Rally Office Hours:
October 2, 2025

Summary

The video of the "Rally Office Hours" meeting begins with a welcome and a shout-out for National Custodian Day. The speaker emphasizes that the weekly meetings are for asking questions, sharing experiences, and increasing knowledge about the Rally product. Attendees are encouraged to put questions in the chat, which will be addressed from a Kanban board. The sessions are recorded and made available on the academy page, and attendees agree to be recorded by joining. Professionalism is requested, and participants are reminded not to share anything they don't want to be public.

The video highlights that recordings of past office hours are available on the academy page, with timestamps for different sections. Attendees are requested to identify themselves by name when joining, to prevent spam. The meetings focus on existing functionality of Rally, and for feedback or issues, users are directed to the help section or to open a support ticket. Office hours are held every Thursday from 12:00 to 1:00 PM ET, and users can register for invites and access the Rally community for product feedback.

The Rally team is introduced, including Rusty Lloyd (solution engineer), Cali McClung, Dave Schuster, Heather Kazer, Eric Nash, Todd Galloway (Rally RTE), Yin and Matt from product, and Mike Lentini (marketing).

Product Announcements

• Rally Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server: Wen Chi announces that the MCP server is now available in production for early adopters. This server acts as a standardized interface for AI models and developer tools to interact with Rally's MCP server. Use cases include AI-powered assistants offering automation in CI/CD pipelines to update Rally during the developer workflow, reducing context switching and accelerating software delivery. Organizations' developer teams are invited to reach out for a technical demo.

Q&A Highlights

• Latest Rally Updates (Alexis from GE Healthcare): Alexis asks about new features, particularly for backlog item creation, epic/feature/story decomposition, and data quality analysis within the tool (e.g., configuring a "definition of ready").

• Heather and Cali mention a UI refresh, OKR functionality, and "work rules" for data quality.
• AI integration is available for creating artifacts and decomposition, where information fed into a feature can generate a preview of features with acceptance criteria and decomposed stories, potentially using templates.
• AI also helps interpret charts and data visualizations.
• Cali suggests checking the release notes (from Q4 2024 onwards) in the help section for specific updates.
• Custom Views: Cali introduces "custom views" (replacing custom pages) on the reports page. These use time-box-aware widgets for modern dashboards and are continually being enhanced. Heather demonstrates how custom views can reference attributes from the time box, eliminating the need to repeat information and allowing information to switch dynamically with different milestones.
• Team Health Widget: A new "team health widget" is being rolled out for the team board, using AI to summarize and provide real-time insights into team health. Users need to opt into AI capabilities to access this.
• Alexis is encouraged to contact Jason Deno, her SE, for a follow-up session.

• Capacity Planning Changes (Eve from GE Healthcare): Eve asks for an overview of recent changes in capacity planning, specifically regarding tracking modifications with the publish plan.

• The updated interface provides more detail, showing what's complete, rolled up, estimated, and capacity for both individual teams and the entire plan.
• Users can drill down into specific teams to see features, dependencies, and how estimates are broken down, including work allocated from other teams.
• The "features" view allows filtering and showing specific fields, and looking at capacity.
• Work alignment can be viewed by investment category or strategy.
• Key changes mentioned by Eric Nash include the return of the "capacity cut line" in portfolio items and features views (requires rank to be turned on), and the merging of "plan progression" into the "progress tab" for a unified visualization with revision history.
• Nate has created videos in the help section for learning more. Forecasting is also a new capability.
• Eve is encouraged to follow up with her SE for a deeper dive.

• Saved Views and Hierarchy Changes (Mark): Mark asks if it's possible to easily move saved views up, down, or across the hierarchy, or share them with people on different teams for whom he is not a workspace admin.

• Heather explains that saved views can be shared with an entire workspace (for workspace admins) or a specific team via "manage save views."
• A "hack" involves creating a temporary fake team to share the view, allowing another user to copy it as a private view, and then unsharing it. This works around the limitation of not being able to share with individuals directly, only with projects.
• Another potential hack is for a user to open a shared view on one team's workspace, then save it as a new private view, and then apply it to their own team.
• Mark considers these solutions as hacks, and the product team acknowledges the permission challenges.
• Heather suggests that if a view is widely liked, it could be proposed to a Rally council or governing body to make it a workspace-level view, subject to organizational governance.

Event News

• Bright Talks:

• "10 Minutes with Lance": Lance Knight discusses strategic portfolio management for AI.
• Matt Gorbsky (Chief of Product) will co-present on product operations and using ValueOps to bridge strategy and execution.
• "Frictionless by Design": Brian Nathanson (Head of Product for Clarity) and Matt Gorbsky discuss automating time capture with frictionless time capabilities.

• AI Survey: The UX team is conducting a brief survey for feedback to shape the future of AI in Rally.
• Free Classes: The ValueOps Academy offers free classes on Rally, metrics, VSM, and capacity planning.
• Rally Big Room Planning (PI Planning): Attendees are invited to be guests at the next quarterly PI planning session in about a month to learn how Broadcom does Agile at scale and uses Rally to create Rally. This immersive workshop covers processes and offers the opportunity to interact with teams.

The meeting concludes with a reminder to join the community, attend office hours, subscribe to the newsletter, and explore Rally Anywhere.

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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