Create Your Team Homepage | Athenian Help Center

Align gives you a high-level overview of all the insights you had access to with Analytics - but quickly and personalised.

With Align, you can create custom dashboards for each team, so that each team can check how they are performing in terms of their own goals, and their progress.

With Analytics, you will still be able to drill down into each team's time allocation, or how each metric has varied over your chosen timeframe.

Let's work with an example –

You just found out that one of your teams spends most of its time on Review processes. After drilling down, you realise this team spends most of its time waiting for the review process to begin.

Analytics will have allowed to uncover this bottleneck and the obvious areas of improvement. However, how do you then turn these insights into actions?

That’s where Align comes in 🎉

Step 1 – Creating Custom Dashboards on Align

After switching over from Analytics to Align, click on the Teams tab.
This will give you an overview of all the teams currently stored in your Athenian system.
Then click on the team you want to focus on.

You can then create a custom dashboard for this team that shows you the metrics you want to track! But yoou will need to add each individual metric to the dashboard view one by one.

Add an individual metric to your dashboard:

Go to the Align dashboard and click “Add Metric”.
You’ll then see a list of all the possible metrics that Athenian can show you. All metrics you see in Analytics can also be found here, and you’ll be able to drill down on them.
Let’s use the previous example – you want to improve your team's Review Time, so go ahead and choose Review Time as your metric.
You can now specify a timeframe for this metric – any time between last week to last year.
You can filter your metrics by repository, issue type, priority, and project –
Filters shown vary based on the metric you pick.
You can also add Breakdowns to segment the metrics in your dashboard by Teams, Repository, Jira Label, Issue Type, and Priority.
Once you’re happy with your metric, click “Save” – orange button in the top right corner.

Voilà! Both you and your team can now track this metric every time you visit your Align dashboard.

Our custom dashboard should be used as your team's Athenian homepage, where anyone can track the metrics and goals that matter most to them.

Customizing your dashboard further

Repeat the above process for every metric that matters for the team you’re focusing on.

When creating your custom dashboards, aim for balance. Think about how different metrics influence each other. For example, if you’re trying to improve a team’s Review time, it might also help to track how many Pull Requests this team has worked on in your chosen timeframe, as well as how many comments there were on the Pull Requests. This will help you ensure that, in boosting the team’s velocity, the quality of their work doesn’t suffer.

🚨 The Cobra Effect

Whenever you set a goal for a team, there's a risk that the team might misinterpret, or gamify, this goal. This is known as the Cobra Effect - beware when adding metrics to your teams' dashboards, and setting goals for your teams.

In our example, if we set the goal of reducing review time, the team might focus on quick reviews, at any cost - velocity increases but quality of their work suffers. To avoid this, and to ensure thorough reviews while improving their speed, you can add "number of comments per review" as a metric and track it doesn't fall below historicals. 

It’s better to set these elements as metrics rather than goals, as it’s not something the team should treat as an objective. Instead it’s a counter metric you should track to ensure the team stays on course.

Step 2 – Making the Most of Align Dashboards and Time Frames

Spotting a pattern
When specifying a timeframe for your metric, always start by picking the last three months, or the last six. This will give you a trend and will be more accurate while shorter windows may not paint a realistic picture.
Setting a time frame
When setting a new goal and biasing your team towards action, it is important to set a realistic time frame that will motivate them to change behavior. We typically suggest starting with one quarter for most metrics!
Shorter time frames
For some metrics, setting a shorter timeframe will make it easier to course correct should you find you’re getting off track. Shorter timeframes will show you smaller trends in your team’s performance, which can help you be more responsive to any spikes or dips. Allowing you to correct anti-pattern behaviours, or metrics that deserve fast reaction (e.g. first time to review).
Experiment with customization
You can have as many dashboards as you see fit. For example, you can set specific dashboards that filter your metric(s) by a specific repository, issue type, priority, and project, which is useful if you want to track the team’s performance in specific areas.

Breakdowns
You can also add Breakdowns to segment the metrics in your dashboard by Teams, Repository, Jira Label, Issue Type, and Priority.

🚨 Pro tip:

Generally speaking, it’s a good idea to always track your overall Pull Request Cycle Time. So you might want to add the PR Cycle Time metric to your dashboard regardless of which areas you want to improve on.