[porker]

Yes, dashboards are underrated by those who haven't used them.

The data analysis tools did cause problems at one company I worked at. They had a very locked down JIRA install and management were in thrall to the burn-down chart. If you got behind you were hauled over the coals.

The burndown chart only considered the rate tickets were closed. So developers started creating extra tickets at the start of a project, so that when they got behind on a larger issue they could closed off some of the small tickets and the chart would stay on track.

Management never spotted.

[dleslie]

Ha! I was a team lead at a company where something similar happened. Management was obsessed with the burn down chart and equated total completed with productivity.

So I told my team to make tasks as atomic as possible. If it can describe two meaningful changes then it should be two tasks.

I actually preferred this outcome. Instead of a large task for a feature, we had hundreds of tiny tasks that culminated in a feature. It was far easier to get a handle on what was getting done and what was the impediments.

[Talanes]

For some reason, plenty of people in management don't seem to realize that raking people over the coals over individual data-points just incentives your workers to avoid giving up data.