We know it's summer, but forget the beach for a moment…it’s worth it, we promise. Grab an iced coffee, crank up the AC, and get ready to dive headfirst into the latest GA (General Availability) features that can help you better align to the dual mandate of engineering leadership–delivering operational excellence and driving better business outcomes!
First up: Resource Allocation
Resource Allocation–Custom Fields, Enhanced Flexibility, and Insights Delivered Faster
The Resource Allocation dashboard is an invaluable tool for meeting the executive leadership side of the engineering leader's dual mandate. From a single view, you can quickly:
Visualize priorities and project investment by initiative, epic, or any other category
Translate resourcing decisions and engineering health to business impact
Forecast project delivery as a function of resourcing and other inputs (and make changes as needed)
That last point was a big driver for the enhancements covered below. In a nutshell, we’re making Resource Allocation more flexible in order to better suit the needs of every engineering organization–who all do things just a little bit differently.
Extending Business-Focused Visibility to Custom Fields and Labels
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data” - Sherlock Holmes
Mr. Holmes’ words could not be more true, especially when those theories impact resourcing decisions for key engineering projects. But here’s the thing about engineering: there isn’t really a lack of data, it’s just messy–thanks a lot Jira.
LinearB’s latest enhancement to Resource Allocation provides more reporting flexibility and enables you to gain visibility into how dev cycles are being spent in terms of actual currency–regardless of how you structure your project data. You can now see resource allocation data by custom fields and labels, as well as by epic, project, or team.
This improved reporting flexibility and consolidation of project data in a single location helps leaders:
See their strategic investments no matter how they’re categorized in Jira
Make better resourcing decisions with a complete set of data
Showcase engineering impact on the projects and initiatives that matter most to the business
Get Insights Your Way with the Resource Allocation Digest
Engineering leaders know that making tough calls and strategic, high-impact decisions is much easier (and yields better results) with the right data. Which is why it should always be at your fingertips.
We’re excited to announce the general availability of the Resource Allocation Digest–a customized report on key projects, initiatives, and resourcing decisions delivered right to your inbox.
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LinearB already makes it easy to surface the project delivery and resource allocation data that impacts the business. But logging into tools–however intuitive 😉–may not be everyone’s preferred working style…and we’re all about providing flexibility and freedom to do things your way.
With the new Resource Allocation Digest you can:
Prepare talking points for strategic meetings
Ensure you’re always up-to-date on high impact project trends
Confidently answer questions like “Can we prioritize this new initiative?”
All without ever having to sign into LinearB!
Enterprise customers can begin sending the Resource Allocation Digest now!
And if you haven’t seen Resource Allocation with LinearB, check it out!
Exclude Projects from Resource Allocation
Engineering data and insights that can help predict project delivery or showcase business impact are great. In fact, they’re foundational to LinearB’s approach to improving engineering organizations.
But you can have too much of a good thing. Don’t adjust your screens…everything is fine. While this may seem counterintuitive–especially to engineering leaders–there are occasions when having all your data on display isn’t in your best interest.
Based on customer feedback (please keep it coming!!), this recent enhancement to LinearB enables platform admins to remove certain projects from appearing on the Resource Allocation dashboard in LinearB through your organization settings.
This new feature:
Alleviates concerns about sensitive project data being displayed
Enables leaders to focus on a key area of the business
Ensures that only the data you want to show up in the dashboard will be there
In short, it keeps the team focused on what matters most and nothing else.
Learn more about Resource Allocation here!
Next up: Enhanced Custom PM Metrics!
Custom PM Metrics: Look into State Transitions to Find Project Bottlenecks
We previously covered Custom PM Metrics–feel free to check it out if you’d like an in-depth refresher.
LinearB Custom PM Metrics enables your product team and engineering managers to quickly and easily correlate Jira data in a helpful way, identify patterns, and pinpoint bottlenecks. The old way relied on significant expertise with Jira Query Language (JQL)--the fastest way to filter and search in Jira.
Custom PM Metrics simplifies the process, surfaces insight, and automatically organizes it by issue count, story point, or issue state across teams, issues, epics, fields, and labels so you can quickly take action. No advanced Jira or JQL knowledge required!
And now, this feature supports state transitions! This enables teams to analyze (and take action on) projects that are consistently delayed due to them moving from “Done” back to “QA” or “To-Do”.
This enhancement helps leaders gain a sense of where to begin improvement efforts and tame the sprawl that is all-to-common in issue trackers.
Let’s move on to automation and developer experience enhancements.
Workflow Automation and Developer Experience
WorkerB will now send Slack and MS Teams mention notifications whenever a teammate is tagged in a comment via git providers. The notification will include a link to take you to the PR and comment. Now you’ll never:
Miss change requests
Wonder if reviewers will see your comment
Need to reach out in a separate message
For many developers, a fractured day made up of competing priorities and all kinds of notifications from different tools is the status quo. No one sets out to miss comments, questions, or PR review requests, but it happens (sometime more often than we care to admit).
Bottom line, without consistent visibility into what needs to be done, delivered in an expected and familiar way, it’s easy for work to fall through the cracks.
Fortunately, WorkerB–LinearB’s chat bot and workflow automation tool–can now help ensure you don’t miss the important stuff (like when you’re mentioned in comments that require attention/action). This simple automation helps requesters and reviewers alike avoid context switches, reduce developer toil, and collaborate more effectively.
Please note that this enhancement is currently limited to cloud versions of GitHub and GitLab.
Last, but not least, LinearB went to the spa and had some work done.
A New Look and Feel for LinearB
The updated “home screen” in LinearB now offers a view into the all-new Groups (Team of Teams) reporting and team structure. The new Group Dashboard:
Extends crucial metrics to Groups or Team of Teams, including work breakdown, WIP, merge frequency, and PR size
Focuses attention on the big picture with groups and then enables you to drill down into individual teams
Contextualizes all these metrics with industry-standard performance benchmarks
The New Group Dashboard is a significant step forward because it increases flexibility in reporting structures and enables you to quickly identify bottlenecks (and improvement opportunities) so you can better prioritize improvement initiatives.
Stay tuned for even more exciting updates to the Group dashboard in coming weeks. We’re cooking up some very exciting stuff–like a more robust date range picker and the ability to completely customize the Group dashboard!!
Also, the Summer Launch is just around the corner, and you can bet we’ve got a whole lot of awesome features and events planned! We’ll see you soon!
Not using LinearB yet? Get your free forever account here
Want a guided tour? Schedule a demo now!
Feel free to get back to the beach and that tropical drink with the little umbrella 😎!
