There’s a new tool available for software development projects. Aha! is designed to help define a product roadmap and enable collaboration to keep the project humming along smoothly.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been involved on the project management side of the fence. I always used—and still have—Microsoft Project. The thing with Microsoft Project, though, is that it’s a complex and cumbersome tool, and it requires a fair amount of knowledge and experience to use properly.
Also, Project doesn’t easily allow a project manager to illustrate a roadmap and connect the dots between achieving the strategic vision and the milestones of the project. Lastly, Project lets project managers share information, but it doesn’t facilitate true team collaboration.
I walked through a demo of Aha! with co-founder and CEO Brian de Haaff. I was impressed with the general layout and simplicity of it. Compared to Microsoft Project, Aha! has a much cleaner, more intuitive layout. Brian showed me how dragging requirements around to re-order them in one view automatically updates their position and priority in other views as well.
Aha! could be used to manage other kinds of projects, but the Aha! team set out with a goal of streamlining software development. One sign of its development-centric approach is the fact that it has API hooks into various bug-tracking and revision control systems. An Aha! project manager can push completed features and requirements into a development platform like Jira, and status changes made in Jira are also automatically reflected in Aha!.
At $59 per user per month, Aha! isn’t cheap. There’s also an enterprise version that costs $99 per user per month but allows for an unlimited number of users to be added with review and commenting capabilities—those who need to keep track of a project without being integrally involved.
You can sign up for a free trial of Aha! at the company’s website.