Track delivery risks in your Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Develop accounts.
Automatically Track Delivery Risks in Aha! Software
Dates matter. (You have heard us say it again and again because time is precious). Without a deadline to work against, you often do not know what you can feasibly achieve. But we understand why setting a firm release date can feel risky. There are plenty of factors outside a product manager's control, like unexpected technical problems or changes to the team's availability. Sure, you cannot predict the future — but we want to help you better anticipate it.
This is why we have made it possible to set alerts for various types of delivery risks — so you can get ahead of potential problems and ship on schedule.
Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Develop already include a number of capabilities to help you manage risk. For example, you can visualize cross-team dependencies on a Gantt chart or use individual or team capacity planning to analyze and report on capacity constraints. With today's update, you now have another way to surface issues that might put your plans at risk. In fact, there are 14 of them that you can set alerts for.
To get started, navigate to your workspace settings and enable the risks you want to track. For instance, you can get notified for releases and features in Aha! Roadmaps that are due soon or overdue — and specify when you would like to receive the alert. And if you use Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Develop together, you can surface development risks — such as work that does not have an estimate, assignee, or sprint — as well as stalled items and unresolved dependencies.
The next step is to add the new "Delivery risks" field to your feature card layout. This is where any risks impacting a specific feature will be displayed. You can also add a manual flag with a short description summarizing the concern. If there are no issues, the field will show that delivery is on track.
We recommend customizing your cards on the features and workflow boards to see warning signs at a glance. You can also report on each of the 14 new delivery risk indicators to analyze risk in a single view.
Let's take a closer look:
Surface key risks
Start by selecting the risk indicators you want to track. In this example, we are planning releases in Aha! Roadmaps and assigning work to be implemented in Aha! Develop — so we will use both planning and development-related indicators. Specifically we want to be alerted about features not scheduled, nearing due dates, features starting late, stalled work, and past-due dependencies.
Adjust the threshold for each risk indicator to match how your team works.
Spot planning-related issues
Now let's review an upcoming release in Aha! Roadmaps for potential risks. We have already prioritized which features we want to deliver and synced with engineering on scope, estimates, and timing. A warning indicator alerts us that one of the features is missing a start and end date. A quick adjustment to the record resolves that issue and ensures everyone knows when the work should be done.
Flag development-related challenges
Over in Develop, technical leads can quickly see which work items are at risk by monitoring the workflow board. Here we can see that the "Weather alerts" feature is at risk. When we drill in, we discover that the feature has unresolved dependencies. Now we can better address issues as they arise and collaborate with product management if release plans need to change.
Product managers in Aha! Roadmaps will see both planning and development-related risks for roadmap-driven work.
Focus on reality
Include the new delivery risk field in your reports. Here, we are reviewing the status of features in our upcoming releases. This makes it easy to discuss any concerns as a team and keep leadership informed of the impact on your plans.
Add the "Flagged record comment" field to list reports to see the description for manually flagged records.
Delivery risks are just one more way Aha! software helps you keep your bold product plans on track — so you can delight your customers and achieve your goals.
No plans are immune to unexpected obstacles — but these new alerts give you an opportunity to course correct. Check them out in both Roadmaps and Develop or reach out for a demo.
Sign up for a free trial of Aha! Roadmaps
Aha! Roadmaps is the best way to set strategy, prioritize features, and share visual plans. It includes Aha! Ideas Essentials for crowdsourcing feedback. If you are interested in an integrated product development approach, use Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Develop together. Sign up for a free 30-day trial or join a live demo to see why more than 600,000 product builders trust our software to build lovable products and be happy doing it.
