Summary
Challenge: Fragmented tools and lack of clear prioritisation make it hard to manage backlogs, leading to missed tasks, inefficiencies, and SLA risks.
Solution: A Forge-based Rovo Agent analyses and prioritises work, surfaces key tasks, and delivers daily Slack updates with clear, contextual recommendations.
Outcome: This improves focus on critical tasks, reduces manual effort, and keeps teams aligned, driving better efficiency and decision-making.
Background
Here at AC, we wanted to find a smart, automated way to help busy teams to handle their backlog and prioritise tasks more effectively.
To achieve this, we built a custom, Forge-built Rovo Agent – designed to intelligently prioritise work items and streamline backlog refinement.
Challenge
For busy teams, it’s all too easy to critical work to get buried, as the backlog grows longer by the day. We’ve seen this first-hand, both with our clients and within our own teams.
It’s time-consuming to manually review boards or dashboards to decide what to tackle next, and the process is open to human error or bias. What’s more, traditional sorting by priority or due date doesn’t always reflect the true business impact of a task.
When backlog refinement falls by the wayside, important tasks can be missed and teams may end up working on less valuable items. This is especially challenging for teams striving to adopt Agile ways of working, where continuous prioritisation and backlog grooming are essential for delivering value.
Support teams, especially those using Jira Service Management (JSM), frequently face an influx of tickets with limited backlog management. It’s difficult for engineers to know which requests require immediate attention, leading to delays and potential breaches of SLAs.
For Agile teams, meanwhile, this fragmentation can undermine the transparency and collaboration that agile frameworks depend on.
Solution
These pain points inspired us to create a solution that helps teams and individuals cut through the noise of overloaded backlogs and shifting priorities, and focus on what truly matters each day.
It would not only automate prioritisation, but also provide clear, context-driven rationale for every recommendation. In addition, by supporting agile ceremonies such as backlog refinement and sprint planning, our solution empowers teams to continuously adapt and respond to change.
Our answer was to build a custom Forge-developed Rovo agent to act as a digital assistant designed to intelligently prioritise work, surface the most important tasks, and deliver actionable insights directly to users.
By leveraging AI, Product Owners can streamline backlog refinement, receiving intelligent suggestions on item prioritisation, uncovering hidden dependencies, and ensuring that the team’s efforts are always aligned with business goals.
This directly supports agile principles of delivering value early and often, and maintaining a transparent, prioritised backlog.
How this custom Rovo Agent works
Our custom Rovo agent is designed to deliver a daily digest of what truly needs attention. When a user logs in, the agent retrieves all work items assigned to them, pulling in key fields such as summary, due date, priority, and comments. But rather than simply sorting by priority or deadline, the agent goes a step further.
Using various prompt engineering methods, the agent analyses the language and context of each work item’s summary and description. This allows it to identify tasks that may have a disproportionate business impact, even if their priority or due date doesn’t immediately suggest urgency.
The ordering logic can be tweaked on the fly, enabling filters like ‘blockers due this week’ or ‘bugs with critical keywords.’
For support teams, the agent ranks new Jira Service Management tickets by context-aware importance, ensuring that urgent requests are surfaced immediately. This flexibility aligns with the Agile emphasis on responding to change and continuously re-evaluating priorities.
The user experience was a key focus for us. The agent presents a concise, sortable table listing each of the following:
- Work item key
- Priority
- Due date
- A brief rationale for the work item ranking
This tabular display makes it easy for users to scan their workload and make informed decisions. Recognising that many teams live in Slack, we also built an integration that sends the daily digest directly to a dedicated channel, ensuring that everyone starts their day with a clear, actionable summary of the immediate priorities for them and their teams.
Benefits
By automating the triage process, users spend less time reviewing backlogs and more time on high-value work. This ultimately translates to increased productivity across teams.
The agent ensures that critical tasks are surfaced and addressed promptly, reducing the risk of missed deadlines or overlooked tasks. With clear, context-driven rationale for each recommendation, users can make more informed choices about where to focus their efforts, enabling Agile teams to deliver value more consistently and maintain a sustainable pace of work.
Our solution also helps ensure that only actionable, well-defined work items are prioritised. This reduces wasted effort on incomplete or ambiguous tasks and enables teams to maintain a steady flow of deliverable work – a key enabler for Agile teams aiming for a smooth, predictable sprint cadence.
The Slack integration fosters transparency and alignment within teams, ensuring everyone is on the same page from the start of each day.
The agent’s modular design allows it to be easily customised and extended to meet the evolving needs of different teams and business areas. We’re already seeing the potential for this tool to scale across departments, adapting to the unique workflows and priorities of each group.
Ultimately, by streamlining daily operations and enabling teams to focus on what matters most, the Rovo Agent drives greater efficiency, reduces operational risk, and supports the achievement of business objectives.
