When did this last happen to you? Your Confluence layout is too boring and therefore you usually lose track of things quickly? You work with your colleagues on a project with multiple tasks and only notice when hitting the save button that the colleague has already completed the task?
Especially in self-organizing teams with several staff members, working students and interns, misunderstandings are common, because when using the default Confluence theme, information might be all over the place. Lots of information, such as news concerning the team (new colleague), coordination work (next team event), the technical knowledge exchange (tutorials, process flows) or approved vacations within the team and much more are easily lost in the daily work routine.
How can this situation be avoided?
→ A team dashboard enables all important organizational and technical information to be stored in one place in a structured manner. In this article, we’ll show you how to build the best team dashboard for you.
SOLUTION
For our team dashboard we now create our own space in Confluence. (In this example we use the app Lively Theme. This does not change the basic functionalities of Confluence, but facilitates the adjustments and offers more possibilities.)
The team should agree beforehand on what concrete information should be displayed on the shared dashboard. In this example the team agreed upon these features: welcome message, vacation, team blog, activity overview of the individual people and a clearer menu view for an improved findability of the individual sub-topics were agreed upon.
SCREEN BACKGROUND VIEW DURING PROCESSING
ADVANCED MENU OF SINGLE THEMES
Example for more clarity within the dashboard (Widget Macro)
An expanded menu with icons provides more structure within all topics that affect the team. With just one click you are in the topic area you are looking for. The icons also visualize the contents of this area. Through a dropdown option, the respective subtopics can also be listed, additionally to the icons, the Widget Top Color can also be customized. If you would like to insert a menu with “Short-Cuts”, it might look like this:
The five options which are listed below will help you to structure the information in your team.
1. TEAM CALENDAR
In order to optimally visualize which team member is available (in no meeting, call or otherwise), a team calendar can be integrated. It can also display the company’s available meeting rooms or special appointments that apply only to the team.
2. TEAM BLOG
In the next step, if an additional box is inserted to show the most recent blog posts, no information that needs to be shared with the team through a new blog post is lost. Through a meaningful title and a blog post image you can see at a glance on which topic the entry focuses.
3. WELCOME AREA
The Welcome section offers non-team-internal employees, who use the team dashboard, a great overview. This can contain the tasks for which the team is responsible, contact persons and other relevant information. This saves time and avoids unnecessary requests to the team.
4. HOLIDAY OVERVIEW
The holidays of all team members can be clearly displayed in an additional area. This has the advantage of facilitating collaboration on deadline compliance, holiday replacement, and so on.
5. ACTIVITIES OVERVIEW
To avoid duplicate tasks, the activity overview helps to keep track of the current actions of other members. New items in the activity overview are displayed in chronological order as users update their Confluence pages. In addition, the activity overview can be used by team leaders to see the tasks of team members at a glance.
Where to go now?
- Download Lively Theme for Confluence from the Atlassian Marketplace and leave a review.
- Read the Lively Theme documentation and learn more about the app’s features.
- Visit the Atlassian Community to ask questions.
- If you have an issue with Lively Theme functionality, have a look at our Service Desk.
- Contact us at support@livelyapps.com
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