Gantt chart created in Aha! Roadmaps.
Release Templates Now Skip Weekends
Ambitious launches require thoughtful plans. Success depends in large part on the product team working efficiently together. Everyone must be aligned on what needs to get done and when — with an awareness of important phases and milestones. With this week's launch, we are improving how you measure the duration of those benchmarks.
Weekends are now automatically excluded from release templates in Aha! Roadmaps — so you can focus on business days between phases and milestones.
Release templates can save you a ton of time. They give you a framework for the work you plan to deliver and you can specify default durations between phases and milestones. Building a standardized, repeatable workflow lends consistency to release planning.
You could already manually adjust the timing within a release to account for non-working days. But we wanted to save you that extra step. Now weekends are automatically excluded from your existing release templates — and from any new ones you create.
Here is how release templates work:
Create a template
Let's quickly review how to create a release template. Visit your workspace settings in Aha! Roadmaps. Here you can adapt an existing template or create your own from scratch. In the example below, we made a new template for mobile releases. We have adjusted the duration of our development phase to 10 days — that now means 10 weekdays. We also added a milestone for the go-to-market launch.
Use a negative number for the days after prior phase if you want phases to overlap.
Apply it to your release
Now let's apply the template we just created to a release. The Gantt chart below helps us visualize our phases. In the mobile release template, we set the go-to-market launch milestone to be one day after the development phase is completed. Before, this milestone would have fallen on a Saturday. Now, that milestone is automatically moved to Monday, the next business day. And we can always drag phases on the Gantt chart to fine-tune the dates.
Now if you hide weekends from the Gantt chart you will not inadvertently hide milestones. They will automatically adjust to fall on weekdays when the template is applied.
Keep your plans realistic and keep the team moving with release templates that default to working days.
Build out your templates in greater detail with dependencies and to-dos. Reached template perfection? You can apply new release templates to existing releases and set a default one for your workspace. Learn more in this video: How to create a release template.
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