Create custom charts from your Pivotal Tracker data

When you create a Screenful dashboard, you get a nice set of charts pre-selected on your dashboard for Pivotal Tracker. You can configure charts according to your preferences and you can further tweak your charts using filters. The pre-selected charts provide you a fairly complete picture of the status of a project, big or small. 

But you don't have to stop there. You might need a specific piece of information, which is not captured by the any of the default charts. Then it's time to dig deeper into your data by creating a custom chart. 
 

Create your first custom chart

To create a custom chart, go to dashboard settings and click create custom chart at the bottom.

You'll be presented with a list options that allow you to choose what kind of chart to create. Let's assume you want to create a chart that shows the number of stories per story type in a given Pivotal Tracker project. In the chart settings, you'd select Task count as the metric and group the data by Storytype: 

These selections produce a chart as below:

In the chart settings, you can choose to show this chart with horizontal instead of vertical bars:

That gives you an overview of what types of stories and how many there are in your project. Instead of the story count, you could also choose to show e.g. the average cycle time. Here's the full list of metrics currently available for this chart. 

Slice & dice further with the stacked bar chart

To explore further, let's assume you want to see the number of stories completed per assignee. But instead of just the total, you'd like to see also a breakdown by story label. How many stories each individual completed and what kind of tasks they were?

To get an answer to that question, you can create a custom chart with Stacked bar chart selected as the chart type grouped by Assignee, which yields:

This chart shows the breakdown of stories completed per assignee. Hovering your mouse over a bar reveals the numbers per label:

You can create as many of these charts as you want, give them a suitable name, and place them on your dashboard. Custom chart comes with the same filtering and aggregation capabilities as any other chart in your Screenful dashboard.

Aggregate data from multiple Pivotal Tracker projects

Sometimes it can be hard to stay track of your work if your stories are scattered over multiple projects. With data aggregation feature, you can consolidate data from multiple Pivotal Tracker projects into one chart. 

You’ll find the new aggregation feature in the screen settings. Just go to any of your charts and click the settings icon, you’ll notice that there’s a new tab called Sources, which shows all the available projects.

To aggregate data from more than one data source, just select the projects you want to include. When you go back to your dashboard, you’ll see the same chart but now it’s combining data from all of the selected projects.

Use TV mode to rotate on a big screen

If you turn you dashboard into TV mode, your custom charts are included in the rotation:

TV mode is a special mode of UI that is optimized for viewing content in an office TV or big monitor. In this mode, excess UI elements are removed and the screen title and the board name are shown in a more visible font. That way, the UI will be more readable from distance. Auto-rotation is turned on so that a screen will automatically switch to another every two minutes. 

Pretty cool? More chart types will be added in the future. You can signup for a free trial to see how these charts look like with your own data.