i crossed Dashboardify is it conflicts with Views with ajax on ( mentioned on module page).
Just wanted to explore the options thats all. Homebox seems to be the choice i think.
PM Example Views
Maybe we could include an examples module for pm which includes an assortment of views, views/blocks. It's easier to customize an existing view than create one from scratch. These could then be deployed thru Homebox, Panels, PM-Vista, etc.
PM-Vista is strictly a theme now :)
The blocks provided by PM_vista theme have been moved out to a separate module called Extravaganza ( http://drupal.org/project/extravaganza ). Example contents sounds like a good idea. Maybe that could go along with the demo content set-up too. An idea that has been worth looking at from testing point of view.
key performance indicators?
So is it safe to assume that key performance indicators need not be considered for discussion since, they would be provided by respective modules or features maybe!
key performance indicators?
KPIs should be decided by the user (project admin) not by the system/module/feature.
I think therefore I Drupal
Lets keep kpi in discussion
Keeping track of time spent on a project would be great KPI. Flots charting may be a useful means to display pm/person actual time/planned for time/billable time for all persons working on a project ( or task, etc).
A List of all nodes with a pager
TimeTracker is a nice idea, since it is related to almost every entity in one way or the other. Need idea/inspiration for some good timetracker UI though.
For KPI,
how about a list of all nodes with filters and pager and sorting?
Also am thinking on the lines of some status bar which displays metrics like Count of {Something} like,
Total Open Issues (20) | Tasks ( 52 ) | Resolved ( 3 )I agree that Project
I agree that Project Management should provide a few default KPIs, via Views if that's the way - that way it provides an example of what can be placed on that page.
Homebox seems to be a good way to go then for the structure, unless there is a way that we can leave this more flexible for the site builder to decide.
My site: http://julian.granger-bevan.me.
Maintainer of: Drupal PM (Project Management).
You can contribute towards my Drupal work at http://www.gittip.com/juliangb/.
I think, for flexibility,
I think, for flexibility, it's better to only provide some default views with blocks and not declare Homebox as a dependency, but instead only recommend it on the project page.
In which case, what do we
In which case, what do we have on the "/pm" page, by default?
My site: http://julian.granger-bevan.me.
Maintainer of: Drupal PM (Project Management).
You can contribute towards my Drupal work at http://www.gittip.com/juliangb/.
Current Strom+Contrib (D6)
I can tell you how we are currently handling it.
We overwrote the menu_link theme to add for special menu entries (project, organizaiton, tickets, ect.) a Add or List Link. So this is basiclly what D34dm3n proposed.
On the second we are using Homebox with D6 and it works like a charm. Because of this in Storm Contrib for D6 you will find some common used list exposed as Blocks, so we can use it in the Homebox. Also some blocks have special homebox configuration options. The default dashboard shows Tickets, Tasks, Projects, Requested Holidays, a Timetracking Calender and a News Block. All Blocks (except News) are in Storm Contrib. Tickets and Task is one block, which can be configured with predefined filters. The Timetracking Calender needs also the Calender Module, but shows so then a Mini Calender Version, where you quickly can see, if you need to track time on some days.
In PM everything should be easier because of the use of views. You can easily add a BlockView to a normal view. I'm not sure how the filter thing can be done. Every user can create a filter like he wants, save it and reuse it at most of the list. You also can add the Ticket Block twice to you Dashboard with different filters.
Here a screenshot of our Dashboard:
Sorry its in German, but I think the main concept is understanable. I also added some comments. Its from the a normal users point of view, the administrator has more Add buttons at the left navigation menu, but I don't have these permissions.
Dashboards, BI, Reporting Oh My!
a dashboard should be a 10 second, 50,000 foot view of your project portfolio (like a CEO would look at):
is project X over budget?
is project Y missing a deadline?
were the weeks milestones hit?
reporting is a big part of this as well.
the dashboard needs to be completely flexible, im thinking panels may be a good way to accomplish this. but the weight of panels might be an issue....
i am really interested in this since PM and Business Intelligence is a large part of my job (60% Microsoft SSIS/AS/RS admin/developer, 40% Drupal Developer).
I think therefore I Drupal