How to apply custom flowstate values in Team Boards to parent board

[Pearce Cowart]

For tracking purposes, a group of teams needed more granular values than ScheduleState allows.  We customized their Team Boards (siblings and unique parent) accordingly, all have the same FlowStates defined.

But we also need a similar view that functions as a "master" view at the parent level, displaying all cards and their states for the parent and all children, consistent with the individual Team Boards. 

Team Boards seem to be "hardwired" to their respective project... no ready linkage to siblings or parents.

Kanban Board settings do not allow choosing FlowState for driving the columns.  My predecessor circumvented all this with a custom field, which is drudgery to maintain per artifact.

Am I overlooking some nuance here?  Is there a straightforward alternative to accomplish this?

[David Spalding]

I think you want to use something other than Team Board and it's "stealth" column names under field "Flow State" for more htan one team. As the name implies, Team Board is for teams. I've actually used "Flow State" in some custom list and board apps showing how the Team Board customization can be extended a bit. 

For a train or large branch, you probably want to use custom fields, as some people in my workspace have done. Then the same field values can be used for columns in Kanban Boards across teams, as well as reporting dashboards.

As the reach of this shared increases, anticipate some people wanting to standardize these values, restricting teams who want their own flavour of board columns. ;)

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SM, Application Support
Cigna
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[Micky Holmes]

As David stated, you need to leverage a custom field to represent the flow state choices you want to use at the parent (team of teams) level. The Team Board is specific to a single team (leaf node in the Rally Project hierarchy) and those custom flow state choices are only visible at that level. There is an app you can add (at the parent node in the Rally Project hierarchy) from the Apps Library called Kanban Board. After you add that app, in the settings, you can specify the flow state columns to be based on the custom field you created. Keep in mind that when you set up the Team Board you had to map your custom flow state choices to the Schedule State choices. You do the same in the Kanban Board. To help with abstracting the various Team Board flow state values that each team has set for their User Stories to your higher level Kanban Board, add the Schedule State field to the cards in the Kanban Board and then drag and drop the cards into the custom flow states accordingly.

[Pearce Cowart]

Thanks David and Micky, that confirms what my predecessor set up years ago (custom field).  Much obliged for your feedback!
Pearce