PMO dashboard in Jira: what to put on it

A PMO dashboard is a single live view of every project's cost, schedule, scope, risks and decisions. In Jira, it sits next to the work itself, so the steering committee reads the same numbers the project team updates each day.

Most PMOs build this view by hand. A project manager exports status, pastes it into a deck, and the deck is out of date before the meeting starts. A dashboard that reads from Jira removes that step.

What a PMO dashboard has to show

The audience is the people answerable for the money: sponsors, portfolio managers and the PMO lead. They ask four questions about each project, and the dashboard should answer all four without a conversation.

• Is it on budget? Spend to date against the approved budget, with earned value so a project that has spent 50% and delivered 30% shows up early.
• Is it on schedule? Planned against actual progress, shown as an S-curve rather than a list of dates.
• Has the scope moved? Work packages added, removed or re-estimated since approval.
• What could hurt it? The open risks and the decisions waiting on someone.

What to leave off

Ticket counts, velocity and sprint burndown belong to the delivery team. They answer whether the team is shipping, and Jira already shows them. Putting them on a PMO dashboard crowds out the funding questions and invites the steering committee to manage the sprint.

One row per project, one page per portfolio

Start with a portfolio table: one row for each project, with a health status for cost, schedule, scope and risk. A sponsor should be able to find the project in trouble within ten seconds. Each row then opens the project's own dashboard with its registers for risks, decisions and work packages.

Derive the health status from rules written down in advance. If red means the forecast cost exceeds budget by a set percentage, every project is judged the same way, and the argument in the meeting moves from whose colour is right to what to do about the red.

Run the meeting from the dashboard

Open the dashboard at the start of the steering committee and walk the portfolio table from the worst row down. Record each decision against the project in the same place. The next meeting starts from the decision log, not from a memory of what was agreed.

Where Tollgate fits

Tollgate is a project and portfolio dashboard for Jira Cloud. It tracks cost, schedule, scope and risk for each project, with earned value, S-curves and registers for risks and decisions. It is free for up to 10 users, then priced per user through the Atlassian Marketplace and billed on your Atlassian invoice.

To see a steering committee run from the dashboard, book a 30-minute demo. You can also read how the dashboard works on the How it works page, or the guide to Jira portfolio management.