Three Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Connect Just Any Team Tool to Clarity

I have been having a number of conversations recently about the power of connecting Rally to Clarity®. Because of this, I did a webinar recently that focused on how to do this. In the session, I went through the steps of moving from ideation to delivery, and looked at how you could use Clarity and Rally to go through this process. (If you’re interested, you can access the BrightTalk webinar, which is titled “Vision to Velocity.”) During the webinar, I got a question that I was waiting for:

“This is really cool—but can I use [team tool] instead of Rally?”

Now, if you’re managing strategic portfolios with Clarity, chances are you’re already integrating data from your delivery teams. And why wouldn’t you? Alignment between execution and strategy is the cornerstone of effective strategic portfolio management.

But here’s the catch: Not all team tools play nicely with your enterprise data. In fact, connecting the wrong tools—or connecting them in the wrong way—can introduce more risk than value. So what are some of the problems that can arise when integrating team-level tools with Clarity?

Before you plug just anything into Clarity instead of Rally, here are three reasons to think twice:

1. Not all tools speak the language of business

Most team-level tools (Jira, Azure DevOps, and so on) were built for task management, not strategic alignment. Connecting these tools directly to Clarity often means you’re pushing in tactical noise that muddies your business view—rather than enhancing it. (To learn more about the distinction between Jira and Rally, see a prior post, “You have Jira. So what? Here’s what you’re still missing.”)

Why is the language of business important? Here are a couple of reasons:

• You need to be able to understand the alignment between the different levels of your organization. Trying to just connect work tasks to strategic themes leads to information gaps that need to be properly accounted for.
  • This is because the data itself is too “flat.” Specifically, it is unstructured and not organized into the “pieces” that the business needs in order to create and maintain a consistent strategy.
  • In order to be successful, you need to focus on understanding business needs and how you apply those needs, as well as the goals of your organization, to planning and prioritizing what you will need to work on.
• You can only see a portion of work the business wants and the execution of that work by a single team. A single team view can’t reflect the status of the strategy. The business will need this insight to pivot as necessary and continue moving forward.

Sure, Jira or Azure DevOps can show velocity or sprint progress. But can they accurately reflect investment impact, financial performance, or value delivered? Without a translation layer like Rally, the answer is usually no. You end up with disconnected data and dashboards full of fluff. You can’t gain end-to-end visibility, which is required to sustain progress on your overall product development, evolve with market and customer demands, and stay aligned with organizational themes.

Clarity is built to track value. Don’t feed it data from tools that only track tasks. Rally speaks the language of business delivery.

2. Data without governance is just noise

Plug in a team tool without guardrails, and suddenly your portfolio data becomes a free-for-all. When talking to customers, there’s a common term for this that we hear: the “wild wild west.” Conflicting data elements, inconsistent hierarchies, and duplicate work items can lead to contradictory information, add unnecessary story (and work item) clutter, and wreak havoc on your cost models and reporting accuracy.

As you begin to plan your work at multiple levels, you will need to make sure that you answer these questions effectively:

• What data construct is responsible for your organization’s work getting done? What construct is responsible for your organization’s strategy? Who maintains them?
• How are you tracking that the work is getting done and ensuring that all of your connections between data types are working properly?
• Are you tracking the same work in both your team tool and in Clarity and is there any overlap?
• Can you sustain what you are doing today as you scale?

There is a real need to get information in such a way that everyone trusts the data. This means you need to avoid manual or batch data collection. This kind of chaos opens the door to audit and compliance issues—especially when you’re capitalizing Agile labor. That’s not a small problem. That’s a financial liability.

You need to make sure that the long-term solution for alleviating the chaos is purpose built to foster trust and reduce any liabilities. Clarity and Jira or Azure DevOps are really good for investments and team-based execution of work. However, if you just use these tools, you will need to build and continually maintain a solution based on your needs. This is due to the following reasons:

• Different add-ons and scripts are required to get the portfolio-level information needed (popular add-ons include script runner and structure). This information gathering is not in real-time.
• Dashboards, BI reports, and JQL queries are needed in order to get the required information out of the data.
• Different projects can have different workflows. A translation is needed for each of the status updates and transitions that happen between these various workflows.

In addition, the administrative overhead required to maintain any cogent level of data integrity will continue to expand, especially as you scale. Ultimately, you’ll reach the point where you will be spending as much time making sure all the extra pieces are running as you do to keep the main system operating properly. Another way to think about what’s missing is by reviewing the following infographic:

You must be able to scale the work that you need to do across your organization. Without the middle layer that a purpose-built platform like Rally gives you, you can’t fund, balance, and plan the work you want to do. All you can do is have a body of work that you’ve funded and see that the work gets done. You can’t pivot, and you can’t balance work with the other priorities you have in a quarter. You have a pile of work that you’re sending to a team, and that’s it.

Bringing Rally and Clarity together gives you the ability to see everything across all of the work that you are planning, at every level. This extends from what the business wants all the way down to all of the work that is being delivered.

Connecting Clarity with Rally isn’t just about integration—it’s about integration with control.

3. You lose the big picture (and the trust of finance)

Executives don’t care if a story moves to “done.” They care if an initiative advances. If your team tool can’t reflect progress at the investment or objective level—or worse, if it reports differently than Clarity—you’ve created a credibility gap.

Why is credibility essential? In a word? Trust.

If that gap isn't closed, finance leaders will stop trusting the numbers. Portfolio managers will chase down teams, asking for manual updates. And the whole vision of strategic portfolio management that you’re working on? It goes out the window.

In order to be successful, you will need to focus on a number of things, including these aspects:

• Visibility. How will you see all of the work to fund it properly?
• Alignment. How do you break down the work into the proper sizes to be worked on?
• Feedback. How do you ensure that you have the right people doing the work?

When using team tools like Jira and Azure DevOps, you are generally focusing on just one team. As a result, that domain is all that you see. You're working on a flat plane of existence. You don't realize that there's more that you need to think about as you start to scale, such as the groups of teams that you have delivering your work. Thus, you will not be able to see the big picture, because you can’t see what is going on with all your teams in the team-level tool. Due to this lack of visibility, you can’t be successful at any level above the team level.

In order to be successful as you scale Agile within your organization, you need to think about what you need to do in terms of your entire organization. You have to consider the different dimensions that data can have (team, team of teams, program, portfolios, and so on). In other words, you need to be thinking about Agile from a dimensional perspective. Thinking about how to use Agile from a team of teams and higher perspective lets you do that. It forces you to think not only about the team you might be working with, but how all of these teams (and teams of teams) need to work together to accomplish their shared goal.

You need to make sure that you have continuous visibility into every level of planning and execution (especially at the mid-range level) to drive decisions, improve trust, and minimize risks.

Don’t risk the integrity of your data for the sake of convenience. Use purpose-built platforms and keep the sanctity of your data first and foremost.

So what should you do instead?

If you’re serious about connecting team execution to enterprise strategy, use an integration approach that enforces governance, filters out the noise, and translates delivery data into business value.

That’s why Rally is more than just a team tool—it’s a purpose-built partner for Clarity. Together, they form the ValueOps platform. ValueOps offers one system of record for investment planning and Agile execution, with no bolt-ons or brittle connectors required.

Because connecting tools to Clarity shouldn’t just be easy. It should just be right.