Get Started with Rally Portfolio Manager

Before you do any portfolio management in Rally, there are some important concepts to discuss with your organization. Understanding how your organization models your portfolio and identifying the terms you use to talk about it is essential for producing your portfolio in Rally.

• Portfolio steering in your organization
• Models for strategy and execution
• Your organization's language

Portfolio steering in your organization

Traditional portfolio managers build a plan and then monitor the progress of that plan. Agile portfolio managers adjust and steer their plans based on new information obtained through feedback loops.

Acting on new information enables the business to exploit opportunities, mitigate risks, and maximize value delivered. Portfolio steering helps your organization to easily shift capacity, adjust focus, and even stop initiatives that are no longer the best investments.

Modeling your portfolio in Rally may involve redesigning all or part of your portfolio management process to emphasize value delivery, strategic alignment, and smart steering. Rally coaches can help you implement these process changes and can help you facilitate your portfolio planning and steering events. Rally's Agile Portfolio Steering Workshop guides you in this process and helps you reflect it in Rally Portfolio Manager.

Contact your Rally account representative at sales@rallydev.com to schedule an Agile Portfolio Steering workshop.

Models for strategy and execution

The portfolio item hierarchy models your portfolio, with each level representing a different type of strategic goal. The higher types of the hierarchy represent goals or themes to bring to market over a longer period of time. The lower types of the hierarchy represent more discrete items of market value.

Create as many types as you wish, and name them using the language of your organization. As you create each type, Rally assists you to implement parent-child type rules to keep the hierarchy in order as you designed it.

You may currently be using higher levels of the user story hierarchy to model your portfolio. When you start to use portfolio items, you can shift to have user stories only represent the actual work done to bring the portfolio to market.

Portfolio item types versus Rally projects

To distinguish between Rally projects and Rally portfolio items, use this simple rule:

Your organization's language

Your organization has its own names and terms for categorizations and levels of strategic work and sizing. In Rally, we represent a specific theme, initiative, or feature using a portfolio item. Here are some aspects of portfolio items that you will need to name:

Portfolio item type

The portfolio item type is the name of each level in your strategic hierarchy. When creating a portfolio item, you must identify its type. Each workspace has a default of three portfolio item types:

• Theme – Level 3 (top level)
• Initiative – Level 2 (middle level)
• Feature – Level 1 (bottom level, connects to the execution—or user story—hierarchy)

You can rename default portfolio item types. You can delete some of the portfolio item types if you do not use all the default levels.

You may name as many portfolio item types as you like. Be sure to give each portfolio item type name and level number to your administrator. Level numbers start at 1 for the lowest type of portfolio item in the hierarchy and increase by one for each level.

See Administer portfolio items for details on setting up this field.

Investment category

The investment category is a budget or investment area that a portfolio item supports. Define a list of investment categories possible for a portfolio item. Each portfolio item can be associated with one investment category.

Each workspace has a default of four investment category drop-down options:

• Short Term Growth
• Strategic Growth
• Cost Savings
• Maintenance

You may name as many options as you like. Give this list to your administrator.

Examples of investment categories include:

• Geoffrey Moore's Escape Velocity – Differentiate, Neutralize, Optimize
• Gartner's Strategic IT Spend – Run, Grow, Transform
• Gartner's TIME triage framework – Tolerate, Invest, Migrate, Eliminate

See Administer portfolio items for details on setting up this field.

Portfolio item types versus investment categories 

When you define your portfolio information, if you hesitate between defining a Portfolio Item Type or using Investment Categories, consider the following.

Investment Categories are intended to track portfolio allocations. These portfolio allocations are a way for your portfolio committee to track that development work is aligned with the amount of funding you allocated to each investment category. This is especially helpful to protect small portfolio investments that have a tendency to see their development resources borrowed by other groups. By defining investment categories, you help keep the appropriate development resources focused on where the business expects value delivery.

Preliminary estimate

The preliminary estimate is the size that you think your portfolio item may be. You may identify as many sizes as you like, and for each you must provide a name and numeric value. You may use any type of numeric value, although Rally coaches advise using relative point sizes. These values will be used in future planning features to help you schedule portfolio items into a timeframe.

Each workspace has a default of five preliminary estimate options:

• XS (1)
• S (2)
• M (5)
• L (8)
• XL (13)

See Administer portfolio items for details on setting up this field.

Value Scores and Risk Scores

For each portfolio item you may choose to identify a Value Score and a Risk Score. The Value Score is a number that indicates the worth of the portfolio item. The Risk Score is a number that indicates the chances you will take in bringing the portfolio item to market.

The numbers you use for Value and Risk scores should have meaning for your organization. Consider using numbers that may be multiplied or graphed in a Rally app to provide more insight in prioritizing portfolio items. You can use a custom field to track textual risk assessment.

Custom fields

As with other Rally work item types, you may add custom fields to portfolio items. These fields will appear in the editor for each portfolio item, regardless of its type. Consider the information that is essential to track for your portfolio (that isn't already part of the portfolio item structure).

Although you can use the workspace defaults, your Rally subscription or workspace administrator should customize Rally Portfolio Manager for your organization.

These are the workspace configuration areas that you may want to change:

• Portfolio item Prefix

  This is the text that appears before the ID number of your portfolio item. The default is PI.

• Portfolio item Types
• Investment category options
• Preliminary estimate options
• Custom fields

Provide your administrator with the names and values needed to customize these areas. In addition, your administrator may need to add projects and update user permissions for projects containing portfolio items.

Online help and training videos are available from various places in Rally:

• "New" image badges on navigation links and Rally Portfolio Manager pages
• Context-sensitive links (question mark icons on the upper-right of each page) to online help
• The general online Help link at the top right of the Rally header area
• Search within Rally online help

To contact support, click the Contact Support link on the footer of any Rally page.