Plan or track work items in progress by visualizing them on a sprint calendar. Portfolio level work items are worked for multiple sprints and this tool helps you visualize features or epics across sprints, yes you heard it right, cross sprint schedule!!!
We see two kinds of teams:
Sprint Teams: They commit to User Stories for each sprint and use sprint tools (Sprint backlog, Taskboard) to execute and track their work for each sprint.
Kanban Teams: They pull highest priority work from backlog and execute work to completion before picking the next one. Usually these teams do not set specific sprint/iteration for each work they are executing on.
While both Kanban teams and Scrum Teams have User Stories or Tasks that are smaller chunk of work that is finished within a sprint, they do rollup to a portfolio level work like feature that span across sprint.
If you are a scrum team that sets iteration on each user story then you will be incentivized, because we rollup child user story iterations to its parent feature, yes you are rewarded for planning your child user stories.
If you are a kanban team and does not set iterations for your user story, plan when your features will tentatively start/finish by manually extending your features sprints.
- Custom calendar views
- Plan
- Track progress
We are testing out a new feature, Cross team dependency tracking for an epic. While Feature timeline is a teams view of work in-progress, epic roadmap is for a epic worked by multiple teams across multiple sprints.
Select an epic owned by a team and track feature work done under different areas and see predecessor/successor links to track dependency.
View portfolio level work items across projects. Portfolio Plans is an organizational tool that allows you to pull Epics from any project and team within organization and plots on them on an easy to read timeline view. This helps teams drive cross-project visibility and alignment by tracking portfolio level work.
Getting started is easy. First, create a new plan. Then, select a project and add the item(s) you wish to track on the plan. You may add as many work items as you want and from multiple projects.
Once all the portfolio items are pulled in, visualize the work in a gantt chart calendar view. You can drag and drop to adjust the dates. Additionally, you can view the rollup of progress for each item. In settings, select whether you want to track progress using completed count or effort. Drill down to Epic Roadmap on a specific item to see its details. Zoom in and out to focus on the items you want using "alt" + scroll wheel.
Need more than one plan for your organization? Create multiple plans to track new initiatives.
We are always happy to hear feedback. Please reach out to us using the Q&A or review sections.
Portfolio Plans requires Azure DevOps Services.
Users will need Analytics permissions. See https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=786441 for details.