Prioritize and Complete Agile Projects with Embedded Analytics
Introduction
Many companies’ departments have continued to struggle with managing day-to-day operations, gaining experience and improving their operations, transforming their raw data into meaningful action, and making decisions with confidence. Many departments can now use embedded analytics to make a difference in identifying and understanding a team’s strengths and weaknesses, guiding leaders’ decisions.
Embedded analytics helps companies to dominate data within their organizations to attract more customers and be more competitive. In this blog, I will give an overview of embedded analytics and how Bold BI will help improve the quality of business in agile department.
What is embedded analytics?
Embedded analytics is integrating analytical solutions and data visualization capabilities into a software application’s user interface to improve data comprehension and usability. Bold BI helps you easily embed an analytics solution into your everyday work applications using a JavaScript SDK and server application. It also enables you to reduce dependency on IT teams and delivers all the insights you need to improve organizational and workforce outcomes.
Benefits of embedded analytics in an agile department
Embedded analytics help an agile department through:
- Effective workflow management.
- Improved team effectiveness and performance.
- Improved customer satisfaction.
- Better prioritization and faster completion of projects.
Effective workflow management
Embedded analytics makes work more efficient by enabling managers to track work progress using key metrics such as bug status, planned work hours, utilized work hours, team roles, and overall task completion rate. These metrics help key decision makers monitor task statuses and project completion times. Managers can identify slow-moving projects and help teams take necessary steps to complete the project within the timeline. This will help them approach the market as fast as possible, which in turn enables the company to gain more profit.
Improved team effectiveness and performance
With the help of embedded analytics, project managers and employees can track their work performance using metrics such as total worked hours, scope changes, incompleted tasks by project and priority, and tasks by type. Analyzing these metrics, managers know how much time their employees took to complete all work. This will help them identify well-performing and underperforming employees. It will also help them quickly identify work-related problems affecting employees and respond positively to improve performance, which will help improve product quality.
Improved customer satisfaction
Customer feedback is important to every business. Deploying embedded analytics will help administrators track customer satisfaction metrics such as customer satisfaction score, average response time, net promoter score, passives, and detractors. Examining these metrics helps managers observe any sudden changes in customers’ scores. An increase in the average score is favorable, while a decrease is unfavorable for the company. So, the company will work hard to maintain the positive average score and address the problems resulting in a decreasing score. These metrics will make the company aware of issues earlier, which will help them be solved faster, thus providing a positive experience to customers.
Better prioritization and faster completion of projects
Embedded analytics helps you view the importance of tasks completed using key metrics such as task by priority, incomplete tasks by project and priority, and bug status by priority. Looking at these metrics will speed up project completion time. It will help managers to identify tasks they should start working on. It will also help them recognize individuals who complete high-priority tasks faster and those who took more time in previous sprints so they can assign tasks considering team members’ strengths.
Completing high-priority tasks faster will help the company approach the market faster, gain more customers, and gain a competitive advantage over its peers. An increase in the number of customers will increase the sales amount and income of the company.
How to embed analytics tools into agile apps
Let’s see how analytics can be embedded into your agile web applications. Bold BI helps you embed your dashboards in 18 web platforms, including React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, VueJS with Go, and VueJS with Core. In this blog, I am going to explain how to embed dashboards in your ASP.NET MVC applications. Consider a scenario in which your agile department has a web app like the one shown in the following image.
You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself. Follow these steps to embed your dashboard successfully.
Prerequisites
Download and install the Bold BI Server on your local machine and create an enterprise-grade dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment instructions here.
Step 1: Create an ASP.NET MVC application.
To successfully embed a dashboard in your application, first, you need to have an application. Open Microsoft Visual Studio and click New Project. Then choose ASP.NET MVC Web Application, enter a project name, and click OK.
Step 2: Configure embed properties.
After the ASP.NET MVC web application is created, you need to create a Model class called EmbedProperties under Models and provide the dashboard root URL, site identifier, environment, user email, and embed secret.
RootUrl : Bold BI dashboard server URL. Example: http://localhost:58094/bi.SiteIdentifier : For Bold BI, it should follow the format `site/site1`. For Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, it should be an empty string.Environment : Your Bold BI application environment. If using Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, you should use `cloud`. If using Bold BI, you should use `enterprise`.apiHost : An ASP.NET Core application would be run on http://localhost:5000/, which needs to be set as `apiHost`.
Step 3: Generate an embed secret.
You have to set the EmbedSecret for authentication. You can get the embed secret from the Bold BI Server. Then, navigate to the Settings icon in the left navigation bar and click the Embed tab. Click Enable embed authentication and then click Generate Secret to generate the embed secret. On clicking the button, a secret key will be generated, and you can paste it into the application. To learn how to do this in more detail, you can refer to this documentation link.
Note: Save the secret key, as it cannot be retrieved again. If you do not save it, you will have to generate a new one using the Reset Secret option.
Step 4: Create authorization server.
You need to implement an authorization server in the ASP.NET MVC application to get authenticated before embedding the dashboard from the Bold BI Server. You can also configure the single sign-on (SSO)-based authorization server, which is an authentication endpoint that enables users to securely authenticate multiple applications using unique embed secrets. This prevents the need for the user to log into different applications separately.
Step 5: Create a Bold BI instance.
Finally, create a Bold BI instance to load the dashboard using a JavaScript file. Reference required script files and CSS files in the HTML pages.
Step 6: Run the application to embed the dashboard.
After successfully creating the ASP.NET MVC application, you need to run it. It will be launched successfully with the dashboard details. Finally, you can that see the dashboard created in the Bold BI Server is embedded in your web application.
To learn more about embedding dashboards into your applications, please refer to this blog. You can also download the sample codes mentioned in all these steps from our documentation.
Bold BI’s agile solution dashboard examples
Sprint management dashboard
Embedding a sprint management dashboard lets you track story points and tasks in each sprint using key metrics like sprint velocity and scope changes. This helps you manage your sprint efficiently and complete the sprint on time.
Key metrics and KPIs
Sprint velocity: Shows planned and completed story points by sprint.
Tasks by type: Shows total planned and completed task count by type: bug, story, and technical blog.
Scope changes: Shows scope changes by sprint. Story points planned, added and removed in each sprint are showcased.
Completed story points over time: Shows the trend of completed story points in a day.
Incomplete tasks by project and priority: Shows the number of incomplete tasks by project and priority.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the sprint management dashboard demo.
Team management dashboard
Embedding a team management dashboard helps you examine important KPIs such as the overall task completion rate. Tracking these metrics lets you manage your team’s resources properly, utilize your workforce efficiently, and approach the market sooner.
Key metrics and KPIs
Team roles: Shows the composition of the team by member roles.
Planned vs. actual task completion by project: Shows a comparison of the planned and actual completion percentage of tasks by project.
Total utilized work hours: Shows the overall utilized work hours compared to the planned work hours.
Task summary by resource: Shows the task summary of each resource with planned tasks, closed tasks, closed task completion percentage, and the utilized work hours percentage.
Planned hours vs. utilized hours by resource: Shows the comparison of planned work hours and utilized work hours by resource.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard demo, refer to the Team management dashboard example.
Customer Satisfaction Dashboard
Embedding the Customer Satisfaction Dashboard helps managers monitor customer satisfaction, including metrics for their satisfaction scores, average response time, and more. Using insight gleaned from these visualizations, team leads can improve areas where they are lacking and respond to queries quickly, which increases customer satisfaction.
Key metrics and KPIs
Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) over month: This shows how satisfied customers are with support they have received, expressed as a percentage, for support types such as incident and forum.
Customer effort score: Shows the amount of effort a customer had to exert to use a product or service.
Net promoter score: Measures customer experience by how likely satisfied customers are to recommend the product to others.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Customer Satisfaction Dashboard demo.
Release management dashboard
Embedding a release management dashboard lets you learn about metrics and KPIs such as start date, release date, and total worked hours, which help you to plan upcoming releases, work based on priority, and enhance product development.
Key metrics and KPIs
Summary by component: Shows planned and completed story points for each component along with completion percentage.
Tasks by priority: Shows the total planned and completed task count by priority: low, medium, and high.
Release status: Shows task count and the proportion currently in each status.
Completed story points by sprint: Tracks completed story points by sprint.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard demo, refer to the release management dashboard example.
Defect management dashboard
Embedding a defect management dashboard helps you track key metrics such as defect density, defect gap percentage, and escaped defects. By monitoring these metrics, employers can easily spot the defects in their projects, monitor them efficiently, and improve their employees’ effectiveness.
Key metrics and KPIs
Defects by project: Shows the comparison of total created bugs and resolved bugs by project. Click on the bar to see the defect count by component using drill-down.
Defects cycle time: Shows the defects cycle time by planned and actual bug fix time over the past six months.
Defects by type: Shows the composition of total defects by category.
Defects by status: Shows the composition of total defects by current task status.
Defects by reporter: Shows the reported defects count for each type of reporter.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the defect management dashboard demo.
Conclusion
Bold BI helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails, and more, seamlessly. It will help you save time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your applications, refer to this blog and our help documentation.
I hope you now have a better understanding of Bold BI and how it will help agile teams to be more successful. You can create a dashboard as you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 130+ data sources.
Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free 15-day trial and create more interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support questions.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on January 28, 2022.
