Aha!

Kommentare: The past 14 or so months with Aha! has helped us evolve our internal processes and break down barriers to provide more consistent and streamlined cross-collaboration across our teams. Working with Aha! has been a very positive experience.

Vorteile: I always tell people that Aha! brings together the why and the how of a solution, giving the view into the overall strategy components of a solution, mixed with the back end development and ongoing progress. It captures everything our teams needs to collaborate, stay informed, share, and stay on track. It's easy to use and the support team is fantastically responsive, knowledgeable and friendly. As someone with little technical background, the platform and an ever-growing knowledge base made it easy to customize the experience to our unique needs.

Nachteile: Sometimes too many options can be a bad thing. Aha! will let you do basically anything you want, but sometimes having that ability makes it feel overwhelming. However, I'd hardly call that a con since 1) I'd rather have too many options than not enough, and 2) the support team and knowledge base help you through whatever scenario you're in.

Vorteile: Having been on a long journey over the years with many different types of project/product management software solutions, none of them ever seemed to be "the one". Aha takes a different approach, and focuses on management of end-customer value that is aligned against the vision you have for your company and its products. It's the first work management platform I've used that took this holistic approach, and actually its massively empowering. I'm now able to construct high level roadmaps for complex projects that span multi-discipline teams that can be reported to all stakeholders very clearly and easily. Managing the features the team are going to focus on in a customer centric way is also great. Yes, you can use Aha for task management, but often in a product management capacity it's more important to express WHAT customer outcomes & benefits we want, and then let the team figure out HOW to deliver them. Moreover, the customer support from the Aha team is excellent, with plenty of guides not just how to use the platform, but also how to strategically tackle typical challenges that product managers face. I highly recommend Aha. It's a liberating product from a team that clearly have an awesome culture based around customer success.

Nachteile: Aha is a sophisticated tool that's very flexible and configurable so it takes a little while to get fluent with everything it can do, and understand the best workflow patterns with it. That said, once you find your groove it gets much easier. The support team help with that though.
Pricing is also in the premium end of the market, particularly for smaller companies, but then you do tend to get what you pay for.

Kommentare: We can share project information and status immediately within our team, also useful for visual displays for internal and external meetings.

Vorteile: As an IS project management team, we like Aha's ability to organize all project and portfolio information in one spot. The custom report section's timeline report is used frequently for all portfolio reviews, and it allows us to drill down to a product, release, feature with 3 clicks.
We also use the comments sections for meeting minutes and another task tracking. I would estimate we only use 50% of Aha's capabilities but are very happy with our purchase. I Also customer service is 5 star when I submit an email I get a response often within the hour.

Nachteile: There is a bit of a learning curve, but videos help. I think you need a senior resource that will take a couple weeks to sift through all the features and identify what's important for your implementation vs. nice to have. Since we are an IS PM team, we don't use strategy and ideas, we only use product, release, features & reports tabs. We have experimented with strategy and ideas features but have not had the time to fully explore. There are a couple of items I have mentioned to customer service:
I would like the ability to store documents with the assurance I can recall if needed - currently, when I attach word docs I have to keep a backup in SharePoint based on advice from customer service.
I would like the calendar to exclude weekends as the default (or as an option) currently when I set up releases using my templates I have to go in and change start and end dates to workdays,

Vorteile: I particularly like how Aha! allows the PM to link the features/tasks the team are working on to the reasons why these features have been defined and prioritized over others. It gives a clear direction to the entire team. I recently joined a startup company as a product manager and I felt daunted by the amount of features and tasks that were waiting to be developed in the backlog. The team was working in Agile mode, releasing features as soon as they were developed. It was extremely complicated to organize them around objectives and priorities and we had no visibility on when each of them would become available. Some members also felt that the team was sometimes working on features that should not be considered high priority.
Aha! solves these problems as it helped us organize the developments into theme-boxed releases (even if we actually put features in production as they are developed) and the master features improve clarity by grouping features into epics. Each of them are also now clearly graded in term of business value and effort and linked to overarching goals and initiatives in order to justify the priorities. The dynamic reporting features are also a real time-saver. Finally the hotline is amazing! I had a couple of exchanges with them and their reactivity and helpfulness was way above my expectations.

Nachteile: I have only used the software as a trial until now, so I haven't spent too much time in adapting it to our specific needs. Once we sign up for the paid version, I know that I will have to dedicate a few days to set it up to best fit our needs and customize a few of the options.
I am glad that their support team is so responsive. I am pretty sure I will need their help and I am looking forward to working with them and benefiting from their experience from other companies.

Kommentare: Increased ability to manage projects effectively and an ability to handle more projects without a decrease in organization. Upscaling the company's activities as we grow, Aha! is able to positively affect a single project, and also adds benefit when managing multiple projects in an environment that may be stretched for resources at any given time. Aha! can grow with your company.

Vorteile: Vast amount of functionality related to almost all aspects of project management. The scheduling tools to set up different timelines and dependencies on a project is the best I have seen in a single self-contained project management tool. Apart from basic time management and scheduling tools there are also a wide array of data analysis that can produce graphs, charts, and reports on project details recorded into Aha!, providing info previously unrecorded or not taken advantage of while using previous platforms. This allows you to see how much time you spend, your pain points, and areas of improvement for a single project or for the entire company as a whole.

Nachteile: As with any complicated software, the software has a steep learning curve and it is difficult to build new processes in a company for a program with this much coverage and that touches so many aspects of the company. Oftentimes when we began using the product for a certain purpose we found that it was often required to make adjustments in other areas of the company to effectively use the software. A good example would be our adjustment of protocols in the company with JIRA to effectively leverage functionality in Aha!. This often meant work required in those areas that was not initially foreseen. However, when was said and done - after on-boarding the product the benefit was a net increase in our ability to effectively manage projects.