Jira Reports for CEOs and Senior Management Working in Confluence

CEOs and senior management don’t normally work in Jira. They oversee everything from people and processes to profitability and strategic goals, and while Jira is great for tracking tasks, it’s hard to use it to track progress at the strategic level. Jira is for seeing the trees, not the forest.

But Confluence? Well, everyone’s in Confluence. It’s the company intranet and often substitutes for the office in these remote, distributed times.

Because CEOs and senior managers are responsible for monitoring the bigger picture, they need to see reports. The problem is, if they don’t work in Jira, how can they see Jira reports?

By seeing them in Confluence.

Reporting to the CEO in Confluence

Natively there are a handful of ways to add Jira reports to Confluence pages, although the charts macro is incredibly limited. You can make a pie chart, a created vs resolved issues line graph, or a table of two-dimensional stats, and you can’t do much with them.

You can also add separate reports on sprint health, sprint burndown, average age of issues, and others, but these are preconfigured charts without customization options. You can only see data across multiple Jira projects using a saved filter; none of the macros allow you to select multiple projects. Furthermore, if your Jira and Confluence cloud instances don’t have the same URL, most of the reporting macros won’t be available in your Confluence.

With the Atlassian Marketplace macro, Custom Jira Charts for Confluence, you have a lot more flexibility. To give the CEO and senior management a bird’s eye view of progress on multiple projects, you don’t have to worry about saved filters. You simply click on all the projects you want to report on, like so:

Then, you can create all kinds of charts, from bar charts to funnel charts, and change labels, descriptions, and colors, reorder data, and chart in two dimensions – all from the same macro.

The other big drawback of the native Jira reporting macros is that if your CEO or senior managers don’t have access to your Jira (which they may not if they don’t work in Jira), then whatever charts you show them in Confluence will be blank. Custom Jira Charts for Confluence comes with a feature called User Impersonation, which lets a Confluence user load Custom Charts onto a Confluence page using a Jira user’s account permissions. That way, your executives can see your charts.

Here are 2 examples of Jira reports that you could make to communicate progress to your CEOs and senior managers in Confluence.

1. Status of Issues Across all Projects in Jira

To create the 2D stacked bar chart above, we’re pulling in issues from the entire Jira instance, with the Chart By dropdown set to Project, and the Group By dropdown set to Status. We can see that almost half of the issues our teams are working on are complete. We can also see that 9% of the issues being worked on are at risk.

This breakdown gives CEOs and senior management direct visibility into the overall progress of work across all Jira projects. It also helps them understand the health of each department. We can see that most of the issues in the Software project are in the “Open” status. This overload of open issues could mean that the software team needs additional team members and can assist executives in making the decision to increase their hiring budget.

2. At Risk Issues by Customer

To create this pie chart, we’re pulling in Escalated issues using Jira Query Language (status=Escalated) from our Jira Service Management (JSM) project, with the Chart By dropdown set to the Organizations field that ships with JSM. We can see that way over half of the Escalated issues are issues submitted by the Bluth Corporation. This means that the Bluth Corporation could be at risk of stopping their services with us. Knowing this, senior managers can decide to focus a bit more on this customer in order to provide a better service and build trust.

What if CEOs want to make reports themselves?

Custom Jira Charts for Confluence isn’t just great for Jira teams seeking to report on progress about their projects to the CEO and senior management. It’s also great for CEOs who want to make reports themselves using Jira data. Perhaps they want to make an announcement in Confluence, and support it with a good-looking chart or graph.

As Custom Jira Charts for Confluence is the mirror image of the app used by Jira teams, Custom Charts for Jira, CEOs and senior managers have exactly the same powers to build whatever charts they want.

For example, a CEO who wants to announce that everyone’s getting a Christmas bonus might want to add a chart showing the company’s excellent financial performance over the year. They might also want to compare the year’s revenue to previous years and highlight the company’s growth.

The 1D Line Chart above represents the company’s total revenue for each year over the past 5 years. To create it, we’re pulling in issues from the Sales Team project, with the Chart By dropdown set to a custom date field called “Closed Date”. The team is using this field to track the date each deal closes. The Calculate dropdown is set to calculate the sum of a custom number field called “Revenue”, which the team is using to track the money made from each deal.

As we can see, the company has had substantial revenue growth from year to year. From 2021 to 2022, revenue almost doubled due to the hard work of the team. Clearly, they deserve a well-earned bonus!

For more information about Custom Jira Charts for Confluence, and how the app can bolster your company’s reporting to and by the CEO and senior management, get in touch. You can also try Custom Charts in our interactive reporting playground.