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Status Future consideration
Categories Reports
Created by Paul Edge
Created on Jul 7, 2018

Support rendering of larger roadmap data sets in built-in Portfolio Roadmap view without truncating at 500 items

As a product strategy leader I need to visualize and share my overall roadmap with stakeholders preferably in an automated, always fresh way directly from our roadmap system of record, Aha.
For my particular roadmap data the built in Portfolio roadmap view renders with a "truncated" error message. I've seen this error message elsewhere but the difference with the Portfolio Roadmap view is there are no filter options, not even for Timeframe which is often a handy way to constrain things to the current period. 
This is a unique combined hierarchical and timeline view that cannot be recreated in custom reports because Aha reporting -- with one exception I'll come to -- only supports a max of two levels of hierarchy for initiatives and goals (meaning a report on a set of items can show the name of the "roll-up", only the name and there's no ability to see the grandparent of an item.

There is the hierarchy report that supports multiple levels however for my data set I quickly run in to the truncation error message here too. It is possible to create a set of similar reports where each one is filtered on a subset of our roadmap data.
While there are some interesting aspects to my company's roadmap that add some complexity we're only 800 people, not a giant multi-national, and we've only been using Aha a couple of years. Since I already have more than 500 Releases in my data set the top level Portfolio roadmap view won't full render for me and without some kind of change it never will, 'cos I can't delete releases from my system of record.
Possible solutions include:
1. support rendering of more things. I recognize the performance impact running in a browser. And I am often using a workstation class machine with 32GB of RAM. I can live with certain things not working on my cell phone but they could work on a workstation
2. Enhance custom reports like the custom roadmap timeline to support at least three levels of hierarchy. In my case I have company, portfolio and product level initiatives and the same for goals (or OKRs as we call them). I care about the Portfolio report and the Hierarchy report because I don't have anywhere else in Aha to go to see all three levels
3. Enhance the Aha API with a Tableau web data connector (and/or similar for PowerBI, Spotfire and so on). My workaround today is to drop extracts of Aha data to Excel and visualize in Tableau. As a sidenote for the Aha product team: we are quickly shifting to only using Aha for data entry at the frontline product manager level and not using it for any reports or visualizations especially not top level whole roadmap views. It's just easier to use Tableau even with the need to export data manually.
4. Add hierarchy and alternate sort options to the Strategy roadmap view. This is another view that, while it renders everything, I just cannot use with any stakeholders because it mixes all three levels of initiative in an undifferentiated way and will only sort by the start date of the initiative
5. Flatten out the Analytics--Diagram report. I've seen this requested elsewhere but it's another native Aha view that shows hierarchy at scale. It's just completely unusable in a circular layout. Flatten out the rendering might make it more useful although it's not really the timeline view that the Portfolio roadmap provides.
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  • Daniel Dolinov
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    Sep 21, 2019

    Yes please!  I often need to run reports that run dependency reports where I end up with more than 500 records returned.

  • Mike Craft
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    Nov 7, 2018

    I support the desire for adding better / easier integration with Tableau.

  • Guest
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    Jul 9, 2018

    hi