How does Project Status Report work?
Asked by Munteanu Mihai-Ovidiu:

How does Project Status Report work?

How does scafolding plugin work?

What is their connection?


Answers:
author: Josch Bencke
body: Must be frustrating, that we cant answer your questions more detailed. But to the point - it seems there are two versions possible:

a) Your boss assumes you know exactly how project reports are done in your company -

a1) check project management guidelines or reports in existing projects. There is no "standard" - there are leagues of authors and projectmanagers publishing "their own versions" of the one and only truth of projectreporting.

a2) Check your jira installation - maybe there are already reports, views, dashboards or boards configured, who tell you how it should look.

b) your boss does not really know what he wants, just THAT he wants something reported. In that case -

b1) ask him to provide an example of answers he hopes to get from the report

b2) to find someone who has done projets in your company and first define, what kind of report is usually done or would be considered helpful

c) AFAIK, he told you scaffolding is too expensive. Actually, it is the one of best plugins around for this kind of thing and not many alternatives are available - and trying to reprocude its functionalities with "free" plugins plus smart Wiki-work plus manual effort plus work for keeping things updated might quickly turn more expensive - IF you take your worktime into account.

Question is again - WHAT does he want to achieve - not what does he believe solves the problem. Scaffolding is very powerfull - maybe he saw it can do "X", but it can do also "A" - "Z" and "X" could be achieved in many other ways too.

So not sure, wether you are on the right track anyway. If your company would have hired me to solve this (its what I do for a living :D among other things) that would be the first questions I would ask : "I understood your order, yet - what do you want to achieve by this. What is the businessresult/decision/answer desired - and which information is needed to get there"

comments: author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Yup, nice analysis - it really does boil down to "ask your boss what he means". I like the "boss, show me what you're talking about" approach, as you'll definitely get an answer (whether that's a set of functions you can then ask us to help you identify or just a set of requirements, at least you'll know what to look for!)


author: Munteanu Mihai-Ovidiu
body: Let's see what I know so far...

Let's say I am in Confluence(Dashboard)-\> I select a project from the list (jira projects) -\> then, i have a list of options about that project...among them there is "Project Status Report"-\> I select that and then i have to select an area-\> after I select the area i hit the "Submit" button-\> then, it generates me the report about that project-area (issues, statuses, resources etc)

How does he do that (to extract those data)? Is still stupid my question? :))

Are those 2 plugins envolved? : scaffolding and reporting plugin

I don't have to do anything... I just need to understand "how is done?"


author: Munteanu Mihai-Ovidiu
body: That list is a list of "Spaces". Every project from Jira has corresponding Space in this list!


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Right, well, "I select a project from the list (Jira projects)" instantly needs explaining, as it's not standard. How are you getting that?


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Ok, so I'm looking at the list of spaces on a Confluence dashboard here. They have corresponding Jira projects. There's nothing about "project status report"

I'd suggest you look at the configuration of your system confluence dashboard to see what you've got set up here - you've got something configured which is not standard.


author: Josch Bencke
body: To cut this short : No. Not at all - why should it.

In Detail :

**Scaffolding Plugin** can be used to create a page template (e.g. a form for a standardized project status report). You then can create 1 .. n wikipages, which all contain the basic structure, predefined in the template. Any standard "Space template" can do this.   

The treat with scafolding is : You can edit the template later and all pages, created so far with this template, (can) change as well - AND you can build a bit more complex forms. Nothing more.

Basically - with this - you can turn wikipages into the equivalent of rows in an excel sheet - only prettier and longer. The scaffolding-template defines the column structure of the sheet. The wiki pages are the content.

**The reporting plugin** uses data IN CONFLUENCE !!!! to generate reports. So you need to have a bunch of wiki pages first of all, which can then be aggregated into a report.

Might be there is a supplier to retrieve data from Jira - check with the developers at [](http://marketplace.servicerocket.com/product/reporting-plugin)<http://marketplace.servicerocket.com/product/reporting-plugin>(use the ASK US function, I guess)

So getting back to part of my question up above - which information is necessary to get the answer. Do you need ANY information posted in the wiki ? Or do you get all the info you need from Jira tickets already ? If so - I dont see the reason yet to do this in confluence at all.


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: I'm not entirely sure this is posted in the right place!

We're trying to establish what these "project summary reports" actually are. They probably do pull information from Jira into Confluence (heck, you can do that without even looking at the Scaffolding stuff), but the core problem is that we don't really know what Munteanu is actually looking at.


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: You need to tell us what you mean by "project status report".

For the scaffolding plugin, see [](http://marketplace.servicerocket.com/product/scaffolding-plugin)<http://marketplace.servicerocket.com/product/scaffolding-plugin>(this is how to use it, not "how it works", but I suspect that's what you really mean.


author: Josch Bencke
body: **Another solution suggestion - with wiki tools only, if you do not wish to use reporting:**

1. Use the Checklists Macro and maybe some metadata plugins and/or the "multiple excerpts" plugin.
2. Create a "Status report" page. In this page, place the checklistsmacro to generate a table of data for a treebranch of pages.
3. Optional: Inside the page, you set up a second checklists table, which just references its own page.
4. Each of these pages represents the status for one item. manipulation of the Flags can be done via checklists table functions (see Option on #3). The rest is edited manually:

> Pagetitel = Itemtitle
>
> Page excerpt = Status summary
>
> Tags on the page = Flags regarding status, like "draft", "review", "live", "flagged", "archived", "ontime", "timecritical", "late", "budget green", "budget yellow", "budget red", Parent-project

So people can edit their own pages and the total result is collated in your overview page.

using Metadataplugins, you can provide additional information in the checklists, but you dont need to.


author: Munteanu Mihai-Ovidiu
body: Sorry again for those abstract questions...

From what I understand, so far, this Project Status Report means: a report about a JIRA project... thanks to your link, i saw that for those reports wiki uses 2 plugins... report plugin to extract data from JIRA, and this scafolding to create templates for those pages...

Honestly, I don't even know what my boss wants me to know... I think I will analyze the report plugin, to see how it takes the data... and God bless!

Thank you!

comments: author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Ah, yes, I've just realised you've asked this elsewhere.

A look at the scaffolding plugin docs is definitely worth a try, but I think your best bet on "project status report" really is to ask your boss what they think they mean. My best guess is that they mean a page in confluence that pulls in some project data from Jira, but there's no easy way to know. You might even be able to cheat and say "boss, I'm having problems debugging it in test, could you tell me the exact url you're using so I can take a copy over to test".


Tags: jira