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Work Items

Work Items

Owned by Graham Langdon
Mar 18, 2025
5 min read

Introduction

The Work Items page enables you to query tickets from Jira or ADO and display the results in a fully customizable table, chart, or KPI widget.

Searching for Tickets

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At the top of the work items page is a set of query controls. Editing these controls and clicking “Apply” will search for tickets. The two query controls are:

  • Descendants of

    • This allows you to select specific parent objects and return all the child items associated with them. All children of children are also returned.

  • Advanced

    • This allows you to query tickets based on the properties of those tickets. You can wrap query elements in nested AND, OR, or NOT groups to create very finely tuned queries.

The Descendants Of and Advanced queries can be used together. When they both contain queries, the results will be all the Descendants Of the selected parent items that also match the criteria specified in the Advanced menu.

Customizing Columns

Tailor the columns to display relevant properties such as status, priority, and assignee. The table can also be configured to display the properties of parents. More on that in the next section.

To customize the columns, click the “Columns” button in the top right of the page. Several commonly used columns are pre-selected by default. You can remove any of those columns and add as many other columns as you want.

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Displaying Parent Properties

View properties of parent tickets such as epics or initiatives, providing essential context for understanding the overall progress and alignment with business goals. When adding a column, click the “Parent Property” button, select the parent type or parent types you want, and then select the desired property.

Some configuration examples:

  • An Epic column that displays the name/s of any parent Epics for the tickets returned

  • An Initiative column that displays the value in an “Investment Category” field of any parent Initiatives for the tickets returned.

  • A column with both Feature and Epic parent types selected that will display the names of those parent objects for the tickets returned.

When tickets returned don’t have a parent of the type specified, or the parent doesn’t have a value in the field specified, the cell for that ticket in that column will be blank.

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Visualizations

Turn your query results into visual insights like pie charts, tree maps, or column charts. This helps managers quickly identify trends and potential issues.

Once you’ve submitted your query, click on the “Visualization” button in the top right area of the page. There you can select what visualization type you want to see, and what table column values you want to use to group your data.

You can set a max number of series displayed when configuring your chart. When you have a max number of series specified, the chart will show the largest series up to your limit, and group any other series into an “Additional Series” group.

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Creating KPI Widgets

Set up KPI widgets to track critical metrics. Use color coding and thresholds to ensure SLAs are met and identify areas needing immediate attention.

This is configured in the Visualization menu by selecting the KPI option. Here you have the option to add a target so that the widget will display in red if the number of tickets returned is outside the limit you’ve specified.

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Add to Dashboard

When you’ve created something you want to reference again later, you can add it to a dashboard. Click on the Plus icon button in the top right. There you can give your widget a name and select the dashboard you want to add it to. You have the option to add your configuration to a dashboard in one of the following forms:

  • Table

    • Adds the table of results with the columns you’ve configured as a full width dashboard element.

  • Visualization

    • Adds just the visualization you’ve created to the dashboard. The table is accessible when you click on the visualization but isn’t displayed on the dashboard.

  • Visualization and Table

    • Adds a full-width combination widget to the dashboard which shows your visualization on the left and the table on the right. This is a convenient setup as interacting with the chart on the left filters the table on the right live. You can click on a series in the chart and see all the tickets that are associated with that one series. When you’re done clicking around, everything goes back to the way you configured it.

Work Items widgets on a dashboard are fully editable. You can even do things like convert a KPI widget into a table and vise versa.

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Troubleshooting

If you’re experiencing long load times, consider the following:

  • Each column adds to the load time, especially if they reference a user field like “Creator”, “Assignee” or customer user fields. To increase speed, make sure you only have the columns you need.

  • In advanced filters, “Contains” is a slower search than “Is”

  • “Descendants of” can be slow for very large parent objects such as projects since the query has to traverse all child links. It’s faster to query tickets based on their direct properties using the “Advanced” menu than it is to find tickets based on their links.

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