Schedule team changes from the capacity report in Aha! Roadmaps
Plan Better Launches by Tracking Team Schedule Changes
Planning for change. This might sound like an oxymoron. By nature, plans are grounded in milestones, dates, and deliverables. But success depends on the team's availability to actually do the work — which is often in a state of flux. People come and go, take time off, or get assigned to projects on other teams. Today's update makes it easier to account for these changes so you can keep your roadmap on track.
Now you can more accurately visualize team workload on the capacity report in Aha! Roadmaps — increasing your confidence that the team will be able to deliver on time.
Team-based capacity planning provides powerful functionality for estimating work and optimizing capacity as you move from strategic planning to tactical implementation. Add scenarios using different timelines and estimation units, assign features to teams, and then visualize workload on the capacity report to create an achievable roadmap. The ability to add detailed estimates and assign work to individuals helps you refine your plans as you get closer to implementation. But until today, there was not a way to reflect upcoming changes to the team's availability and velocity — making it hard to gain an accurate picture of the team's bandwidth.
Open up the details drawer for a team directly from the capacity report or navigate to team settings at the account or workspace level. Here, you can schedule changes such as adding or removing team members, changing a team's start and end date, and adjusting the velocity or working days for each person.
Once applied, the capacity report will show the team's historic, current, and future availability. So when a new member joins the team, for example, the report will factor in their capacity based on their start date. Conversely, if someone leaves, their name will appear in gray with no capacity after their departure date. This gives you an accurate view of available resources across the team at any given time — so you can gauge how much work can get done and optimize workloads accordingly.
Team capacity planning is especially beneficial for large organizations with many strategic workstreams. That is why it is included in the Aha! Roadmaps Enterprise+ plan. This plan is for organizations that demand the most sophisticated capabilities and a hands-on level of support from our Product Concierge team. It also includes advanced security and backup features, as well as ongoing training services.
Here is a closer look at how you can plan for adjustments to the team's availability:
Schedule team changes
Imagine you are assessing your roadmap for the next six months. You have defined the features you want to build and assigned them to the right engineering teams based on current availability. However, there are some upcoming changes that will impact team capacity — Kathryn will be splitting her time across two teams starting next month and Rose will be joining the platform team. In the example below, we go ahead and schedule those changes so we can see how this will affect our plans.
Schedule changes from the capacity report, account settings, or workspace settings — all changes will be reflected for that team throughout your account.
Adjust your plans
Let's refresh the capacity report to see the impact of the changes we made in the previous step. We can instantly see that Kathryn is overloaded from April onwards. The good news is that Rose, our new teammate, will be available to take on work. So we re-assign features from Kathryn to Rose directly from the report. This resolves our resourcing challenge, giving us confidence that we can deliver against our roadmap.
If a team member is scheduled to leave, their name will appear in gray with no available capacity after their departure date.
Understanding the reality of your team's availability is fundamental to empowering the team to achieve more and sustain happiness.
Of course, you cannot always foresee every team change. But we hope that this update helps you plan ahead for what you do know, so you can set the entire product team up for success. Remember you can use Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Develop together for an integrated capacity planning workflow. Estimates and progress stay in sync in both tools — empowering product and engineering teams to work closely together to set achievable plans, manage workloads, and deliver the roadmap on time.
Upgrade to the Aha! Roadmaps Enterprise+ plan
Aha! Roadmaps is the best way to set strategy, capture ideas, score features, and share visual plans. Choose the Enterprise+ plan if you need the most sophisticated capabilities, advanced levels of support, security and backup features, as well as ongoing concierge services. Please contact us to learn more.
