How we improved delivery speed with Aha!

Lesley Craggs

Strategic Project Manager

We had a problem

At Swarovski, we work in cross-functional teams to deliver initiatives. For example, we currently have an effort underway to improve our online platform that includes team members from IT, content, and strategy.

Prior to using Aha!, it was challenging to align teams around a shared set of priorities and coordinate work across them. Each team followed different processes and had a different way of working. With people in multiple locations and no centralized system to manage our products, communication was extremely fragmented. It was difficult to understand the status of releases and manage the dependencies between them. The situation was impacting our ability to deliver in a timely way. We knew that we needed to find a more structured and cohesive approach that would enable us to focus on achieving our goals and work together more effectively.

Aha! as a solution

Aha! provides the framework we need to clearly articulate our strategy. It also enables us to create visual roadmaps and communicate our plans. This ensures that everyone has a common understanding of the bigger picture and priorities. We are also able to prioritize features more judiciously to focus on meeting the most critical requirements.

Aha! enables us to visualize our plans, making the intangible tangible. It brings a new level of structure to our processes and keeps us focused on achieving our strategy.

Having a single, online location to manage our projects is improving our delivery speed. We use the kanban-style workflow board in Aha! to review progress as a team each day. This enables us to easily share updates, discuss status, and identify any blockers holding us up. For distributed teams, this is essential to keep everyone in sync.

Life is good

Aha! has enabled our cross-functional teams to work in a more efficient and collaborative way. Communication has improved significantly as we now have greater clarity around who is working on what, how work items are linked, and when they are due.

Aha! is a great tool for cross-functional collaboration, ensuring that processes are clearly understood and consistently implemented.

Aha! has also significantly reduced the administrative load for managing our initiatives. Each team member is now responsible for keeping the status of their work items up-to-date, saving us a lot of time that we previously spent tracking this information down. Overall, we are able to deliver with much greater speed, focus, and transparency.