BI Tool Case Study: Tableau Connector

by | Mar 10, 2020

Our customers frequently give us feedback regarding our products, which we take into account when creating product roadmaps and use to improve our apps. One of the other benefits of this feedback is that we come across interesting testimonies about how our users are utilizing our apps. In this blog series, we’ll deep dive into the use cases with our apps and share how they provide value to different organizations. 

The Client and Their Challenges

This week, we will discuss one of our clients who specializes in software development. They have offices in two different locations with five teams working on various projects, which are all at different stages in the development cycle. Depending on the workload and stage of each project, members will need to move between teams in order to allocate development resources as required. Not all members of a team are located in the same office, which means that they cannot benefit from quick, in-person communication.

A few months ago, the management team ran into a few problems. The first was that they needed a way to monitor all projects on a weekly basis so that they could communicate better with clients, assign resources, and plan cost flows between different projects. The second problem involved onboarding team members who transition between teams about the new project and its respective targets, as well as current status for reaching those targets. Lastly, there was an issue where project managers were not able to quickly address pain points on progress with developers during their weekly meetings.

Our Solutions

The first solution we came up with was implementing KPI best practices, which helped the organization establish measurable goals for both teams and individuals. To track these goals, the team used Jira reports and dashboards with a few simple gadgets, which enabled them to automatically create reports so that project managers and upper management were ready for meetings. They also started using templates in Confluence to document meeting notes and organize project requirements and timelines.

In addition to establishing KPI’s and setting them up with Jira and Confluence, the team used Tableau Connector for Jira so that they could transfer their data out of Jira and into Tableau. Because Tableau is a more robust business intelligence tool, this gave team members better visibility of metrics and reporting. They then were able to take relevant reports and embed them into Confluence templates using Tableau for Confluence Pro. This meant the reports automatically updated when anyone would make changes to a template page. Finally, the managers could embed the individual project reports from Tableau in the project home and status pages of Confluence so that clients and higher-level managers could get a quick overview of on-going projects.

Confluence and Jira are powerful tools, but they do not have the capabilities of business intelligence tools, which gives you deep insights into an organization’s data. This particular organization gained greater visibility into their project workflows by using integrations between Tableau, Jira, and Confluence, which in turn, helped them communicate better with customers, staff, and management regarding the team and were in alignment with project goals.

Need help with this kind of thing? Reach out and let us know, we would be happy to help.

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