Manage technical writing tasks across multiple teams

Writers' work is often spread across multiple development teams and tracked in separate Jira projects. Without a unified view, managing documentation requests, release notes, video progress, and content reviews leads to constant context switching, making it harder to spot bottlenecks, balance workloads, and stay aligned with development cycles.

This article walks you through building a Technical Writing dashboard using Rich Filters for Jira Dashboards. The result is a single, filterable dashboard that gives your team a real-time overview of all their work across every project, along with an easy way to report progress.

https://youtu.be/oyA4GYRVwvw?si=KYivGldVa3N2h2fU

Before you start

Make sure you are using Jira Cloud and that all projects are on the same Jira instance.

Use case

You have a centralized team of technical writers creating documentation, release notes, microcopy, and video tutorials for multiple development teams. Your writers need to track their assignments across various Jira projects, monitor individual workloads, handle documentation review requests, and support marketing campaigns.

Rich Filters for Jira Dashboards solve this by letting you aggregate and filter issues across multiple projects in a single view. Because rich filters are based on a standard Jira filter, the issues listed can span all your Jira projects and product teams.

The Technical Writing dashboard consists of the following gadgets:

Rich Filter Controller - the main control panel, letting writers slice the data using static, dynamic, and smart filters (details in the Configure filters section below).
Writers tasks (Rich Filter Results gadget) - a comprehensive list of work, showing the Assignee, Pod, Status, Summary, Project, and Last comment.
Rich Filter Flexi Charts - a bar chart showing issue count by status (for example, Backlog, To Do, In Progress, In Review) so the team can quickly spot bottlenecks in the publishing pipeline.
Pods (Rich Filter Smart Gauges gadget) - a gauge chart that shows the percentage and exact number of issues assigned to each pod, so you can monitor workload distribution.
Assignees (Rich Filter Flexi Chart) - a breakdown of all issues by assignee, showing how many each team member is handling.
Content by type (Rich Filter Simple Counter) - a dedicated counter for video tutorials, microcopy work, and release notes.
Videos by Team Member (Rich Filter Pie Chart) - a breakdown of video tutorial issues by assignee.

Create the rich filter and Jira dashboard

The rich filter is the foundation of the dashboard. It defines the pool of Jira issues that all gadgets will draw from.

Create a new rich filter based on a Jira filter that returns all the documentation and technical writing work items you want to manage.
If you need guidance on creating rich filters and dashboard basics, see Rich Filters for Jira Dashboards.
Create a new dashboard and name it Technical writing.
Set Viewers to My organization so everyone in your company can view it.
Select the Two-column layout.

Add gadgets

Add the following gadgets to your dashboard. In each case, select your Technical Writing rich filter as the Rich filter value, then click Submit:

Left column:

Rich Filter Controller (Main).
Rich Filter Results gadget and name it: Writers tasks.
Click Done to exit dashboard edit mode.

Configure filters

Filters control what all the gadgets on the dashboard display. Static filters offer one-click buttons; dynamic filters expose individual Jira fields for ad hoc filtering; smart filters group tickets by custom logic (in this case, by pod, which is a team of writers working together).

To configure them, open your rich filter configuration.

Go to the Static filters tab of your rich filter config.
Create three static filters:
1. Recently updated with the JQL updated >= -30d.
2. Assigned to me, with the JQL assignee = currentUser().
3. Recently resolved with the JQL statusCategory = Done AND resolutiondate >= -2w
Go to the Dynamic filters tab and add filters for the following Jira fields: Assignee, Status, Priority, Project, Sprint, Product, Updated, and Labels.
Go to the Smart filters tab and create a smart filter called Teams to categorize tickets by the writer pods.
1. Add a separate clause for each pod. (The JQL assignee in membersOf("team-name") filters issues to show only those assigned to members of your existing Jira groups, so you must use your organization's actual group names for it to work):

Pod	Color	JQL

Pod	Color	JQL
Fab 4	Purple	`assignee in membersOf("fab4")`
Pod 2	Green	`assignee in membersOf("pod2")`
D&D	Red	`assignee in membersOf("dd")`
Connection Collective	Orange	`assignee in membersOf("connectioncollective")`
Sprintbusters	Blue	`assignee in membersOf("sprintbusters")`
Peas in a pod	Pink	`assignee in membersOf("peasinapod")`

b. Go back to your dashboard and refresh it.
Your controller should display all static, dynamic, and smart filters. Additionally, you can customize the shown filters, adding colors and custom sections.

Set up your views

Views define which columns appear in each Rich Filter Results gadget.

Go to the Views tab of your rich filter config.
Create your view: All work with the columns: Assignee, Pods, Status, Summary, Project, Last comment.

3. Go back to your dashboard and refresh it.
The Writers Tasks gadget now displays all the columns defined in the view.

Writer Tasks Rich Filter Results gadget displaying the configured view with task columns.

Set up custom values

Labels on work items (video, ux-writing, releasenotes) let you break out specific content types in your counters and charts. Custom values translate those labels into named metrics you can reference across gadgets.

Go to the Custom values tab and create the following custom values:

Name	Base value	JQL

Name	Base value	JQL
Microcopy	Issue Count	`labels = ux-writing`
Video	Issue Count	`labels = video`
Release notes	Issue Count	`labels = releasenotes`

Set up your charts and counters

Add the following gadgets to your dashboard. In each case, select your Technical writing rich filter as the Rich filter value. Configure each gadget to display the right data in the right format.

Rich Filter Flexi Charts and name it: Rich Filter Flexi Charts.
1. Chart type: Bar
2. Statistic type: Status
3. Value: Issue Count
  Flexi Chart gadget shows the distribution of issues depending on their status, allowing you to spot bottlenecks in the publishing pipeline.

Right column:

Rich Filter Smart Gauges gadget and name it: Pods.
1. Smart filter: Pods
2. Computation mode: Use smart clauses as gauge filters
3. Value: Issue Count
4. Layout: Gauge
  The gadget shows the percentage and exact number of issues assigned to each team, so you can monitor workload distribution.
Rich Filter Flexi Chart and name it: Assignees.
1. Chart type: Donut
2. Statistic type: Assignee
3. Value: Issue Count
  The chart visualizes how the work is spread among the writers.
Rich Filter Counter and name it: Content by type.
1. Values: Video, Microcopy, and Release notes custom values
  You can now easily see how many new releases are prepared, accompanied by the video and microcopy tasks.
Rich Filter Pie Chart and name it: Videos by Team Member.
1. Working query: labels=video
2. Chart type: Donut
3. Statistic type: Assignee
4. Value: Issue Count
  The gadget provides a preview for new videos published by the writers.

With this setup, your technical writing team has a single, always-current view of their entire workload. By using this layout, your technical writing team can seamlessly manage their workload, prioritize reviews, and keep all development pods well documented.