Numbers to decide with, not to decorate.

How to use reports and dashboards in the follow-up meeting

A report is only worth it if it changes a decision. The simplest way to start is to tie each report to a question that comes up every week in the meeting. The numbers are fed by day-to-day work (statuses, dates, sprints, tickets and logged hours), so there's nothing to configure: just use Tasskee.

Step by step to build the routine

1. List the meeting's questions. "What's overdue?", "Who's overloaded?", "How much did we deliver this cycle?", "Are we spending more hours than planned?".
2. Link each question to a report. See the table below.
3. Start with the portfolio dashboard. It shows, on one screen, which projects are late, at risk or on track, with the owner of each.
4. Drill into the report only for what caught your eye. The dashboard tells you where to look; the report explains why.
5. Record the decision in the task. If the number revealed a problem, the outcome of the meeting is a task with an owner and a due date, not a loose comment.
6. Repeat every week, with the same script. Comparing with the previous cycle is where the report pays off.

Which report answers which question

Examples by type of company

Marketing agency in Porto Alegre

The partner opens the portfolio dashboard on Monday. Two client projects show up as at risk. She drills into the hours report and sees that the logged hours went over the estimate on both. The meeting's decision: renegotiate the scope of one and reinforce the other. For the financial side, see hours, invoicing and payment.

Building maintenance company in Campinas

The operations manager tracks the support dashboard: ticket volume and response deadlines. When the deadline starts to slip in a category, he redistributes before the complaint arrives. Tickets and the queue with deadlines feed this dashboard.

Software house in Florianópolis

The lead uses velocity and burndown to commit to the next sprint based on history, not optimism. The estimated vs. actual report calibrates the next round of estimates.

Best practices

• One report, one question. If nobody knows which decision the number supports, take it off the agenda.
• Keep statuses honest. A flow report is only as good as the discipline of moving the card when the work changes phase.
• Consistent time logging. Without logged time, there's no estimated vs. actual.
• Compare equal periods. One cycle against the previous one, not a short month against a long one.
• Show the dashboard, not the pre-packaged version. People who see the number in the system trust it more than a slide put together the night before.

Common mistakes

• Looking at the average when one forgotten task distorts everything. Prefer the median and percentiles.
• Holding the team accountable for the number instead of investigating the process that produces it.
• Building a parallel spreadsheet because "the report doesn't add up". Almost always the problem is the source data, and the fix should happen there.
• Drawing conclusions from a small sample, like a project with only a few tasks.

A 20-minute script for the meeting

Open the portfolio dashboard and spend five minutes on the projects at risk. Spend another five on the workload per person, redistributing whatever's needed on the spot. Dedicate five to the cycle report, like velocity or flow, and the last five to recording the decisions made as tasks. A follow-up meeting that ends with tasks created, each with an owner and a due date, usually lasts less and delivers more than one that ends in "let's look into that".

Plans and export

Start includes 6 basic reports. Pro has all 19 reports and the aggregated portfolio, team, organization and support dashboards. To take data to another system, the REST API and webhooks are available from Start.

Want a ready-made format for the weekly conversation? Use the weekly status report template. And if the meeting is about goals, the dashboards work together with goals and OKRs. Try Pro for 15 days, no card required, and see your team's numbers without building a spreadsheet.