Channels, Breakouts and keeping things tidy

Your first Thread is a joy. Your fifth is fine. Somewhere around your twentieth, the sidebar starts to look like the drawer in the kitchen where the batteries, the takeaway menus and a single mystery key all live together. Nothing is lost, exactly. You cannot find any of it.

This chapter is about putting up shelves.

Channels are the shelves#

A Channel is a team's list of Threads: a client, a team, a product launch, the office move. Every Thread starts in a Channel, from the message box at the bottom of the Channel's screen, so every piece of work has a home and its results have somewhere to go back to. Open a Channel and you see its Threads in one feed. The rest of the Organization's work is still there, on other shelves, out of your way.

Channels can also be private. A private Channel is seen only by its members, and the Threads started in it begin private too. A Channel does not decide who reads each Thread, though: every Thread keeps its own setting. Once that clicks, most of this chapter is common sense.

Next to the shelves is your own short list. The Threads list in the sidebar holds every Thread and Breakout you take part in, newest first, and the Activity list tells you what happened while you were away.

If you used Rally in its early days, you knew Channels as Projects and then Spaces. The Threads inside them used to be called Channels, which is the sort of thing that happens when a product grows up in public.

Breakouts are the margins#

Conversations wander. Halfway through planning a launch, someone wonders whether the pricing page needs rewriting, and suddenly the Thread is about the pricing page. A Breakout is where that tangent goes instead. It is a side conversation inside a Thread, private to you when it starts, with Rally already briefed on everything said so far. Draft something rough, or bring in one colleague to argue it through. The main conversation carries on undisturbed. You have written in the margin instead of tearing a page out of the notebook.

Breakouts used to be called Substreams, a name that sounded like plumbing and has been retired with full honours.

And then finding things again#

The chapter ends with search, which looks through every message, link, artifact and file you are allowed to read, and with links that drop a teammate into exactly the right Thread or Breakout.

If you read only one page of this chapter carefully, make it Who can see what. The rest is about tidiness. That one is about privacy.