Sidekicks

Everything in this book so far has had one thing in common: you were there. You typed a message, Rally got to work, and you watched it happen. That is a fine arrangement for most jobs and a poor one for the Monday report, the morning inbox sweep, or the support channel that needs watching while you are asleep. Rally is willing to work nights. Somebody has to tell it what to do when nobody is looking.

Telling it is the hard part. Handing a job to anyone, person or program, goes wrong in the explaining, and a form with a frequency drop-down and a row of weekday checkboxes makes the explaining worse: it does exactly what you clicked, which is rarely all of what you meant. So Sidekicks have no form. A Sidekick is a named helper that you describe once, in plain words, and then stop describing. You talk to it the way you talk to Rally in a Channel, and it writes its own instructions down: a name, a short description, the instructions themselves and, if you want it to act on its own, one or more triggers that say when to start.

Two kinds of helper#

Sidekicks come in two kinds, and a trigger is the whole difference.

• Instructions only. A Sidekick with no trigger never starts anything by itself. It is a page of know-how that Rally can pick up in any conversation where it is relevant: your brand voice, the way your team writes release notes, the checklist for a new client. Write it once and every conversation can borrow it.
• Delegated work. A Sidekick with a trigger runs on its own. Every Monday at 9, every hour, whenever a new meeting note lands, whenever someone emails it. Each time, it does its job and reports back where you told it to.

The second idea is ownership. A Sidekick belongs to you alone, to the whole Organization, or to one Channel, and that decides who can see it, who can change it, and whose connected tools it uses when it runs.

A word about the old name#

Sidekicks used to be called Automations. The app has nearly finished the move, but a few corners still use the old word: Rally's Home tab in Slack talks about creating an automation, some descriptions in Settings say "automations" where they mean Sidekicks, and some link addresses still contain automations. They are all the same thing.

Where this chapter goes#

The pages ahead start with what a Sidekick is and who it belongs to, then show you how to make one by describing it. After that come the triggers that start a Sidekick, the window where you manage them, and where a Sidekick's results end up. The last page brings a Sidekick into a Channel so the whole room can use it.