Product Blog

From the various conversations we had with Rally Portfolio Manager early adopters, we know many of you have been longing for a Kanban view of your portfolio. You even told us on Rally Ideas (D1622).

We have been actively working at making that a reality and we did not want you to wait any longer, so a day before April Fool’s, we delivered the first increment of a Portfolio Kanban Board.

Rally Portfolio Kanban

Rally Portfolio Manager users, you may now:

• Define specific Kanban States for each portfolio item type

• View your portfolio items on a Kanban Board

• Prioritize portfolio items from the Kanban Board change portfolio item state by a simple drag-and-drop action on the Board

You can define your portfolio Kanban WIP limits when you define the Kanban state values, but you’ll have to wait just a wee bit longer to view these limits and respective infractions on the actual board. We decided to not delay the delivery of the board any longer so you can start organizing your portfolio items by their state in your idea-to-delivery value stream. It should just be a week or two before you can visualize your WIP limits on the board.

Also, the percent information displays the percentage of stories that have been accepted for that portfolio item. In the near-term, you should have other options on the portfolio item fields to show on the board.

As Johanna Rothman states in her “Manage Your Project Portfolio” book (a great quick read on agile portfolio management), “customers don’t buy or use projects – they buy sets of running, tested features.” Portfolio Kanban is a great technique to help you focus on finishing projects before starting new ones.

Portfolio Kanbans are also incredibly valuable at increasing your development capacity. Why? because the fewer initiatives development works on at the same time, the faster they can deliver those they are working on. If your organization suffers from too much context switching in engineering, you’ll find published data on the cost of multitasking here.

Not familiar with portfolio Kanbans or want to know more about the beast? Read design a portfolio Kanban board, our latest Coaching Corner topic, from our coaching experts.

Questions about the Portfolio Kanban? Read our instructions on how to use the portfolio Kanban Board.

We have a handful of enhancements in mind for this portfolio Kanban board, including listing exit policies above each board column, but we also want to hear from you about this first increment. Please chime in the Rally Ideas Portfolio Management category with your great ideas!

Popularity: 43% [?]

I am back from our three Agile Portfolio Management launch events, caught up on sleep, still dizzy from the excitement. Dining with Geoffrey Moore (what a personable and genuine individual) after reading his Escape Velocity book was a treat. Every product manager owes it to themselves to read that book. Meeting many of our customers who have been longing for better visibility into development status was sugar on the cake.

After spending several years researching this market, it was a great feeling to launch Rally Portfolio Manager, the first agile portfolio management solution. But seeing your solution align with recommendations provided by industry luminaries – from Geoffrey Moore to Dean Leffingwell to Dave West – made me realize what a game-changing offering Rally Portfolio Manager is for Rally.

I was both nervous and relaxed before our first event in San Mateo, CA on December 6. Nervous about the complex combined live/simulcast event production but relaxed about the product we were about to announce.  The event production went flawlessly, thanks to our phenomenal marketing crew. After an entire a year of disciplined customer development with the Stratus Preview, I knew the product would hit the mark. No nervousness there. The only missing piece was not to have my product owner experience the excitement live with me. As the great product owner she is, she was holding down the fort, busy staying close to the team (and answering simulcast questions!), as any great product owners does and making sure all the final details were taken care of, including help content and videos. Susan exemplifies the quintessential product owner – one who relies on her product manager’s knowledge of market trends and customer needs to define the right features to build, then build those right in direct collaboration with her exceptional development team(s). It takes both a product manager and a product owner (and of course a great development team) to “build the right things right,” so I really missed not having her at the event.

Speaking of missing the events, if you could not attend, browse the Agile Portfolio Management toolkit for the recordings, nicely cut into digestible portions. Make sure to replay the customer experience presentations and panel discussions. Those were priceless at providing real-life experiences to current strategic planning challenges.

Rally Portfolio Manager

For information on Rally Portfolio Manager, in Rally, click the main Help link.

Unlimited Edition customers, if you are ready to experience Rally Portfolio Manager, have your Rally workspace administration contact support. You’ll be asked to first read the Getting Started guide, so here is the link to save you time.

Susan and I will be tuning in to the early Rally Portfolio Manager feedback sent to rpm-usability@rallydev.com then engaging with users on an on-going basis about feature ideas in the new Portfolio Management category in Rally Ideas.

Agile portfolio management is serious business but we had to have some fun launching it. Check out the two adventurers tackle the alignment of business and development trailer.

Happy strategic planning!

Catherine Connor
Product Manager for Rally Portfolio Manager

Popularity: 65% [?]

Are you hearing what your users have to say? Do your users even have a way to voice their input? This is a case of: “If you build it, they will come.”

In the era of LinkedIn and Facebook, product managers seem to miss out on the value of crowd-sourcing in staying connected with their users. Idea sites, like Rally Idea Manager, provide a social conduit for users to converse with product managers and among themselves about product ideas (think “conversations over contract negotiation!” in the Agile manifesto). Reciprocally, these sites create a feedback loop to submitters of ideas, keeping users informed of the evolution of their ideas. Idea votes are also an underestimated value to creating quantitative business cases.

Rally Idea Manager Multisite:

This week, we are expanding our Rally Idea Manager offering to provide you with more than one social site to engage with users. Up until today, product managers using Rally Idea Manager to collect a continuous flow of user input could organize ideas into categories in a single site. If you are a large organization with very diverse products, it makes sense to have a fully dedicated idea site for each product.

With Rally Idea Manager Multisite, you can setup individual sites to manage ideas by product or by input source for a product (for example: strategic customers, partners, vertical markets, geography, etc.)

The sites all integrate with Rally, so from an Enterprise view, your development work can link to all sources of ideas with each source being tracked in a separate site.

Usage Tips for Existing Users:

If you already got your feet wet with Rally Idea Manager, here are some tips to leverage more of Rally Idea Manager:

• To spell check idea description, use the new spell checker option in the idea description field. You asked for it on Rally Ideas, we delivered!

Spell Check

• To show the most voted features for an idea category, select the Category from the Categories panel on the right, then click the Most Promoted tab.
• Vice-versa, to show the ideas expected to be delivered soon for a specific idea category, select a status from the Statuses panel on the right, then click the status-specific tab (your administrator can enable status-specific tabs from Setup > Ideas > Idea Tabs)

Most Promoted

• To embed a graphic in an idea submission, attach a PNG or JPEG file type and the graphic will show in place in the idea description. Other formats (GIF, TIFF, etc..) are simply attached to the idea post.
• To track the progress of ideas from one state to another, download the all ideas report and filter by “Days in status”
• To report on ideas a specific customer is interested in, download the “idea by interest report” and filter by the specific customer name (see steps here).

Idea by Interest Report

Need a Booster to Get Started?

If you have not already adopted Rally Idea Manager (which comes included in your Rally Unlimited Edition) and are tempted but wonder where you’ll find the time to get your site up and running, do yourself a favor (you deserve it consider the Rally Idea Manager workshop. In a 2 day hands-on session, we will fill you in on all the best practices to leverage your site (we have been using ours – Rally Ideas for over a year) and you will leave with your site ready and some best practice techniques.

For those of you in the Denver area, come hear about Rally Idea Manager at Product Camp Denver on Oct 29!

Catherine Connor

Popularity: 47% [?]

We are celebrating the end of July by rounding out the user administration enhancements we have been focused on for the past few months. In this weekend’s release (7/31), you will see a Print option and an Export as CSV option on the Users pages in the Setup area of Rally:

Users page for subscription and workspaces:

Subscription and Workspace users

Users page for projects:

Project users

These options should greatly facilitate managing large number of users. If you use the User Lookup mashup, we encourage you to switch to the new Users page. Tip: the total number of active users is reflected at the bottom of the Users pages.

By the way, this mashup is a good reminder of the power of using our Web Services API to add functionality to Rally. We wrote this mashup to quickly deliver value to our customers while keeping our product team focused on our product roadmap. We then incorporated the mashup functionality in the core product when many users reported value from its use. We encourage you to share any mashups you have created by adding them to the mashup dropbox in Agile Commons. Our product team will review them and post them to the Mashups page, and you’ll get a chance to be listed on the Mashup Developers Hall of Fame

BTW, wanna know about an upcoming mashup? the Story Deep Copy mashup. It will allow in one click to copy a story, its children stories and tasks. It will be available shortly, and we will announce it on the Product Blog when it is completed.

We have also added Programs to the custom report designer on the Reports tab. If you use Rally programs, you can now slice and dice defect and story information for a specific Program. If you use Time Tracker timesheets, your timesheet reports can be scoped to a program. Pretty nifty.

As a reminder, Agile2010 (in Orlando, FL) is less than two weeks away! We will have some exciting new capabilities to demo, so be sure to stop by the booth! And, don’t forget to install Rally for the iPhone so you can stay in touch with your teams’ progress while you’re at the show.

Long live July… Please August, be a little cooler for Agile’s sake!

Popularity: 52% [?]

Did you know that non-Rally users in your organization can benefit from the information you track in Rally?

You can radiate the status of your Rally projects throughout your organization by displaying Rally standard reports and mashups in wikis, corporate dashboards, portals and plain old Web pages. This provides executives, managers and non-Rally users a convenient way to view status and health of development projects from applications that they use every day.

Below is an example of a Rally report (Iteration Burndown) embedded in a SharePoint page, clearly showing that this project is in great shape and is proceeding as expected:

Many times business executives are interested in knowing when a roadmap feature or initiative will be completed, rather than focusing on individual stories and projects. In this case, the Story Burnup chart (shown below) can be embedded into a corporate dashboard, providing non-technical users with a forecasted completion date and an up-to-date summary of work accepted and work remaining.

Want to learn more? See the specific examples for SharePoint and Confluence on Agile Commons.

Popularity: 56% [?]