Rally Work Rules: Ensuring Data Hygiene Across the Enterprise

When teams in large enterprises start to adopt Agile work management practices, release train engineers (RTEs) and scrum masters play a pivotal role. These individuals provide guidance and support to portfolio managers and Agile teams. They are always looking for ways to improve portfolio management practices in their enterprise. Additionally, when portfolios include product development that is subject to external audits, these individuals are also responsible for governance and ensuring compliance with relevant policies, which is critical to the success of the enterprise.

But what if the data provided by teams is missing information or has misclassified work? It can be challenging to achieve consistency, especially in an enterprise that has delivery teams contributing to multiple release trains and varying levels of synchronization. Often, RTEs need to reach out to their peers or teams to prompt them to review their data. However, too often, issues are only addressed after red flags have been raised. On an ongoing basis, RTEs need to remind teams to update the data.

There are ways RTEs and scrum masters can improve data hygiene and integrity in spite of these challenges. In Rally, RTEs can create custom dashboards that provide useful guides. They can create dashboards that display custom lists with parameterized queries to highlight work items or portfolio items that require attention from specific roles.

In addition, Rally now has Work Rules. With these capabilities, teams in large enterprises can:

Create flexible rules that help users improve the quality of their data and reporting. Teams work differently, so this flexibility is key; a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t practical.

Establish guard rails that help guide users to update their work accurately—and at the right stage of work.

With these capabilities, teams can better ensure compliance with standards and policies. This is integral to helping ensure the smooth flow of daily work, and applying best practices so that teams improve reporting and the quality and auditability of their data.

How can teams roll out Rally Work Rules in large enterprises?

Here’s a high-level overview of the steps you can take to roll out Work Rules in your enterprise.

Plan

You should start by gaining an understanding of compliance requirements and what data is needed for audits. Following that, have a discussion with your RTEs, workspace administrators, and project administrators to define the areas that need work rules. Are work rules needed to keep work items up-to-date for all teams? Or do portfolio items have missing data that prevents proper association or classification?

Based on that, identify the type of Work Rules that are needed. Rally enables teams to define Work Rules to:

• Enforce required fields.
• Make fields read-only. In this way, teams can preserve the integrity of specific fields once work reaches a certain state, such as when it is done or accepted.

You can also plan to roll out Work Rules uniformly across the entire workspace or apply them to a subset of projects based on their specific workflow requirements.

Communicate

Before implementing Work Rules, make sure that you communicate the resulting process changes so that users understand the impact. It is also important to highlight that some Work Rules provide warnings while others issue an error and prevent updates.

In Rally, Work Rules are visible from the Team Board and Portfolio Kanban Board. This helps keep users informed about the list of Work Rules applicable to their projects (and their source).

Implement

When implementing Work Rules, ensure that they provide meaningful warnings or error messages so that users know how to correct their data. To support these efforts, Rally makes it easy to customize warnings and error messages.  

Conclusion

It is important to remember that Work Rules should be developed collaboratively, and regularly reviewed and updated to ensure they remain relevant and effective.

By leveraging Rally Work Rules, teams can establish consistent data hygiene that helps improve data integrity and portfolio reporting. Ultimately, this makes it much easier for teams in large enterprises to establish proper governance and ensure compliance. For more information and best practices on how to create Work Rules, see the Work Rules documentation.