Hi there,
We have recently started using initiatives and they are for sure powerful. One of the strongest features is when you tie an initiative to a release and are able to visually represent when your initiatives are going to be tackled.
I think it would make sense that if you map a feature to an initiative and then map that feature to a release, that release inherits the initiative.
Any thoughts on this? I am concerned that the people working for me will forget that step of adding the right initiative to the release.
Yes, please implement this! As we have weekly releases, we don't tie much information to the Release in Aha - it would be too much work to keep it updated, particularly with features getting moved around or pushed out. All the relevant strategy details are entered on the feature. If you're going to use the Release as the primary reporting mechanism for timelines and such, then please have it auto-update based on the features within the release. This would make the system so much more usable for us. I'd actually prefer that timelines and Initiative end dates be based directly on the linked features, but it doesn't seem like that's in the cards.
Hi There,
It has been several months now that we have been using AHA across our organization. We are really happy to have this application and think it has brought a tremendous amount of value to our organization.
One of the things that is a major challenge for us is initiative management across releases. The reason for this is initiatives are not automatically being added to releases when user stories(features) are attached to an initiative or removed when user stories(features) are removed from a release. With this function being completely manual, what we are finding is that releases are missing initiatives or have the wrong initiatives when we go to pull reporting. In my opinion, the initiatives and their releases are probably the most important slice of data we have from which we report and I would imagine that is the case for other organizations. With so many intuitive functions in this tool, I really feel strongly this is something that should be reconsidered. Especially given the propensity for this data to be wrong given the sheer manual effort it takes. I put an idea into the big idea portal (https://big.ideas.aha.io/ideas/APP-I-2131) in Jan which was quickly followed up with a Unlikely to Implement. What would it take to get this reconsidered? I can ask everyone in our eCommerce organization to vote on this if that would help. I think all the folks above would agree that this is our biggest pitfall at the moment with the tool. The other pitfall was completely eradicated with the recent idea to initiative link.