Dashboards for specific contributors in RTC / CLM
Hi,
RTC gives the option to customize project and team dashboards. Based on what I have seen in the process configuration, you can predefine a default project and team dashboard. These can be used to customize, once the project area has been created, the different dashboards for the teams.
Now, the question... is there any way to provide dashboards for specific contributors? For example, having one dashboard for project managers with multiple tabs, another dashboard for developers, with multiple tabs and so on.
The only I can imagine right now is to provide 1 project dashboard with multiple tabs... similar to the JKE Banking dashboard with tabs for Requirements, Planning, etc. Is this the only way I have to deal with this if I do not want to define team dashboards?
I dived into the xml and noticed that there are some specific lines for dashboard's contributors, but cannot figure out where they are shown in RTC.
E.g.
<dashboard-template id="developer" name="Developer Dashboard" title="Developer Dashboard" type="contributor">
....
Thanks for ideas and clarifications,
--Claudia
RTC gives the option to customize project and team dashboards. Based on what I have seen in the process configuration, you can predefine a default project and team dashboard. These can be used to customize, once the project area has been created, the different dashboards for the teams.
Now, the question... is there any way to provide dashboards for specific contributors? For example, having one dashboard for project managers with multiple tabs, another dashboard for developers, with multiple tabs and so on.
The only I can imagine right now is to provide 1 project dashboard with multiple tabs... similar to the JKE Banking dashboard with tabs for Requirements, Planning, etc. Is this the only way I have to deal with this if I do not want to define team dashboards?
I dived into the xml and noticed that there are some specific lines for dashboard's contributors, but cannot figure out where they are shown in RTC.
E.g.
<dashboard-template id="developer" name="Developer Dashboard" title="Developer Dashboard" type="contributor">
....
Thanks for ideas and clarifications,
--Claudia
4 answers
Hi Claudia,
The snippet you've found in the process configuration is a relic from the 2.x personal dashboard templates which, back then, existed within project areas and were governed by that process. In 3.0, these dashboards were generalized into personal dashboards on the JTS, which can now be used for any application, not just RTC. The personal dashboard templates in process are no longer used, since personal dashboards are no longer associated with any project, but are application agnostic (there may be no RTC server at all in the deployment).
I need a bit of clarification - by "specific contributors" do you mean a single, specific user, that gets a tailored default personal dashboard based on their role? i.e., the dashboard is a personal one and not shared with anyone else, and each user with that role gets their own separate copy. Or did you mean that all the users with that role would share a single dashboard, which would be associated with that role, e.g. Project Managers' dashboard for Project ABC.
The snippet you've found in the process configuration is a relic from the 2.x personal dashboard templates which, back then, existed within project areas and were governed by that process. In 3.0, these dashboards were generalized into personal dashboards on the JTS, which can now be used for any application, not just RTC. The personal dashboard templates in process are no longer used, since personal dashboards are no longer associated with any project, but are application agnostic (there may be no RTC server at all in the deployment).
I need a bit of clarification - by "specific contributors" do you mean a single, specific user, that gets a tailored default personal dashboard based on their role? i.e., the dashboard is a personal one and not shared with anyone else, and each user with that role gets their own separate copy. Or did you mean that all the users with that role would share a single dashboard, which would be associated with that role, e.g. Project Managers' dashboard for Project ABC.
Hi Curtis, thanks for the response and clarification of the code I found.
What we really want to do is a "one stop shopping" where we can consolidate all the information from the different tools for a specific project. For example, consolidate a dashboard to contain relevant information from RTC, RRC and RQM. Of course this information can be consumed by the different roles in different ways, because they are interested in that information from different perspectives.
Having said that, we were researching if it was possible to have different dashboards so we could organize the information for each role (e.g. PM, developer, etc.), and provide that as part of the default process template. One way to "simulate" this could be using 1 project dashboard with multiple tabs (1 tab for each area, like requirements, planning, etc. similar to what you can see in the JKE Banking example), but the problem with that is that each tab might become huge containing lots of viewlets.
We noticed that RRC does not give you the ability to define default dashboards as part of the process template (or we were not able to find how you could do that), so we went to the RTC approach as the one stop shopping point.
Any ideas on the best way to achieve this objective? Is there any future change that may be we should look at and wait for that feature to make it easier?
Thanks in advance,
-- Claudia
What we really want to do is a "one stop shopping" where we can consolidate all the information from the different tools for a specific project. For example, consolidate a dashboard to contain relevant information from RTC, RRC and RQM. Of course this information can be consumed by the different roles in different ways, because they are interested in that information from different perspectives.
Having said that, we were researching if it was possible to have different dashboards so we could organize the information for each role (e.g. PM, developer, etc.), and provide that as part of the default process template. One way to "simulate" this could be using 1 project dashboard with multiple tabs (1 tab for each area, like requirements, planning, etc. similar to what you can see in the JKE Banking example), but the problem with that is that each tab might become huge containing lots of viewlets.
We noticed that RRC does not give you the ability to define default dashboards as part of the process template (or we were not able to find how you could do that), so we went to the RTC approach as the one stop shopping point.
Any ideas on the best way to achieve this objective? Is there any future change that may be we should look at and wait for that feature to make it easier?
Thanks in advance,
-- Claudia
RRC and RQM are currently working to provide their own project dashboards for the next release, and the goal is to have a consistent project dashboard solution across the products, i.e. they all work the same way. But it sounds like you want to combine information from the 3 products into a single dashboard. I can think of two possible solutions to this problem, although they are not implemented yet:
1) Lifecycle Project Dashboards
The Lifecycle project is the "umbrella" project that represents the 3 products' individual projects and is created from the LPA application. We have an enhancement to create a dashboard that is associated with it, though it's not planned for a release yet: https://jazz.net/jazz/resource/itemName/com.ibm.team.workitem.WorkItem/156517
2) Templated personal dashboards
Personal dashboards are not scoped to any application and can have viewlets coming from anywhere - whatever the user cares about. We are planning to allow proper templating where a user can select which template they want when creating their personal dashboards, which would likely get mapped to roles, e.g. "Tester's dashboard", or "Project Manager's dashboard". See: https://jazz.net/jazz/resource/itemName/com.ibm.team.workitem.WorkItem/63750
The disadvantage here would be that the dashboards would be separate and couldn't be used in status meetings where all users can follow along.
There have also been some requests for dashboards associated with specific roles, which might be a possibility here, though we still don't have a clear picture of how this one would work. https://jazz.net/jazz/resource/itemName/com.ibm.team.workitem.WorkItem/152825
Let me know if any of these approaches would be a long-term solution for you. In the short term, the best solution is probably what you're doing now, with multiple tabs on an RTC project dashboard. Having the added tabs doesn't add a lot of overhead if you don't open them. It just adds more noise to the UI that users may not care about.
1) Lifecycle Project Dashboards
The Lifecycle project is the "umbrella" project that represents the 3 products' individual projects and is created from the LPA application. We have an enhancement to create a dashboard that is associated with it, though it's not planned for a release yet: https://jazz.net/jazz/resource/itemName/com.ibm.team.workitem.WorkItem/156517
2) Templated personal dashboards
Personal dashboards are not scoped to any application and can have viewlets coming from anywhere - whatever the user cares about. We are planning to allow proper templating where a user can select which template they want when creating their personal dashboards, which would likely get mapped to roles, e.g. "Tester's dashboard", or "Project Manager's dashboard". See: https://jazz.net/jazz/resource/itemName/com.ibm.team.workitem.WorkItem/63750
The disadvantage here would be that the dashboards would be separate and couldn't be used in status meetings where all users can follow along.
There have also been some requests for dashboards associated with specific roles, which might be a possibility here, though we still don't have a clear picture of how this one would work. https://jazz.net/jazz/resource/itemName/com.ibm.team.workitem.WorkItem/152825
Let me know if any of these approaches would be a long-term solution for you. In the short term, the best solution is probably what you're doing now, with multiple tabs on an RTC project dashboard. Having the added tabs doesn't add a lot of overhead if you don't open them. It just adds more noise to the UI that users may not care about.