Microsoft Azure Devops is a cloud-based platform for managing source code, builds, packages and CI/CD pipelines. It evolved from Microsoft’s Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server and was rebranded as Azure DevOps Services in 2018.

While it includes boards that are useful for managing team-level backlogs, sprint planning and tactical execution, Azure DevOps was never intended to support enterprise-wide strategic planning based on large-scale agile frameworks like SAFe. The concepts of strategic themes, lean budgeting, portfolio epics, value streams and agile release trains are not natively supported by Azure DevOps.

Workarounds create more problems. Many organizations cobble together homegrown solutions in an attempt to get Azure DevOps to support SAFe. They may add functionality using third-party Azure DevOps extensions. They may build their own custom “levels” using Azure’s hierarchical Area Paths (similar to nested folders) to represent portfolios, programs or value streams. Or they may add text-based tags to group work items for querying and simulating roll ups.

The problem with these workarounds is that they are difficult to maintain, usually create more problems than they solve and do not address the underlying issue: Azure DevOps is a team-based tool that was not designed to handle large-scale agile portfolio planning based on the SAFe framework.

The good news is that Targetprocess supports all of these concepts natively and can be integrated seamlessly with Azure DevOps to solve the challenges of enterprise planning and tracking based on the SAFe framework.

Azure Devops was designed as a cloud-based platform tool to help teams manage their daily work. There is no native concept of strategic planning or portfolio epics or value streams in Azure DevOps. This means that there is no built-in mechanism for connecting enterprise-wide strategic plans and allocations to the tactical execution of Azure Devops work items.

While work done at the team level may very well be tracked accurately in Azure DevOps, there is no automated way to roll up this team-level progress and status to verify that the tactical execution of work is aligned with the desired solution portfolio, value streams and lean budget allocation plans.

With no automated way to aggregate program and portfolio level status updates from teams using Azure DevOps, release train engineers and portfolio managers often resort to building their status reports manually. They may use Microsoft Project, Powerpoint, or Excel spreadsheets, with data exported manually from Azure DevOps via queries based on text-based tags or Area Paths or by manually aggregating multiple team-level reports.

The problem with all of these methods is that there is no direct connection between the portfolio, program and roadmap views and the actual status of Features and User Stories within Azure DevOps. These portfolio and roadmap reports may be out of date before they are even distributed.

Before and during Program Increment (PI) planning, development teams refine high-level estimates, break work into manageable chunks and sequence it across multiple teams based on their capacity and expertise. During this process, teams need to understand, discuss and easily visualize relationships and dependencies across the planned work.

These dependencies need to be visible at multiple levels (portfolio, program and team) within the organization. Azure DevOps does not provide these live, interactive visualizations that depict dependencies spanning multiple programs, large solutions or complex portfolios of work.

The tools used for strategic planning and lean budgeting are not updated automatically when team-level execution data in Azure DevOps changes

This challenge exists because there is no ability to link the status of tactical team-level execution data in Azure DevOps to the Program, Solution, Portfolio levels used for strategic planning and forecasting.

Perform Lean Portfolio Management and PI Planning in Targetprocess

When PI Planning is complete — the features and user stories are then pushed out to the corresponding epics, stories and teams within Azure DevOps.

Enterprise-wide status and metrics are automatically rolled up from Azure DevOps so they are always up-to-date

After PI Planning the teams can use Azure DevOps to assign the work to specific team members, adjust their initial estimates, and then execute and track the status of their work from within Azure DevOps.

As the work progresses, the status and progress of Azure DevOps work items automatically synchronize with the corresponding entities in Targetprocess.

Connecting Targetprocess to Azure DevOps allows you to visualize and manage dependencies, track estimates, and perform lean budgeting and strategic planning in Targetprocess, while managing team-level execution data in Azure DevOps.

This ensures that team-level execution data remains in-sync with strategic objectives, providing an accurate picture of plans, progress and execution status across the enterprise.

Using Targetprocess as the “single source of truth” in this fashion will allow development teams to use Azure DevOps to track their day-to-day work and manage code and releases.

And business leaders and RTE’s can keep track of cross-team dependencies, Feature and Epic progress as well as steer the progress based on up-to-date portfolio metrics from within Targetprocess.