Automation rules keep a hierarchy consistent without anyone maintaining it by hand. Until now they ran inside one workspace only. The same rule had to be built again in every workspace of the portfolio and kept in step by hand, and nothing connected an initiative at the portfolio level to the epics and stories underneath it.

With this update, portfolio admins define inheritance and aggregation rules once, at the portfolio level, and Craft.io applies them across every connected workspace and down the full hierarchy. An inheritance rule takes the value of a field on a parent item and sets the same value on every item below it, from an initiative in the portfolio through the epics and stories in each workspace. An aggregation rule runs the other way: a parent's field value is calculated from the values of its children, so an item at the portfolio level reflects the state of the work happening several levels below it.

One date aggregation rule gives every initiative in the portfolio the earliest start and the latest end date of all the work beneath it, wherever that work lives.

To create a rule, open the Automation Rules tab in Portfolio Settings.

Anyone running a workspace needs the full picture of what acts on the items in it. With rules now defined a level above, part of that picture sits outside the workspace's own settings.

With this update, every portfolio rule that applies to a workspace is listed in that workspace's settings, alongside the rules the workspace manages itself, and marked as coming from the portfolio. A workspace admin who finds an epic's end date moving on its own can open the list and see the portfolio aggregation rule that produced it.

Portfolio rules stay with the portfolio admin, so a rule means the same thing in every workspace and the values it produces compare cleanly across them.

To see them, open Automation Rules in Workspace Settings.