Where a Sidekick's results go

A Sidekick that does its work and tells nobody is keeping a diary. This page covers getting the results in front of the right people, and keeping a repeating Sidekick from telling you the same thing twice.

The instructions decide#

Rally does not send a run's result anywhere by itself. Where the work goes is part of the Sidekick's instructions, which means you choose it in plain words while you make the Sidekick, and you can change it the same way.

A Sidekick can deliver its work:

• into its home Channel or Breakout. A Channel Sidekick posts into the conversation it belongs to unless you tell it otherwise. "Post the summary here" is all it takes.
• into other conversations you attach to it. Ask the drafting assistant to attach another Channel, and the Sidekick can post there too.
• out through your connected tools. "Send me a Slack DM", "email the team", "add a comment to the Linear issue". Anything Rally can do with a connected tool, a run can do (see Connecting your other tools).

Different runs can send to different places, too: "Post routine weeks here, but DM me if anything is on fire."

A Sidekick's post appears in the conversation under the Sidekick's own name, so everyone can tell it apart from a person or from Rally answering a question. Now and then a post is labelled "Automation", the old name for a Sidekick.

Three things trip people up.

• Say where. A personal Sidekick with no home conversation and no connected tools to send through can only leave its work in its Run history, where only a summary is visible. If a Sidekick seems to run and say nothing, check that its instructions tell it where to post.
• It can only post where you can. A Sidekick can deliver only to places the person who set it up is allowed to post.
• Describing is not sending. A run that only says it sent a message has not sent one. If nothing arrived, look at the run history; the run may have stopped or be waiting for input.

Delivering to Slack#

If your Organization has Rally installed in Slack, a Sidekick can send you its results as a direct message from Rally. For that to work you also need to link your own Slack account to Rally, from Rally's Home tab in Slack. Rally in Slack and Slack: reading, replies and your own connection explain both steps.

A good first Sidekick to try is the morning inbox briefing. Ask:

Check my Gmail every morning and send me the stack-ranked top 3 emails in Slack.

Rally sets up a personal Sidekick that reads your Gmail each morning and sends you a Slack DM with up to three emails worth your attention. On a morning with nothing worth sending, it stays quiet. If your Gmail or Slack connection stops working, the run waits for you with Needs input.

When a Sidekick starts a Slack thread, people can reply in that thread and the run carries on with their reply in mind. More on that in Slack: reading, replies and your own connection.

Remembering between runs#

Every run starts fresh, which is a problem for any Sidekick whose job is "tell me what is new". Without help, it would report the same five issues every hour until you unplugged it.

That is why a Sidekick keeps its own memory. It can write notes to itself that later runs read, and it can keep a small table of things it has already seen. When you ask a Sidekick to watch for new things, the drafting assistant sets this up for you. There is no screen for it; it happens inside the runs.

What this means for you:

• The first run of a watcher sets a baseline. It notes what already exists without reporting it, then reports only what is new from then on. If you want to be caught up on everything already there, say so while drafting.
• Quiet runs stay quiet. A run that finds nothing new finishes without posting.
• What you tell it while drafting sticks. The drafting conversation and every run share the Sidekick's memory. Say "remember I prefer short summaries" in the Sidekick's conversation and its runs will know.
• Your personal memory is not used. A run works for the Sidekick, so it uses the Sidekick's own memory plus your Organization's shared memory, not the things Rally remembers about you personally. Memory in general is covered in Memory and coming back later.