Aha! Roadmaps | Manage at-risk work

Delivery risks affect each stage of the product development lifecycle, from planning to development, roadmap to release. Ambitious cross-functional plans come with many critical dependencies — too many for product and development teams to keep top of mind or back of envelope.

This is where automated risk indicators step in. Select any of the 15 separate alerts (including the ability to manually flag a record as at risk), then track your teams' progress in your Aha! account, and step in to mitigate any risk that pops up.

You can enable delivery risk alerts in Aha! Roadmaps or Aha! Develop. Both products work together to create a unified product development environment, where product and development teams share the same Aha! records and can work towards the same goals. They can also create risk profiles unique to their needs, to track important alerts in the planning and development phases of delivery.

If you are using Aha! Roadmaps or Aha! Develop as standalone products, you can still add delivery risk alerts from the Planning or Development setting subsections, respectively. Risk alerts are not mappable over integrations, and with few exceptions third-party integrations cannot affect Aha! risk alerts.

Click any of the following links to skip ahead:

• Configure risk alerts

  • Planning

  • Development

• Add delivery risks to custom record layouts

• Manually flag a record

• Highlight risks with card customizations

Configure risk alerts

Enable — and configure — the exact risk profile you need to track in your Aha! Roadmaps workspace or Aha! Develop team. To do this, navigate to Settings ⚙️ Workspace/Team Delivery risks.

• Enabled: Toggle these risk indicators on or off.

• Allow users to flag records: Click this toggle to enable users in your team to flag at-risk work themselves. They can flag any epic, feature, or requirement in your team, and add a comment explaining the risk.

• Check records in parking lots: Use this toggle to include records in parking lots in delivery risk alerts.

Planning

These risks typically apply to the planning stage of product development, which can take place in both Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Develop. Enable as many of these as are useful to your team.

The risk alerts you enable here will apply to any records created by your team in your workspace or team.

• Work not scheduled

• Work due soon: Select a number of days to define what "soon" means to your team.

• Work overdue: Select a number of days to define what "overdue" means to your team.

• Release due soon: Select a number of days to define what "soon" means to your team.

• Release overdue: Select a number of days to define what "overdue" means to your team.

Development

These risks typically apply to the development stage of product development, which usually takes place in Aha! Develop. Enable as many of these as are useful to your team.

The risk alerts you enable here will apply to any records created by your team in your workspace or team.

• No team

• No detailed estimate: Records in your Aha! account can have two types of effort estimates. Initial estimates come early in the prioritization process when the work is largely undefined. Detailed estimates come after the work has been scoped and vetted by experts (often including input from an Aha! Develop team).

• No assignee

• No sprint: This risk alert is most useful to Aha! Develop teams that use sprints.

• No program increment: Work has not been assigned to a SAFe program increment.

• Started late: Select a number of days to define what "late" means to your team.

• Status churn: This risk indicator triggers if a record keeps returning to a previous status instead of progressing through development. Select the number of cyclical status changes that should indicate a record is stuck.

• Work stalled: Select a number of days to define how long a record type can stay in a single In progress workflow status before you would consider progress stalled.

• Dependencies not started

• Dependencies past due: Select a number of days to define what "past due" means to your team.

• Sprint rollover: Work have moved from sprint to sprint without being completed. Select the number of sprint changes that should trigger this alert.

Click Update configuration to save your changes.

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Add delivery risks to custom record layouts

You have enabled the risk alerts you need; now add the Delivery risks field to the appropriate record layouts. This field will let you see all risks associated with a record, and (if you have enabled it) manually flag and comment on at-risk records.

• Navigate to Settings ⚙️ Account Custom layouts. You will need to be an administrator with customizations permissions in either Aha! Roadmaps or Aha! Develop to do this.

• Open the record layout for the epic, feature, and/or requirement records in the workspace or team where you have enabled risk indicators.

• From the View record layout, click Existing fields.

• Search or scroll down to the Delivery risks field, then drag it onto the example custom layout.

• Click Save to save your record.

Records that have originated in your workspace or team will now display the risk alerts you enabled in your settings (and show Delivery on track if there are no known risks).

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Manually flag a record

Automated risk alerts capture the most common reasons why an Aha! record might be at risk. But since sophisticated workflows can lead to unique risk indicators, you can also manually flag a record as at risk. To do this:

• Make sure you have added the Delivery risks field to your custom layout.

• Open a record you think is at risk of missing its delivery date.

• In the Delivery risks field, click Flag record.

• (Optional) Click Add comment to explain why you flagged the record.

You can customize record cards in your workspace or team to indicate whether a record has been manually flagged, and report on manual flags (and comments). If a risk has been resolved, open the record and click Remove flag beside the manual flag.

Remove flag will also delete any comment on the manual record flag.

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Highlight risks with card customizations

Get alerted to at-risk work in context. Customize record cards on the Aha! pages where your team spends the most time.

In Aha! Roadmaps:

• Features board

• Workflow board

• Calendars

In Aha! Develop:

• Sprint planning

• Workflow board

• Backlog management and parking lots

You can add four types at-risk indicators to your cards:

• Flag symbol: Indicates that a record has been manually flagged as at-risk.

• At risk: Indicates that an automated risk indicator has triggered for this record.

• At risk symbol: Indicates that an automated risk indicator has triggered for this record.

• Stopwatch symbol: For records in an Aha! Develop team. Lists the time that a record has been in its current In progress status. Use it to check whether a time-based risk indicator (such as Started late or Dependencies past due) has triggered for this record.

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