About Dashboards
Dashboards allow you to display results from several existing reports, charts, and filters that you created on the top-level Reports tab (or the Reports list/tab of a specific entity). The dashboard acts as a container for reports, allowing you to provide meaningful sets of information to your dashboard consumers. With published dashboards (not yet supported), you can use dashboards as a way to provide information to dashboard consumers outside of PPM Pro.
You need to have at least one report to create a dashboard. See Using the Report Designer for information about creating reports. Using the Dashboard Designer walks you through the mechanics of creating dashboards while Stepping into Reports and Dashboards provides a more general overview as well as a specific example use case for how you can design, create, and manage effective dashboards. And finally, the Dashboards Cookbook provides specific examples, both of interest thematically as well as visually.
Why?
A dashboard is a container for one or more reports - add as many as you need. Dashboards also allow you to publish data (not yet supported) so that users who might not otherwise have permission to view the data can see it. Dashboards are always run with the permissions of the current user - each user will see only the data they are permitted to see. As a result, if the dashboard is run by other users, they could see different results depending on their permission to view certain types of data. For example, if the dashboard is owned by User A and run by User B, User B views the dashboard under her own permissions. This prevents users from seeing more data than permitted to see. If a user wants to share a dashboard under their permissions and show the data they are permitted to see, they will "publish" the dashboard and give access to that dashboard to others (publishing not yet available). A published dashboard is a snapshot of a dashboard whose content reflects the permissions of the dashboard owner. See Dashboard Teams and Permissions for more information.
How?
Creating a dashboard is as simple as opening the dashboard designer and dropping a few existing reports onto the Preview Pane, which immediately renders the dashboard. You can add or remove reports, as well as rearrange and dynamically resize them - the Preview Pane will update in real time. The Preview pane displays sample data so that its performance is snappy and you do not have to wait for rendering; viewing the dashboard with real data is just a button click away.
You can easily run a dashboard over different data or entity levels (scope), you can even give your users the ability to change the scope when viewing the dashboard. For example, you can run a project dashboard across the entire organization (organization scope or from the top level dashboards grid) or across a specific portfolio (portfolio scope or portfolio grid). Note that the same dashboard is re-purposed across scopes - no need to create separate dashboards for different entity targets. Filters are available based on the variable settings of each report component - these filters can be set-up to allow dashboard consumers to modify the default filters when viewing the dashboard.
Good to Know
- Any user can be given access to a dashboard. However, each user's report permissions determine which reports the user can access, so it is possible to share a dashboard where the user cannot see the report contained in the dashboard.
- If viewing a Gantt chart in a dashboard, remember that the chart is interactive. As such, settings - such as Color By field and legend, date range, selected columns - are part of the report definition but can be modified interactively (on the report output or on a component in a dashboard) on a per-user basis.
For more information see:
Dashboard Teams and Permissions
Working with the Dashboards List (Grid) Page
Planview PPM Pro Dashboards Enablement - Customer webinar showing dashboard capabilities, creation, publishing and management from start to finish (just under 1.5 hours)