Increase Project Efficiency and Maximize ROI with Embedded Analytics
Introduction
Thoroughly planning a project enables better management by clearly defining objectives, anticipating risks, preparing strategies to mitigate risks, and budgeting time and resources appropriately. Planning also gives project managers an opportunity to brainstorm and share ideas that could speed up the project’s completion, improve the project’s volume of output, and increase the return on investment in the project. By embedding a project overview dashboard in your business’s app, you will gain insights into key indicators that will allow you to identify bestselling and trending products and services, pointing you toward areas worth investing in and helping you make wise choices that lead to greater profitability.
In this blog, I am going to explore the following subtopics:
- What is embedded analytics?
- Benefits of embedded analytics in project management.
- Bold BI’s Project Overview Dashboard example.
- How to embed analytical tools into project overview apps.
What is embedded analytics?
Embedded analytics is the integration of 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. This helps IT teams to monitor the analyzed data and deliver all the insights you need to improve organizational and workforce outcomes.
Benefits of embedded analytics in project management
Embedded analytics helps project managers make the best decisions possible for each project and ensure risks are mitigated before the company incurs a serious loss. I will discuss the following benefits of embedded analytics in project management:
- Increase profitability and productivity.
- Increase customer retention rate.
- Identify new opportunities and market trends.
- Improve decision-making.
Increase profitability and productivity
Embedded analytics helps balance a company’s work by tracking metrics such as tasks, total projects, task completion rate, and more. By analyzing these metrics, product managers will know how much work is left to complete in each project, total projects that have yet to start, and the number of resources needed for the completion of each project. Through proper planning, managers ensure that the work is delivered within the expected timeline and within the planned budget. This reduces resource wastage, avoids delays in delivery, evades production on unnecessary projects, and eliminates extra spending on the project, all while increasing the speed of the project, the volume of the project’s output, or both. As a result, the company increases its profitability and revenue. By doing stellar, timely work, the company is likely to attract new clients.
Increase customer retention rate
Embedded analytics helps many companies achieve high customer retention rates. By tracking the most popular projects and other projects metrics, companies better understand their customers’ buying trends and interactions with their products, guiding the company to what keeps customers happy. From here, the company can maintain its successful projects and efforts to keep its customer base. Going a step further, managers and workers can use embedded analytics to see how their customers interact with and present the company’s brand and use that information to attract more customers.
Identify new opportunities and market trends
Embedded analytics helps guide a company to better sales and marketing opportunities for projects and products. By tracking metrics like most popular products, managers know which products to analyze to figure out what makes them perform the best in the market and ensure that those features are clearly established in the identity of the products. By also knowing which products are the least popular, managers can direct teams to implement more desirable features in the products to boost their marketability.
Improve decision-making
Making the best decisions is the most important part of a project manager’s role. Their decisions in the planning phase predetermine whether tasks will be completed at the right time. By monitoring metrics such as planned and completed tasks by project, planned and completed tasks by date, and incomplete and overdue tasks by project, managers can calculate the total tasks that team members are likely to complete within a given timeline, and divide work on new projects accordingly. Managers can take action to ensure projects are completed on time, such as encourage poor-performing employees to work with a mentor to do better work, assign tasks based on the skills and knowledge needed for the particular work, provide the resources necessary to complete the task, and distribute tasks based on priority. This helps team members avoid unnecessary delays in their work and achieve their goals.
Bold BI’s Project Overview Dashboard
The Bold BI Project Overview dashboard example, created using Asana integration, helps project leads and managers track each project’s status with metrics such as total resources; overall task completion percentage; completed, incomplete, and overdue tasks by project; estimated and actual hours by project; and task summary. These metrics can be broken down by project, date, and assignee.
Key metrics and KPIs
- Total projects.
- Task completion rate.
- Tasks
- Planned vs. completed tasks by project.
- Task count by project.
- Tasks by completion status.
- Incomplete tasks by assignee.
- 5 most popular projects.
- Incomplete and overdue tasks by project.
- Planned vs. completed tasks by date.
- Estimated vs. actual hours by project.
- Task summary.
Total projects
This number card shows the total number of projects for the company. Knowing this helps project managers distribute resources appropriately.
Task completion rate
This number card shows the measure of tasks completed against the total number of tasks, including defect correction.
Tasks
This KPI card shows the number of tasks that have yet to be completed and the number of those that are overdue. This helps project managers set appropriate task priorities.
Planned vs. completed tasks by project
This bar chart compares the planned and completed tasks in each project. It helps leaders determine what kinds of resources and how much are needed to complete a project.
Task count by project
This bar chart shows the overall task count by project. By examining these numbers alongside the number of employees on the team, managers will be able to distribute work appropriately.
Tasks by completion status
This doughnut chart shows the breakdown of task statuses: complete, incomplete, and overdue. Based on status, managers can better allocate team members to complete outstanding tasks.
Incomplete tasks by assignee
This column chart shows each assignee’s incomplete tasks. It allows team leads to identify which employees may need assistance to complete their work on time.
Most popular projects
This pie chart shows the top five projects based on likes, determining the most popular projects.
Incomplete and overdue tasks by project
This bar chart shows unfinished and past due tasks for each project. With this information, team leads can determine whether the current resources provided are enough to complete a project, or whether the currently assigned team members have the right skills for the job. This helps managers better prepare their teams for future projects.
Planned vs. completed task by date
This spline chart compares the number of planned and completed tasks by date. It helps project managers determine whether tasks are on track to be completed on time.
Estimated vs. actual hours by project
This column chart compares the planned work hours and utilized work hours for each project. It helps managers provide an accurate estimate for how long it will take to complete the project.
Task summary
This grid shows the task details like task name, project name, status, assignee, likes, hearts, due date, and notes. This in-depth information on different projects helps managers determine what needs to be done on a granular level.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Project Overview Dashboard example.
How to embed analytics tools into an information technology apps
Let’s see how analytics can be embedded into IT web applications. Bold BI helps you embed dashboards in more than 18 web app platforms, including React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, Vue with Go, Vue with ASP.NET Core, and more. In the remainder of this blog, I am going to explain how to embed dashboards into your Angular applications. Consider a scenario where your IT department has a website like the one shown in the following image.
Prerequisites
Download and install the Bold BI server in your local machine and create a dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment steps here.
Step 1: Create an Angular application
To successfully embed a dashboard in your application, you first need to create an Angular application. Create a new Angular project in Visual Studio Code and add the necessary TS files to the project as shown in the following image.
For more guidance, refer to the sample code in the Bold BI documentation.
In this demonstration, the Angular application acts as a client, and an ASP.NET Core application acts as a server. You need to add several properties in the app.component.ts file as shown in the following table and screenshot.
RootUrl : Bold BI dashboard server URL. For example: http://localhost:5000/bi, http://dashboard. Syncfusion.com/bi.SiteIdentifier : For the Bold BI, it should be something like “site/site1.” For the 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.”User Email : The Bold BI server will use an email address to authorize the authorization server.
After adding these properties, we need to create the Bold BI instance.
Step 2: Create a Bold BI instance
After the Angular web application is created, you need to create a Bold BI instance to communicate between the server side (any web application) and the client side (Angular application), which allows us to embed a Bold BI dashboard in the Angular application.
Step 3: Create an authorization server to authenticate the Bold BI server
Every application that embeds a Bold BI dashboard or widget must be authorized with the Bold BI server. This authentication step requires sending confidential information to the Bold BI server, such as users’ email addresses, group data, and embed signature. So, in your server application, implement this authentication flow and provide the URL for connecting to your server in the Bold BI instance.
Step 4: Run the Angular application to view the embedded dashboard
In the Angular application, update the authorization URL and dashboard URL that were defined in the ASP.NET Core application. Finally, you can see that the dashboard created in the Bold BI server is embedded in your web application.
By following the previous steps, you can successfully embed your dashboard into your Angular application.
To learn more about embedding dashboards into your Angular applications, refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code used in the previous steps from our documentation.
Conclusion
Bold BI helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, Angular, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. It will save you time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your application, refer to this blog and our help documentation.
I hope now you have a better understanding of Bold BI and how it can help project managers be more successful. You can create a dashboard any way you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 130+ data sources.
To get started with Bold BI, schedule a free 15-day trial with our experts about creating business intelligence dashboards and any other features you would like to learn more about. 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 question.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on June 20, 2022.
