You’ve spent some time and defined some core views and metrics that show you the basics of workload and service delivery.

Now, you want to take the next step of maturity and see if you can get more from the views you already have.

Here are some ideas on how you can take your views to the next level:

Show the Data Differently

A very common style of view is to report on the volume of something over time. Take, for example, this trend of Emergency Changes over time:

This view answers, simply, a common question of how many new emergency changes are being created.

By using the display as functionality, however, we can show the trend underlying this trend. In the next view, we see the same data presented as a % Difference:

With the % difference, as well as the reference line at -10%, we can see during which months the Emergency Changes were reduces, and when the organization was able to hit their 10% reduction goal.

Instead of an informational view, now we’re focusing the view on what it is we’re looking to achieve.

Scorecards

We can take that tweak to the next level by going to File > Create a new Scorecard view from the original view:

In this example, we are able to see the original data (the number of emergency changes) and the goal-based view (% change of emergency changes). This also takes up less space, so it’s ideal for a dashboard view where logged-in users can drill down to the chart above, but get all the information they need at a quick glance.

Additionally, the scorecard focuses your attention on the “Green” or “Red” Up/Down indicator, allowing you to easily see: is this getting better or worse?

Filter and Color

You can make similar tweaks to pivot views to bring out the depth of pivot reports.

This is an example of the data above, demonstrated as a pivot; both the count, and the display as:

There’s already some good information in this view, and the fact that you can easily compare the two values in one view is helpful as well. But we can take this further to help draw out the information.

For example, you can use coloring rules to draw attention to improvements or declines, similar to the scorecards:

Or, you can use output filters to only show which months crossed a certain threshhold:

You can use this method to also generate scheduled alerts, as documented in this earlier blogpost.

Conclusion

As you can see, through a few tweaks to use more advanced functionality, you can take a straightforward view and attract attention to key information using conditional formatting and different ways of displaying the data.

Try it out with your most-used reports and see if you can tease out more from your reporting!