How to Create a Work in Progress Report in Looker

A well-built Work in Progress (WIP) report can transform how your team tracks performance, identifies bottlenecks, and manages workloads. Instead of relying on a Kanban Board, your team will have a live view of all your most important active projects organized in a way that suits your team.

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In this tutorial, we will walk you through how to use Looker to create a WIP report. You can also make small tweaks to gain a better perspective on your team’s performance with their projects and tasks.

What Exactly is a Work in Progress (WIP) Report?

At its core, a WIP report is a real-time list of every task or project that is currently in motion. Unlike a daily standup where information is shared but can be forgotten, this centralized destination provides a snapshot of project health by assignee for project managers and teammates to reference throughout their day/week to coordinate their tasks across various projects and departments.

A good WIP report is built to answer essential questions that spreadsheets and meeting notes can’t:

• What is everyone working on right now? Get a transparent view into your team's current commitments and prevent work from being duplicated.
• Which projects are at risk of falling behind schedule? Instantly spot tasks that are overdue or have been stuck in the same status for too long. This tool will help determine whether it makes sense to continue using project estimations and if additional resources are needed for a large, high-output project.
• A source of truth that is accessible anytime: Managers often need to share the delivery estimations of projects they support. By offering Looker, teams gain a powerful resource to create insights for other departments, driving productivity across an entire organization.

When done right, a WIP report moves beyond being a simple task list. It becomes an operational dashboard that drives efficiency, improves planning, and ensures your team is always focused on the most critical work.

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Data Needed to Build: Getting Your Data Source of Truth Ready for Looker

Like any report, your Work in Progress report is only as valuable as the data feeding it. Before jumping into Looker, work with your PMs and teammates to ensure that the WIP will be helpful for all major stakeholders on your team. Clean, consistent data tracking is vital, disorganized data input will result in a disorganized output. This requires discipline internally, as reporting project updates in a CRM is not always enjoyable for all team members.

Required and Recommended Data Fields

At a minimum, your dataset for each task should include the key fields: Project ID (if working cross-functionally and not just on the product/business team), Status, and Assignee. However, to make this chart as strong as possible, here is a list of attributes your Looker WIP report should visualize:

• Task ID: A distinct identifier for each task (e.g., JIRA-1234, TSK-567).
• Task Name: A clear, descriptive title of the task.
• Assignee/Owner: The name of the person responsible for completing the task. Avoid including "unassigned" tasks as they add unnecessary noise.
• Status: The column that identifies the stage of production a project is in (e.g., “In Progress,” "In Code Review," “Needs Refinement”). Filter out completed tasks so the focus remains on active tasks.
• Target Completion or a Date Field: Including date fields helps communicate SLO/SLA delivery of products in sprint-based development teams.

It's important to establish a clear “completion status” so the WIP report excludes tasks deemed "DONE" or "COMPLETE," focusing on active tasks to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

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Building Your WIP Report From Looker

Looker is a best-in-class visualization tool for companies, providing dashboards and a platform to build analysis based on company data. Unlike building a dashboard in Metabase or Power BI, Looker requires some learning to achieve success. While Looker's UI can be complex, we’ll provide tips to help you become comfortable using it.

This is a strong case for using natural language when building your marketing reports, you can leverage an already understood common medium to generate charts based on pre-integrated connectors.

Step #1 – Connect or Upload Your Project Status

In Looker, reports are powerful because you’re not limited to specific ways to find a project. Use "filters" to build your Look by adding data for the Task Name, ticket title, its respective status, and the owner. Filter out statuses like "To Do" and focus on current tasks. Start by clicking “RUN” in the upper-right corner to generate a comprehensive, organized list that highlights current tasks.

Step #2 - Show Time In Status on the Card

This step helps identify bottlenecks by showing the time each task has been in its status. This provides coaching opportunities if tasks get stuck with the same owner. While time-in-status for Looker tiles cannot always tell the full story, they serve as helpful tools to start productive conversations.

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Example #3: Monitoring a Task Assigned to a Specific Team Member

After creating a report in Looker, save it as an asset for your team. Often there's another set of filters teams want when looking at what everyone is currently committed to. Having these individual Looker reports provides additional insights into each team member's workload.

Putting It All Together on a Dashboard

Next, create a dashboard to compile these Looker reports and track bottlenecks and throughput.

Combine Views of Team and Individual Task Lists for Better Context

Start with a simple Looker report that has a user filter as a default. If you’re a team leader, filter the WIP dashboard by employee to show reports on tickets they should focus on, sorted by various criteria such as age or priority.

Final Thoughts

Creating a WIP report in Looker requires understanding the questions needed to assess a team's or project's health. Providing visibility is important for high-performing teams, as every member contributes to achieving goals.

Although becoming an advanced user in Looker takes time, you can leverage Graphed to instantly visualize Looker reports into clear, helpful, and easily sharable dashboards without spending hours learning SQL.