Streamlined Project/Team Management via A-ha

May 22, 2020May 22, 2020

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.

Streamlined Presentation / Generating Documents, PPTs Automatically with Dox42

March 25, 2020May 25, 2020

I recently came across this tool, dox42, that I think is pretty cool and can help teams and organizations reduce/eliminate some of the administrative tasks and produce information from the source systems not only correctly, efficiently and in a consistent way but also automatically.

Some of the benefits for using this (or similar tools) can be:

Dox42 allows business users to create complex, detailed document templates via the tools that they already use such as MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint
The tools allows integration from different source systems; such as MS Teams, SharePoint, CRM systems, MS Excel, Access or SQL databases
The tool allows the templates to be centralized. They can be updated (adding/removing fields, changing company logo etc) very quickly and easily (versus telling everyone to update their templates individually)
The templates allow users to generate documents (Word, Excel or PowerPoint) with a click (regardless of how many slides or pages)
It prevents incorrect data to be shared. Since the data would be coming directly from the source systems, no manual updates to the documents needed
It eliminates copy & paste errors, misalignment or inconsistent formatting throughout the documents
It can include complex calculations or graphs that could be automatically updated, thus, eliminates incorrect data

Dox42 can integrate with a lot of technologies, not just MS products (as shown below).

I explored and tried generating PowerPoint slides for my projects. You can see the dox42 template I created below. This template brings data from an existing project management SharePoint site and a SQL database. The PowerPoint slides are generated automatically per project, so it doesn’t matter if it’s 1 project or 100. Since this is a template, once the data points or labels or format is changed in the template, it would be automatically changed in all slides generated. Once the slides were generated, they can still be updated manually with further data/comments too, if needed.

Here is the screenshot of one of the PowerPoint slides that was generated automatically for a sample project. As we discussed above, all fields are coming directly from SharePoint Project Tracking or SQL database. Budget Chart calculations are done in a temp Excel and then brought into the PowerPoint. The data/images are displayed dynamically (i.e. indicator colors, project manager’s picture, etc).