Rally Office Hours:
January 8, 2026

Summary

Rally Product Tip: Capacity Forecasting

• Location: The Capacity Forecasting screen is found under the "Track" tab in classic navigation, under the "Charts" section of the Team Board.
• Forecasting Method: Rally runs thousands of Monte Carlo simulations to provide probabilistic answers about future work delivery, moving away from deterministic answers.
• Results: The results show a range of predicted work items (count or points) that can be done for different confidence levels (e.g., a 90% confidence level or a 50% chance). The displayed histogram shows the results of the thousands of simulations, with more results landing in the middle like a bell-shaped curve.
  Input Data: The forecasting uses the last year's worth of data for the chosen team.
• Tips on Settings:
  • Excluding Atypical Weeks: Users can remove weeks from the input data if they were not "normal," but only if that atypical event (e.g., a special holiday or training) is not part of the team's regular rhythm during the forecast period.
  • Team Availability: This setting should generally be left at 100%, but it can be adjusted if there are anticipated changes in team size, such as losing a team member for an extended period.
  • Work Complexity: Users can choose from options like "understood typical work," "well understood," "somewhat new or unclear work, minor concerns," or "newer or unclear work, major concerns." This helps the simulations understand if there might be more variance in estimates.
• Delivery Forecasting: This is similar to capacity forecasting, but instead of fixing the time box and varying the work done, it fixes the work and varies the time needed.

Questions and Answers (Q&A)

• Tracking User Story Handoffs: Ed asked for a way to track ownership changes of a user story between resources (e.g., developer to QA).
  • It can be done via Revision History, which records who changed something, but this requires using the Lookback API to query for deltas over time, as a built-in reporting feature is not available.
  • A better solution suggested was to use Tasks to assign the QA person or other resources, keeping the "owner" field as the single person responsible for the outcome.
  • Custom fields can also be used, such as a "Pair" field for a second co-owner. However, the actual "owner" field is the one that appears on the board.
• Adding a Start Date to Delivery Forecasting: Anit asked if it's possible to add a start date to the delivery forecasting, so a feature starting in the future (e.g., January 15th) can be estimated.
  • The forecasting models on the team board are for work items (stories/defects) and look at past performance to predict when a fixed scope of work could be done; they don't imply that all work starts today.
  • This sounds more like a need for forecasting on individual portfolio items (features/initiatives), which have Plan Start and Plan End dates, but that is a different need than what this screen addresses.
• Probabilistic Reporting for Portfolio Level Flow Metrics: Alexis asked about probabilistic reporting for portfolio items (Epics, Capabilities, Features) across a value stream, similar to the team-level capacity/delivery forecasting.
  • Rally has more classic tools for this, like looking at a portfolio item's throughput or cumulative flow diagram, but there is no feature in Rally itself like the one shown for the team.
  • A custom widget could be built to use portfolio item throughput and start doing forecasting.
  • Broadcom has a sibling product, ValueOps Insights, which can run linear regression and Monte Carlo simulations on initiative throughput and predict the probability of hitting a goal.
• Using Timeline View for User Stories: Anit asked if the timeline view can be used for user stories, especially to visualize dependencies between stories from multiple teams.
  • The timeline view is primarily for showing the progress of portfolio items (Features, Initiatives) and not for the story level.
• Tracking User Skills: Jim asked how to track the skills of an individual user or project team.
  • The suggested approach is to add custom fields to either the User object or the Project object.
  • The ability to add custom fields to a Project and a User object was validated.
• Cleaning Up Artifacts in Closed Projects: Brandy asked for best practices for cleaning up artifacts (like features or defects) assigned to a project before archiving or closing it.
  • A common practice is to create an "Archived Project" hierarchy. The team should first clean up open defects and in-progress work, then move the project under the archived hierarchy, and remove the editor access for all users. This keeps the objects searchable for a while before permanently closing the project.
• Removing Unused Investment Categories: Brandy asked the best way to remove investment categories that are no longer used.
  • Categories cannot be deleted if they are assigned to any portfolio items.
  • One suggestion is to prefix the category with "obsolete" so it is not used for the time being.
  • If the user is willing to do the cleanup, the "Show Occurrences" link on the category edit page can be used to find where the category is assigned. Once all occurrences are removed, the category can be deleted.

Event News

• ValueOps Insights: Rally is looking for design partners to help innovate and improve their recent analytics platform, ValueOps Insights. Partners get onboarded for free, receive free insights, and can influence the product's direction. Interested parties can contact Rusty Lloyd or Shamim Ahmed.
• Roadmap Sessions: Attendees are encouraged to view the on-demand link for the latest roadmap session from Matt Gorpsky and team to understand the product's direction.
• Connect Strategy and Execution: A webinar on connecting strategy and execution is available.
• Business Agility Workshop: Broadcom holds a quarterly business agility workshop paired with the Rally Big Room Planning (BRP) process. This four-day workshop shows customers how to do agility planning at scale, use Rally to plan features, look at data across multiple teams, and apply enterprise agility to value stream management. Attendees can follow a link to nominate themselves.

Note: This summary was generated with the assistance of an artificial intelligence language model. While we strive for accuracy and quality, please note that the summary may not be entirely error-free. We recommend independently verifying the content and consulting with a product expert for specific advice or information. We do not assume any responsibility or liability for the use or interpretation of this content.

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