Building Reports that Users Will Actually Use

Have you ever built a "perfect" dashboard only to realize that no one uses it? Have you spent weeks crafting a detailed report that was supposed to provide your customers with more context, but instead provided your support team with more customers?

Most of developers did it, for sure. The question is – how we improve the situation when users tend to skip or misunderstand charts and reports we share with them.

Maestro team, together with EPAM Syndicate Rule Engine (SRE) team, developed an interesting solution, based on a simple core idea. The numerous reports, charts, and dashboards should be addressed to the needs of specific user groups. This is how the idea of four-layer reporting was born:

  • Operational level reports – those representing the on the go changes and actions, and making it easy to track specific events and alerts.
  • Project reports – those covering the project-level statistics and allowing to find general project changes, trends, and responsible persons.
  • Department reports – those covering the trends and statistics by departments without need to process per-project or per-item data.
  • C-level reports – those that cover general enterprise statistics and data and provide an entry point to making strategic decisions.

However, even sounding simple, this approach faced some issues. For example, inaccuracies in numbers between layers, coming from different levels of detailing. This should have been faced  – and Dmytro Afanasiev, one of SRE key developers, with the team, found interesting approaches to personalizing the retrieved data, related to security and compliance checks.

Dmytro's the Before You Build Another Security Dashboard, Read this article on Medium gives deeper dive on both the problem and the solution which included adding Defect Dojo.

You can also find more about reports in Maestro in these posts:

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