I came across this tool, A-ha, recently and after looking into it a bit more deeply, I think it could be really useful for some organizations/teams.
A-ha can be used at the high level for Strategic Planning and Roadmap or can be implemented for more detail level processes; such as Requirements Gathering, Scoring & Prioritization and Capacity Management.
I captured some of the high level functionalities; along with a few sample screenshots and links to those specific functionalities, so you can see more information on their website.
A few points to highlight:
- Each team can have their own Workspace and have their own appropriate template, unique configuration, customization, setup and integration
- This is a highly customizable tool. It’s very easy to add custom fields, change the scoring mechanism, integrations etc. either at the company level or workspace level
- Integration with DevOps (VSTS) works really well. I tested it myself and it could be customized at the Workspace/Team level. Each integration can have its own field mapping, each individual fields can be set up to indicate whether this particular field is flowing from A-ha to DevOps, from DevOps to A-ha or both ways, whether that’s 1 time flow or continuous update
- The presentations and reports can be published publicly or a certain group of people. Because it’s integrated with VSTS/DevOps, the data in the presentations/reports are live and always accurate (well, as accurate as the data in VSTS). No more manual updates for decks. Executives, Stakeholders, Internal and External customers can be given access to the Roadmaps, Presentations or Reports and can easily follow the status of their projects, requirements or requests, live!
- Very detailed Capacity Planning. Management can easily see who is working on what, what bandwidth everyone has and manage the teams much more effectively
- It can be a great, centralized and consistent tool to receive requests, requirements, feedback and ideas from our internal teams/users, from our clients and suppliers via customizable Ideas boards
- It can work with minimal or no distraction to existing processes. PMs, Tech Leads, Development, QA, BA can still do what they are doing today and manage their projects and work via the tools that they currently use (as they do today). Via the powerful integration capabilities, the data can flow from current development tools, such as VSTS into A-ha or vice versa, from A-ha to VSTS. New backlog items can be entered into A-ha (via Ideas Boards, manually or maybe even from other third party tools, such as Salesforce), they can be managed/prioritized (via scoring) in A-ha and pushed to VSTS for the teams to work on. Updates on Effort, Remaining Hours, Statuses etc. can be sent from VSTS back to A-ha.