In our 2022 Annual Review Stefan already mentioned it: we built the most expensive report in company history. But he didn’t tell the whole truth. In fact, we’ve done it more than once. It wasn’t just one report, but many reports. I can’t say exactly how many, as the number keeps growing.
📊 Dashboards, Dashboards, Dashboards, ...
How did this happen? You might be asking yourself at this point. Rightly so, I say! It’s quite simple: we’ve created a lake full of data from which we can generate all kinds of reports. We affectionately named the report on our project utilization rate the “Billable Capacity Dashboard.” There, we can see at a glance whether we are on track as a company and can respond in time to project peaks as well as phases of low utilization. Our CEOs love this dashboard.
For another dashboard, we were less creative. It’s simply called “Project Reporting,” but it’s no less important. Especially during project runtime, it provides us with crucial data and trends regarding development speed, helping us respond to potential issues in a timely manner.
👷🏼 Let's dig into details
But how does it all work? Now it gets really exciting! We built software that taps into various data sources at regular intervals, aggregates the data, and stores it in a database. These data sources are Clockodo (our time tracking tool), Tempo (we use this for our personnel planning), and Jira (that’s our project management tool). Once we have all the data we need, we format it to suit us. Unnecessary data is removed, and missing links are established. This way, we have quick access to the data that matters to us.
The cool thing about this software is that we are completely independent of the tools. If we decide to use a different tool for time tracking, or if a client wants us to work with their project management system, we just need API access for the respective tool to fetch the required data. A dedicated transformer brings the data into a uniform format, and we can start working with it.
Now we may have a mountain of data, but we can’t do anything with it yet. That’s where Metabase comes into play. It’s our BI tool of choice, with which we analyze this data and build our beautiful dashboards. With it, we can evaluate and display almost all the data that is important for our daily work. And if a client asks us for a specific KPI that we haven’t evaluated yet, it’s usually just a new query away in Metabase.
✉️ Get in contact
We all generate a huge amount of data every day, whether at work or in our personal lives. Do you also want to collect and analyze this data in one central place? Then contact us, and let’s make it happen together.
