Wallboard with TOPdesk data: what goes on it

Putting your dashboard on a screen in the team room sounds like a simple job. In practice it does not work, because a dashboard is built to be clicked through and nobody touches a screen on the wall. The AureaDesk Wallboard, which shows data from TOPdesk, needed different choices, and they changed a few times while it was being built.

Why your dashboard cannot just go on the wall

The first attempt was a mode you could apply to any tab. You picked a tab, switched wall mode on, and the menu bar and filters disappeared. There was even an option to cycle through the tabs automatically.

Wall mode was eventually dropped. The tabs differ too much in the amount they show. One tab fits comfortably on a wall screen, while another turns into rows of tiny numbers. Each tab then needed its own exceptions about which figures to show, and they proved hard to manage.

It was replaced by a separate screen built only for this purpose. The screen has its own selection of figures and is not a mode on top of an existing tab.

All about today, with a few exceptions

The period was the main decision. On the Wallboard it is fixed to today, regardless of what you set in the sidebar, and by design you cannot change it.

A wall display is used differently from a report, and nobody walks up to it to compare quarters. People look at it to see where the team stands at that moment, and you do not want the screen still showing the last twelve months because someone selected that yesterday.

“Today” means the calendar day since midnight, so the Wallboard does not use a rolling 24-hour window. For a stand-up the calendar day works better, because everyone is then looking at the same day. With a rolling window the comparison shifts every hour, and “we are ahead” no longer tells you much.

Customer satisfaction is an exception and covers the last thirty days, because ratings come in too sparsely for a shorter period. On a single day there would often be one rating or none, and a percentage based on that tells you nothing. The screen labels it accordingly, so nobody mistakes it for a daily figure.

The other exceptions are the SLA tiles and the strip with open major incidents and P1 incidents. They count everything that is still open, including what came in yesterday. The screen labels these as well, so nobody mistakes them for daily figures.

What is on it

The key figures run across the top, with open incidents, SLA compliance, customer satisfaction, major incidents and the number completed today. Pro and Enterprise add the total workload. The same row has SLA tiles for incidents about to breach and incidents that are breached and still open. Above the key figures, a strip shows the open major incidents and P1 incidents, if there are any.

Below the key figures is the incident flow, the main part of the screen. It shows how many incidents came in today, together with the number picked up and the number done. The flow works like a progress bar for the day and is not meant to measure performance. A team reads a bar like that very differently from a percentage.

In Pro and Enterprise the workload comes next. It is broken down by operator group and, if names are shown, by operator, and split by type of work. Incidents, simple and extensive changes and change activities each get their own colour, because a simple change and an extensive change differ a great deal in the amount of work involved.

At the bottom, recent incidents, changes and change activities sit side by side, newest first. Each row shows the number, brief description, status (for incidents also the priority) and who it is assigned to. On a screen with a wallboard link, rows show the operator group by default rather than the operator, because names and figures per person are off until your administrator switches them on per link.

The operator group bar at the top stays clickable, so you can zoom in on a single operator group during a meeting and clear the selection afterwards.

What happens when something comes in

New incidents, changes and change activities appear as a card on screen. Each card has a coloured edge for its type of work. Incident cards also carry a coloured label with the priority Critical, High or Normal. A major incident is labelled Critical, regardless of its priority.

When the Wallboard first loads, it shows no cards for items that are already there. Existing items are marked as seen, so cards only appear for what comes in after that.

The number of cards on screen is limited to what you can still read from across the room. When the limit is reached, a new card pushes out the oldest one. Each card also stays on screen only briefly and then disappears on its own. Without these limits the screen would fill up with notifications that nobody dismisses, and within a week the team would stop looking at it.

The practical side

You open the Wallboard from the View menu. It then fills the whole screen, without the menu bar and filter panel. You exit with Escape or the button in the top right corner. To see how the day is going at your own desk, choose the period Today in the dashboard. The Rotation button pages through the tables of recent incidents, changes and change activities automatically, so rows further down also come into view on an unattended screen.

The screen scales itself so everything fits without scrolling, from a small monitor up to 4K. Getting everything on screen was essential, because a display with the bottom half cut off is useless and nobody scrolls a TV on the wall. In an exceptionally busy environment the content may still not quite fit. You can then reach the rest by scrolling, and nothing drops out of view.

It also refreshes itself for as long as it is open. For a permanent screen on the wall, your administrator creates a wallboard link, which signs itself back in so the screen stays up all day. A regular account is signed out after a period of inactivity.

What it does for a team

Management already had its figures, so reporting was not the aim. The Wallboard was meant for the team itself, which until then had nothing like it.

“Fourteen in today, eleven done” leads to a different conversation from a monthly overview, because the day is not over yet and the team can still act on it. The day’s flow covers the whole team. You see what you got through together, without a score per person.

For the same reason the flow has no score. It shows three lines, for received, picked up and completed incidents, and anyone who looks at it can see where incidents are getting stuck today without someone having to say so.