Friction on your roadmap may take a while before your team members feel it, and even longer before it shows up in critical business metrics. The workflow heatmap shows total time spent at each stage of your workflow, sliced by individual team members, type of work, or your team's ability to estimate. It shows you at a glance areas that might be slowing you down, so you can address issues before you miss key delivery dates.
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Configure the report
To access the report, navigate to Reports -> Workflow heatmap. By default, the heatmap will display every record in your team, for every status in your workflow, over all time. You can focus the report using the filters at the top:
Record type: Choose from Any, Features, or Requirements.
Group by: Depending on the Record type you chose, you can group records by Assignee, Iteration, Initial estimate, Detailed estimate, or Record type. Your selection here will change the rows on the heatmap.
Status range: Just like you do for the cycle and lead time report, pick a range of statuses for the report to consider with this filter. For example, if you want to focus on bottlenecks for work in progress, you may want to start your heatmap with In progress and end it before Shipped. Your selection here will change the columns on the heatmap.
Date range: Choose the date range that will accurately reflect the current team members working under your current workflow, so that the heatmap will highlight bottlenecks that you can address.
Analyze the heatmap
The heatmap will display the cumulative time in status in each of its cells, with higher values colored darker.
Hover over any cell to highlight its row and column for easier focus.
Click on any cell to open a pre-built list report in a drawer with all the underlying records. Click View full report to bring the list report into full context so you can analyze the data more deeply, or close the drawer to return to the heatmap.
At a glance you should be able to see the status, team member, record type, or estimate that is an outlier in the report. Click to open the Chart information sidebar on the right for suggestions on what to do next.
Symptom |
May indicate |
What to do |
|---|---|---|
Concentrated dark cells in a single step |
A bottleneck or policy constraint |
Try WIP limits, swarming, or automation |
High time in early steps (e.g., Ready/Analysis) |
Waiting to start |
Refine intake criteria or rebalance staffing |
High time in review/test steps |
Reviewer or tester constraints |
Parallelize reviews, clarify the definition of done, or add automation |
Wide variability across assignees/teams |
Inconsistent practices |
Standardize policies or training |
Different patterns by type (features vs. bugs) |
Need for customized workflows |
Tailor policies (e.g., expedite bug triage) |
Persistent dark cells over multiple periods |
Systemic issue |
Prioritize an improvement experiment |
Pair the workflow heatmap with the cycle and lead time report to get a sense for whether a high number in the heatmap indicates a large volume (e.g. someone with a disproportionate amount of records assigned to them, all with average time in status) or a large delay (e.g. someone with an average amount of records assigned to them, spending a disproportionate amount of time in a status).
Share your report
With your workflow heatmap completed, you can easily share it with your stakeholders by selecting one of the export options under the Share menu button on the top right of the screen.
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.