Wallboard for your service desk: what goes on it

A screen on the wall of the team room sounds simple: put your dashboard on it and you are done. In practice that does not work. A dashboard is made to be clicked through, and a wall screen is never touched by anyone. That calls for different choices, and those were revised a few times while building the Wallboard.

Why your dashboard cannot just go on the wall

The first attempt was a mode you could lay over any tab. You picked a tab, switched wall mode on, and the menu bar and filters disappeared. There was even a function to cycle between tabs automatically.

That approach did not survive. The tabs differ too much in how much they hold. What sits comfortably on one screen turns into a wall of tiny numbers on another, and then you find yourself making per-tab exceptions about what to show and what to hide. That never comes out right.

What replaced it is one separate screen, built for exactly this purpose. Not a mode over something existing, but its own selection.

Everything from today, apart from one thing

The most important choice is the period. On the Wallboard it is fixed to today, regardless of what you set in the sidebar. You cannot change it, and that is deliberate.

A wall screen is not reporting. Nobody walks up to it to compare quarters. The question is "where do we stand right now", and then you do not want the screen still showing the last twelve months because someone clicked that yesterday.

Today here means a calendar day since midnight, not a rolling 24-hour window. That sounds like hair-splitting, but it is exactly what makes a stand-up work: everyone is looking at the same day. With a rolling window your comparison shifts every hour and "we are ahead" stops meaning anything.

One figure is different. Customer satisfaction covers the last thirty days. Ratings come in too sparsely for anything shorter; per day you would often see zero or one rating, and then a percentage is meaningless. The screen says so, too, so nobody reads it as a daily number by accident.

What is on it

Five figures across the top: open incidents, SLA compliance, customer satisfaction, major incidents and total workload.

Below that the flow, and that is the part it is really about. How many incidents came in today, how many were picked up, how many are done. The same three lines for operational activities. That is not a performance measure but a progress bar, and a team reads that very differently from a percentage.

Then the workload, per operator group and per operator, split by type of work. Incidents, simple and extensive changes, change activities and operations management each get their own colour, because ten simple changes are not ten extensive ones.

At the bottom a compact list of the eight most recent incidents, newest first. With number, short description, priority, status and who has it.

The bar of operator groups at the top stays clickable. If you want to zoom in on one group during a meeting you can, and afterwards you switch it off again.

What happens when something comes in

New incidents, changes, change activities and operational activities appear as a card on screen. Critical incidents and major incidents get a different colour from high priority, and that again differs from the rest.

Two things about this matter more than they look. On first load you do not get a flood: everything that already exists at that moment is quietly marked as seen. So you only hear about what genuinely arrives afterwards.

And the stack does not fill up. More than about six cards is unreadable on a screen across the room anyway, so the oldest one goes. Individual cards disappear by themselves after twenty-four seconds regardless. A wall screen that fills up with notifications nobody dismisses gets ignored within a week.

Practical things

The Wallboard is a tab of its own, alongside Overview and Workload, so you can look at it without a wall screen too. For the screen on the wall you start it from the View menu: it then takes over the full screen, the menu bar and the filter panel disappear, and you leave it with Escape or the button at the top right.

The screen scales itself so everything fits without scrolling, from a small monitor up to 4K. That was necessary, because a wall screen where the bottom half falls off is useless, and nobody is going to scroll a TV on the wall. On an exceptionally busy environment a small amount of scrolling may remain, rather than something dropping out of sight.

Beyond that it refreshes itself for as long as it is open, so you switch it on in the morning and watch it all day.

What it does to a team

The reason for building this was not reporting. Figures for management already existed. What was missing was something for the team itself.

"Fourteen in today, eleven done" is a different conversation from a monthly overview. It is about the day that is still running, which you can still do something about. And it belongs to everyone at once: there is no name at the top of a ranking, there is what you cleared together.

That is also why the flow has three lines and not a score. Came in, picked up, closed. Anyone looking at it sees where today is stalling, without anyone having to say it.