Absence Dashboard in Jira: Know Who’s Out of Office and Which Projects are Impacted

Mar 15

A project manager or team leader needs to have the ability to keep track of employee absences and their impact on staffing. Such information is crucial in determining whether your team can operate or if there will be any delays in delivering output as a result of absences. Fortunately, Jira allows you to create an absence and capacity planning dashboard for this purpose.

Out-of-Office Assistant for Jira and Custom Charts for Jira

In this guide, we'll create our dashboard using two Atlassian Marketplace apps: Resolution's Out of Office Assistant for Jira and Custom Charts for Jira. The Out of Office Assistant for Jira is useful for creating specific Jira Query Language (JQL) fields for absences. On the other hand, Custom Charts is the platform for reporting. Both apps work seamlessly to provide you with an intuitive staffing report. You need to install both apps to get started with building your absence dashboard.

Adding Charts to your Dashboard

The absence dashboard allows you to assess the impact of absences on your business. This lets you plan to work around your limitations.

Here are some examples of what data you can generate from an absence dashboard:

When creating a dashboard, we recommend including the following reports:

Team members who are currently out of the office
List of issues assigned to absent team members
A Search gadget for filtering data down based on issue type, status, assignee, etc.

Examples of Charts in the Absence Dashboard

1. Team Members Out of Office This Week Chart

This simple table shows who are not available to work on any given week and the number of projects they handle. Check the Out of Office User View to find out more about the exact dates when the team members will be absent and if anyone is covering them.

2. Issues with Assignees Out of Office This Week – Plus Quick Filters Chart

Custom Charts for Jira has an Issue List gadget that replaces the native Filter Results. This feature enables users to easily see key details about an issue.

In the example, the left table shows a list of issues whose owners are out of office. Knowing that the owners of those issues are absent, you will then be able to manage your expectations as to the progress of the issues. On the other hand, the right table with the filter Issues Due this Week allows you to see the issues due for the week with their specific due dates. This vital information helps you in planning whether you need to reassign the issues or just extend their deadline.

Moreover, you could also add a JQL field as this will help you understand when work for a specific issue will resume. For example, if you use assignee.outofoffice.until > endofweek(1), the result will show you a list of issues whose assignees will not be returning before the end of the week. This data is useful when making decisions about reassignments of issues.

3. Priority of Issues Assigned to Out-of-Office Users

In our example, each stacked bar represents the total number of issues assigned to each out-of-office user. Issues are then sorted by priority levels: low, medium and high. Using this chart, team leaders can easily see the number of issues that need to be prioritized and can plan with the team how to move forward in accomplishing these issues.

4. Impacted projects

An Impacted Projects chart might be helpful if you want to see how absences affect all projects. In our example, you can see that the App Factory project is 60% at risk because 12 of its issues were assigned to OOO users. If this project involves customer-facing deliverables, the team needs to prioritize them and possibly reassign them.

Moreover, using the same chart, you can also drill down into the specifics of the issues under each project to get more context. Simply click a specific segment on the pie chart to see the list of issues under that segment.

The Impact Projects chart comes in handy when it comes to checking the projects that are at risk because of absences. Leaders can use this information to weigh the importance of one project over another and determine which projects to prioritize or reassign to others users.

5. Story points at risk this sprint

Another vital OOO chart that you could add to your dashboard is the Story Points custom chart. In our example, you can see the number of story points assigned to the 3 OOO users for the current sprint. With 12 story points under Phil Terr, some of his tasks may end up incomplete. With this in mind, Phil Terr's team leader could then assess whether there is a need to reassign or just wait.

Moreover, Story Points custom charts can also give you insights on who among your team members overcommitted. You can then use this information to better plan your next sprint.

6. Team Members Going Out of Office Soon

A chart that shows the users who will be out of the office soon can help you plan in advance when assigning issues to your team members. If there are urgent issues under them, you could also reassign them to other users.

Conclusion

Our absence dashboard in Jira gives you a general overview of issues, sprints and projects attributed to your out-of-office team members. They can serve as a starting point for your discussions on prioritizing, reassigning and extending deadlines among others. You can also use them for future planning to improve your efficiency in meeting deadlines.