Read the dashboard

The Dashboard is where Tollgate lands you, and it’s the surface you present from. It composes everything on the registers into one read-only picture of whether the investment is still on track for its payoff. This tutorial walks you across the page, card by card, so you know where to look when a sponsor asks for status.

Open the Tollgate tab on the project you chartered in Your first investment. Read down the page with this tour beside you.

Note

Almost everything on the dashboard is derived from data you enter elsewhere. If a derived number looks wrong, fix it at its source (a work package, a risk, a change request) and the dashboard recomposes. Three calls only you can make, and you set them here: the Overall rating, Confidence and the key message.

Standard mode: Project Performance

A project in Standard mode has a shorter dashboard, headed Project Performance. It has two rows:

1. Overall with its key message, beside the Project brief (objective, sponsor, budget and target date). The two sit side by side at equal width.
2. Cost, Schedule and Scope status cards.

The project lead and nominated editors edit the brief with the pencil on its card, which appears when you hover over it. Other people see the brief but no pencil.

• Sponsor can be someone without a Jira account. Search for them, then choose Not a Jira user? Add by name, title and email. The brief shows them with a NON-JIRA label.
• Budget, if you leave it empty, shows the total of the work packages’ planned budgets, marked (work package total). A budget you enter replaces it.

Standard has no Confidence card and no Control Centre. Each card shows the status you set, the status Tollgate calculates, your commentary and the last few reporting periods. Cost compares the forecast with the work packages’ planned budgets, because the plan is the baseline in Standard. The work packages sit below the dashboard, then the registers. See Key concepts for the two modes. The rest of this page describes Advanced mode.

The caption row and the governance record

The dashboard opens with a quiet caption row: the word Dashboard, a freshness chip and who made the last update. The chip shows the age of that update, such as Updated 3 days ago or Status update overdue by 2 days.

The stage panel on the right names what currently governs the investment: the artefact and its status. For most of an investment’s life the artefact is the Business Case (Exploring, In progress, Awaiting decision, Approved). Later it becomes the Close-out report, then the Realisation record. Select the line to open the full record of the governance decision: the version, the approver, the approval date and the next gate. See Check the gate status.

Both lines are deliberately thin. They tell you what governs the investment and whether the picture is fresh, then hand over to the status cards. The page writes no verdict sentence. The cards are the verdict.

The five status cards

Below the caption row are five status cards. They are the heart of the page, and the split between them matters.

1. Overall is your holistic judgement of the investment’s health. You set it by hand.
2. Confidence is your self-reported outcome confidence, with the open-risk signal folded in.
3. Scope derives from the scope position of your work packages (approved changes this period).
4. Cost derives from your work-package budgets (approved plan vs forecast).
5. Schedule derives from your work-package dates (planned vs forecast end, the schedule slip).

Open risks sit on the Confidence card because they threaten the outcome you declare confidence in.

You set Overall and Confidence. Scope, Cost and Schedule are pure functions of the registers underneath them. If Cost is amber, the numbers on the Work Packages register made it amber. That gives the sponsor a status they can trust. For the exact derivation rules, see RAG, confidence & health.

Overall and Confidence each carry a pencil to edit them in place. Each takes an optional one-line reason: why this rating. Keep it to 120 characters at most. It renders on the card under the rating, where the derived cards show their metric. The reason answers the sponsor’s next question before they ask it. See Update status, RAG and confidence.

Tip

A derived card that disagrees with your Overall card is not a bug. It starts the conversation: “Overall’s green but Schedule’s red. Talk me through that.”

The Confidence card, and the key message

Alongside RAG, Tollgate tracks your self-reported outcome confidence: how sure you are the investment will deliver what you funded it for. RAG tells you where things stand now. Confidence tells you where the PM expects the investment to end up. Declaring your confidence is a governance act: you are on the record, calling it.

Beside the cards sits the key message, your one framing sentence for the steering committee. A since-last-steering digest and the next steering date sit beneath it. Until you write a key message, the card says No key message set.

The Control Centre and the stage panel

To the right of the cards sits the Control Centre, the queue of everything waiting on a person. Its groups say whose move it is: Yours to decide, Waiting on others, For your review and For your action. Yours to decide holds pending change requests, materialised risks awaiting a call, and a submitted case if you’re the sponsor. When nothing is queued, it says so. In a steering committee, this is your agenda.

Beneath it, the stage panel names the current stage and carries the governance record. It also holds the page’s one primary action, the act that moves the investment through its current gate. For a draft case, that’s Submit for approval.

The register cards

Lower down, the Registers row carries the live edge of every register on its card:

• Risks & opportunities shows the register count, with a chip when a risk materialises.
• Decisions shows the count from the append-only decision log, with a chip for pending items.
• Changes shows the count, with a chip for change requests awaiting adjudication.

Work Packages, Business case, Close-out and Realisation show their own counts and statuses the same way. You don’t have to leave the dashboard to see them. When a sponsor wants the full register, it’s one click away.

The stale-update chip

If the status update is older than its reporting cadence, the freshness chip on the caption row says Status update overdue by N days. Tollgate never emails you about it. The signal appears on the surface you already open. Keep the picture current through the week and the dashboard stays presentable at a moment’s notice. To see why Tollgate nudges rather than nags, read Above the line.

What’s next

You can now read the surface. Next, learn to run a room from it.

• Present straight from the dashboard is the signature use case.
• The dashboard is the deck explains why you present live from this surface instead of building a deck.