Aha! Roadmaps | Prioritize and track strategic initiatives

Most companies have a long list of initiatives that they want to work on, but they do not have a good way of identifying which strategic initiatives are most important in reaching the overall vision and goals.

Strategic initiatives are the bridge between your vision and your roadmap. If you standardize how you prioritize initiatives, you can feel confident that your roadmap will include the most important work, which in turn will enable you to reach your key business goals.

Click any of the following links to skip ahead:

• Create an initiative template

• Create a custom scorecard

• Prioritize your initiatives

• Compare initiative views

• Visualize your strategic roadmap

Create an initiative template

To prioritize initiatives, you have to be able to compare them to each other. You have two tools to help you standardize initiatives throughout your Aha! Roadmaps account, and help orient cross-functional teams to their work in the same way:

• Custom layouts are the arrangement of fields and tabs on your initiatives. You can design your initiative layouts to match you teams' workflow, include custom fields that capture important data, and prioritize information that highlight's an initiative's value. In the next section, we will discuss custom scorecards, a custom field that will be the foundation of your prioritization conversation.

• Custom initiative description templates pre-populate your initiative descriptions, so that anyone who creates a new initiative using the same custom workflow modal will structure it in the same way.
  
  Note: Custom initiative description templates will appear for initiatives created through the create modal, not through CSV import or the starter roadmap.

Top

Create a custom scorecard

Prioritizing initiatives starts with a product value score. You can review the default Aha! Roadmaps scorecard or create a custom scorecard under Settings ⚙️ Account Aha! scorecards. You need to be an administrator with customization permissions to create a scorecard.

Your initiative scorecard will be made up of metrics. Each metric should reflect some aspect of your strategy to ensure you can use it to objectively measure its value.

Next, add a custom scorecard field to initiatives to use your newly created scorecard, then add that custom field to a custom layout. The custom field configuration is in Settings ⚙️ Account Custom fields, and the custom layout configuration is in Settings ⚙️ Account Custom layouts.

Finally, you need to make sure that initiatives in your workspace use the initiative layout you just created. Navigate to Settings ⚙️ Workspace Configure. You need to be an owner in your workspace to do this.

You can add custom fields at either the workspace or workspace line levels. If you add custom fields for a workspace line, all of its child lines and workspaces will inherit its custom fields by default (though you can choose to customize this for each workspace or workspace line). This can save you a ton of time by enabling you to create custom fields once and have them used by many workspaces.

With the scorecard added, you can score your various initiatives to capture how they measure up against your different metrics. You can then use the reports tools in Aha! Roadmaps to analyze the scoring information and the roadmap tools to visualize it.

Top

Prioritize your initiatives

You can use the Roadmaps List view to analyze scores across each initiative to help make decisions on how to best prioritize your strategic initiatives. This allows you to have a detailed view for tradeoffs between each strategic initiative. And, if you have rolled-up initiatives in child workspaces to higher levels of strategy, you can include these rolled-up initiatives in your list report — so you can prioritize the work that will best align with your overall strategy.

Top

Compare initiative views

To help you analyze your initiatives from different views without, use the Change view type dropdown to switch between several common views while retaining any filters you have added.

Note: Filters you add yourself will transfer to a new view. Page filters — filters associated with the original view that cannot be removed — will not appear on the new view.

Your View type options are:

• Details: A list of all your initiatives, expanded to include their details.

• Chart: A grid to help you visualize and compare your initiatives to each other based on the metrics you select.

• Workflow: A kanban-style view of your initiatives, epics, features, and requirements.

• Roadmap: The strategy roadmap is one of the most useful ways to visualize the progress of your epics and features.

Top

Visualize your strategic roadmap

After the priorities are clear, create a strategy roadmap based on initiative scores. This allows you to reflect the timing of each of the prioritized initiatives and ensures that the entire team is moving fluidly in the right direction.

You can use the view options and filter controls to select only the initiatives you wish to communicate to ensure the team is focused on what matters most. To see how initiatives at lower levels of your hierarchy contribute to your overall strategy, include roll-up initiatives in your roadmap.

Note: You can visualize cross-team dependencies on the strategy roadmap, to highlight items that an initiative depends on that might not be visible on the roadmap. You can also use custom reports and charts to analyze critical dependencies.

Top