Project Dashboards: A Comprehensive Guide

Sometimes managing complicated projects and their dependencies can make you feel like you’re lost at sea. A project dashboard is like your map and compass, helping you navigate and reach the shore. Whether it’s an Excel dashboard built from scratch or a pre-built template from a project management platform, project dashboards are a huge help in managing any project.

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If you’re an individual or organization struggling to create a more organized workflow, then this article is for you. We’ll explain everything there is to know about project management dashboards — what they are, how to build them and the best platforms for building them. Let’s dive in!

Article Roadmap

• What Is a Project Dashboard?
• Types
• How To Create a Project Dashboard
• Top Project Management Dashboards
• Next Steps

What Is a Project Dashboard?

A project dashboard is a data interface that allows you to visually understand, monitor and track a project through every stage, from conception to completion. It presents data and insights about projects and dependencies in an easy to read format, and enables you to monitor your progress, as well as crucial key performance indicators (KPIs), in detail.

You can build a project dashboard from a template, or create something custom from scratch. Most organizations use specialized project management software with pre-built dashboard templates. But project management dashboards can be built using tools like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets too.

Elements of a Project Dashboard

Whether you’re using Excel or PM software, a project management dashboard often has these elements.

• Activity Tracking: Activity tracking helps you see the projects assigned to different people within your team. It shows ongoing and scheduled tasks, deadlines and the progress being made on different milestones.
• Progress Reports: Reporting features add accountability to your project management dashboard, ensuring proper tracking and monitoring of project and task progress. Simple visual tools like bar graphs and charts show individual and team progress, giving you a comprehensive view of where things are.
• Budget Tracking: Every project has a budget, and overspending can be detrimental to your organization’s bottom line. Budget tracking allows you to see your allocated budget, the amount being spent on different tasks, and whether you’re over or under budget.
• Time Tracking: Time tracking allows you to see how much time is being spent on the individual parts of the project. You can also use it for performance management and identify efficient team members.
• Resource Tracking: Resource tracking monitors the various team members available to you and measures the tasks or estimated time associated with their work. This helps you forecast shortages or surpluses, spread assignments out so your people aren’t overloaded and make appropriate decisions.

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Types

Different types of projects necessitate different project dashboards. For example, a content production team will have a very different dashboard from that of an agile web development team. Let’s take a look at some different types of project dashboards and how they work.

Agile Project Dashboard

What Is Agile Project Management?
Agile project management is a methodology, based on iterative development, used by agile teams. It’s most commonly used by software development teams to continuously produce new versions of software, incorporating customer feedback to improve each new iteration. The focus of agile development is to produce results continuously rather than as a one-and-done project.

Agile Project Dashboards
Agile project management software, like Jira, usually offers a variety of dashboards suitable for agile development. Here are some of the different types:

• Scrum Board: Scrum is an agile methodology that relies on sprints, or cycles of work planned with the goal of completing specific tasks. Tasks are picked from a list of backlog items, or things that need to be done, and, once tasks are allocated to each team member, the sprint begins. Once the sprint is over, the team picks a new list of tasks and the process begins again. Scrum boards are used to visualize the work that needs to be done in each sprint. The scrum project dashboard can include statuses like “to do,” “in progress,” “for review” and “done.”
• Kanban Board: Kanban boards don’t rely on sprints or backlogs. Instead, all tasks sit in a “to do” column and are picked up and completed continuously whenever possible. Kanban uses columns to differentiate the various phases of a project or task. Teams have pre-decided limits on how much work they can take at a time to prevent overload.

Lean Project Dashboard

What Is Lean Project Management?
Lean project management refers to the application of lean principles to project management. The five lean principles are:

• Identifying value and eliminate waste
• Mapping the value stream
• Creating flow
• Establishing pull
• Improving continuously

Lean project management originates from lean manufacturing principles, a set of rules used by Toyota to match production to demand. These principles were developed in response to production issues faced by Japanese companies due to the after-effects of World War II and the lack of space for building large factories.

The focus of lean manufacturing is to produce continuously and respond to demand while avoiding wasteful surpluses.

In lean project management, wasteful activities are eliminated. Teams pursue activities that generate maximum value and create a continuous workflow to minimize wasted time. They also work in response to demand, and let market demand create the pull for the work rather than pushing through work irrespective of demand.

Lean Project Dashboard
A lean project dashboard makes use of lean principles to identify tasks that create value and tasks that waste resources. It also works to create a coherent and continuous flow of work to ensure value is created and then promptly delivered to the end user. Kanban boards are popular tools for lean project management since they enable users to visualize the workflow and get a top-down view of tasks and their statuses.

Waterfall Project Dashboard

What Is Waterfall Project Management?
Waterfall project management is the traditional mode of project management. It’s a linear progression methodology that consists of predefined project phases which take place one after the other. Each new phase begins once the previous one has ended and been approved. This kind of project dashboard is ideal for one-time projects that need a defined plan to produce a final result.

Waterfall Project Dashboard
A waterfall project dashboard needs to clearly define the different phases of the project, its timeline and various dependencies. It also needs to have collaboration tools to enable teams to communicate about project details and keep progress on target.

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How To Create a Project Dashboard

So, how do you create a project dashboard? The simplest way is to use a template from a project management app like ClickUp or Jira. The more involved way is to use a program like Excel to create a custom project dashboard. Let’s look at both these methods.

Creating a Project Dashboard in Excel

First, let’s go over the more involved way — creating a project dashboard in Excel from scratch.

Step 1: Import Data
The first step is to import relevant project data into Excel. You can do this manually or you can import data from a source. Click on the Data tab from the Get Data column choose your data source of choice. Import data from the source.

Step 2: Create Pivot Tables
Once the raw data has been imported, you’ll need to tabulate it in a coherent fashion with pivot tables. Click on the Insert > Pivot Table > New Worksheet.

Step 3: Filter, Analyze and Audit Data
Once you have created your pivot table, you will need to select the fields you want to see and segregate them into rows and columns.

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Step 4: Determine Visuals
To make quick sense of your data, you will need visuals and charts. The easiest way of converting your pivot table into a chart is by selecting any cell within the table, clicking on the tab Pivot Table Analyze > Pivot Chart and then selecting charts that make the most sense for your project dashboard.

Step 5: Customize and Refine Visuals
Customize your visuals and add more charts as needed. You can also add slicers and timelines by clicking on Pivot Table Analyze > Add Slicer/Add Timeline. This allows you to filter and view specific data and timelines more easily.

Pre-Built Project Dashboard Templates

The Excel method is fairly involved and the project dashboard you get can be fairly limited, which is why it’s often easier and more efficient to rely on project dashboard templates provided by PM software vendors. Let’s look at some examples of these templates and how they work.

Single Project Management Dashboard
Let’s look at this project dashboard template from monday.com for individual projects. This is perfect if you’re looking to create a dashboard for a one-time project with set milestones and deadlines.

The dashboard includes different views, like Gantt charts, kanban views, table views and more. You can get a complete overview of the project and its individual tasks, including who they’re assigned to, priority levels, due dates and timelines.

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Construction Project Tracking Dashboard

Another project dashboard template from monday.com exemplifies how dashboards can be adjusted for industries as well — this one is specially designed for construction project tracking. This dashboard allows you to track and monitor the completion of milestones for various construction necessities, like permits, foundation, framing, electrical and more.

It also incorporates multiple views to match the requirements of the project. You can also set up automations for communications like emails and updates on task completion.

Content Calendar
Content calendars are used by content teams to track content production and publication. This content calendar template from ClickUp includes multiple views, like calendar, list, timeline and board views. to manage various parts of the content lifecycle.

It also includes pre-built statuses like “writing,” “approval,” “published” and “update required.” You can add additional custom statuses according to your needs.

IT Service Management Dashboard
ITSM teams need a consistent workflow to deal with time-sensitive support requests and incident management. This ITSM project dashboard template from Jira is made specially for IT support teams. It allows teams to see support requests that are active in their queue, including their statuses and history. You can also track changes that have been made, get alerts for new service requests and access the knowledge base.

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Top Project Management Dashboards

So, you’re looking to build a project management dashboard from a template? The simplest way of doing that is signing up with a project management app and then using their pre-built templates.

The ocean of options out there can be daunting. That’s why, for your convenience, we’ve listed the top three project management software for dashboards, according to our data. You can also check out our project management software buyer’s guide for more detailed insights.

ClickUp

ClickUp is a cloud-based project management solution that allows users to schedule, track and manage their projects in a systematic manner. The platform allows you to create customizable dashboards for multiple projects using a drag-and-drop interface. It also offers a range of pre-built dashboard templates to get you started.

ClickUp also offers a variety of views for workflow management, including Gantt charts, kanban boards, mind maps and list views.

monday.com

monday.com uses a visual, collaborative approach to help teams manage a range of different projects. You can create centralized dashboards to view all of your project information and data. You can also customize the dashboard and add the modules you want using widgets. monday.com also allows you to set project baselines, milestones and timelines.

Smartsheets

Smartsheets is a cloud-based project management system that allows organizations to plan, schedule, track and collaborate on projects. It features widget-based customizable dashboards that are easy to use and configure. You can use the project dashboards for time tracking, expense tracking, business health checks and viewing project statuses. You can also view activity logs to keep track of project progress.

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Next Steps

If you’re looking to create a project dashboard from a template but not sure what tool to use, check out our free comparison report to find out how top project management solutions stack up.

We hope this guide helps you and your team achieve maximum productivity in your next project. What do you think are some must-haves in a project dashboard? Share your insights with us in the comments!