We're delighted to announce the TopLeft dashboard. The dashboard gives historical context on your workflows, summarizes the work on each Kanban board, and highlights bottlenecks in your teams.

This feature is being released with the Teams feature we announced last week.

The dashboard is organized by team. The boards for a user's teams are shown on the My Boards tab so it's easy to find the most relevant dashboards.

The dashboard for a team's main Kanban board shows the following info:

• Card volume trend: shows the daily count of cards on the board over the last four weeks, including the number of cards with warnings (orange labels), errors (red labels), and the total count of cards.
• Cards: the current count of warning, error, and total cards.
• Workflow delays: for each column on the board, the average length of time the cards have been in the column.
• Top swimlanes: for swimlane boards only, it shows the swimlanes with the most cards, as well as the count of warning and error cards.

For boards that aren't the default for the team, much simpler metrics are shown. The dashboard simply shows the current number of warning, error, and total cards on the board.

If TopLeft doesn't automatically choose the best board for a team to show the detailed metrics, the correct board can be selected on the team's configuration page.

The following links are shown for each board:

1. Open: navigates to the Kanban board
2. Open Mine: navigates to the board with filters already applied to show only the user's own work. Using this link can make the Kanban board load quickly even when the unfiltered board has many tickets and takes a long time to load.
3. Edit: navigates to the board edit page (shown to team managers and administrators only)

To get to the dashboard, simply click on the TopLeft or company logo in the main navigation menu.

Here's how the dashboard can help MSPs:

• For managers and dispatchers: shows how a team's ticket counts change over time, highlights boards with many error or warning cards, and indicates which columns or swimlanes could be bottlenecks.
• For engineers: helps to focus on the boards most relevant to the user and to ignore boards for other teams, shows on which boards the user's work appears, and makes it easy to open a board already filtered to show the engineer's own work.

Metrics are recorded nightly. They are not updated in real time. But we've been recording the metrics for a while already so you'll have useful data as soon as the feature is enabled.

Recommended Actions

We previously recommended creating at least two boards for each team:

1. a board with swimlanes for assigned engineers
2. a board without swimlanes

This was because there was not previously an easy way for an engineer to use the engineer swimlane board to see only his or her own work.

However, with the addition of the "Open Mine" button and a recent change to how swimlane boards appear when filtered, it's no longer necessary to have a separate engineer swimlane board and non-swimlane board. Engineers can view their own work very easily from the swimlane board by using the "Open Mine" button on the dashboard.

If your team has two boards, an assigned engineer swimlane board and a board without swimlanes, you can delete the board without swimlanes and have the engineers use the swimlane board for their own work.

Further Reading

Dashboard documentation is available in the knowledgebase.