Ambitious cross-functional work is both art and science, and Aha! Teamwork includes the tools to help you with both. From detailed capacity planning to simple status monitoring, you can use Aha! Teamwork to highlight your team's progress (and any threats to that progress) as well as have incisive conversations about how much you can commit to, and when you can plan on shipping successfully.
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Estimate effort
Start with an estimate. Before your team formally commits to an activity, they can assign an effort estimate to it, and then log work against that estimate. This is useful two ways: your team learns to estimate work accurately, and your stakeholders can work from a realistic timeline for your project
Either in your Prioritized backlog (Plans -> Backlog management) or during sprint planning (Plans -> Sprint planning), you are ready to estimate the effort it will take to complete each record.
There are three capacity planning fields that come standard on Aha! records:
Initial estimate is usually configured by product teams when they are first prioritizing a record. If you have connected Aha! Roadmaps to your Aha! account, you may see these estimates come over.
Detailed estimate is usually configured by project teams based on their expert assessment of a record's difficulty to implement. Before your team tackles an activity, they should have a good sense of its complexity and size.
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Actual effort is used by teams to log effort against the Detailed estimate (or Initial estimate if Detailed was left blank).
Individual sprint capacity planning uses Detailed estimates and Actual effort to calculate capacity. If you have enabled that setting for your team, make sure to track those two fields.
If you are working closely with a product team in Aha! Roadmaps, make sure that you both are using the same Estimation units — Time or Story points. Then, start estimating! You can use any number of methods to estimate work (including the planning poker integration). The end result is a Detailed estimate that will be used to visualize individual and team capacity in both Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Teamwork.
Parent records — such as epics and activities — can calculate their estimates from the estimates of their child records — such as activities and requirements.
Visualize progress
Next, get to work! Aha! Teamwork includes several views to help you monitor the progress of your plans.
If your team works from sprints, use the burndown chart (either from the sprint planning sidebar or the much more detailed sprint retrospective report, which can also visualize sprints in progress) to watch your team complete work against an idealized timeline. Track progress based on effort logged, work completed (by your estimation units), or a simple count of completed records.
If your team needs to show a simple roadmap to stakeholders, use the timeline view. This will show all work assigned to your team by date, and includes dependency lines that turn red if your team deviates from the critical pathway.
After your team has worked together for a few weeks, use the velocity, throughput, or cycle time reports to show your team's actual historical capacity, so you can better predict the amount of work you can commit to confidently.
Align with stakeholders
Every completed project helps inform the parameters of the next. Use the reports listed above to communicate the progress of your roadmap, and spark insightful conversations about timeline, prioritization, and strategic impact.
Finally, make it easy for your stakeholders to see realtime accurate progress reports. Many of the views listed above can be shared:
To export your report to a whiteboard, click the Export menu and add the report as an image or as a view.
To invite people outside of your Aha! account to view your report, navigate to Share -> Web -> Manage webpage.
Note: Information visible on hover is only visible to logged-in Aha! account users.To schedule recurring email delivery of your report, navigate to Share -> Email schedule.
For a static version of your report, export your report to PNG image or PDF document.