Managing projects in a modern world (Part 1)

Last week I wrote a blog post and it got a lot of interest. Just not for the reasons I would of thought. One of the screen shots on the blog post contained an image of dashboard.

Everyone was quite intrigued by this and were wondering what it was. So that is what today is about. This is the first of multiple blog posts showing how you can leverage Azure DevOps, Teams and Project Online to manage projects.

That dashboard is Azure Devops. Microsoft’s developer collaboration tools. It includes repositories(Azure Repos) for code, Kanban boards(Azure Boards), Test Plans(Azure Test Plans) as well as a few other tools targeted to developers.

In our case we are building a brand new intranet and plan to use Azure Boards to manage our workload across a variety teams, Azure Repos to store code for our Custom web parts as well as any scripts we create including site themes and site designs. Last but not least we will use Azure Test Plans to mange the quality of our new intranet.

So how can we setup our environment to ensure:

• Has a place to communicate
• Has a place to upload documents
• Can manage their tasks
• manage their sprint
• See the overall project health

Step 1 Setup Azure Devops

1. Create a new project called Intranet
2. Create the teams in Azure Devops: “Communications”, “Training”, “Developers”, “Testers”
3. Define the sprints in our case they are two week long
4. Assign the sprints to each team
5. Add your backlog of tasks
6. Assign tasks to sprints
7. Add the Delivery Plan extension for Azure DevOps

You will end up with something that looks like this.

Azure DevOps will play the basis for how we manage and plan our tasks. It is more powerful than Planner but can require significantly more effort to setup.

Step 2 Setup Up Teams

• Create a new Team called Intranet
• Create four new Channels “Communications”, “Training”, “Developers”, “Testing”
• * Add a Azure DevOps KanBan board to each Channel aligning the Azure DevOps Teams Kanban to the Microsoft Teams Channel
• * Configure Azure DevOps connector
• 
  

* Azure DevOps was called Vistual Studio Team Services. Some of the documentation still references the old name.

All of your Channels should now look something like this

You will also be able have conversations about specific tasks

Step 3 Create a Roadmap

• Turn on the Project Roadmap feature
• Create a new Roadmap
• Create Rows that align to each Azure DevOps Team
• Add Features from DevOps to track the status and timeline

You will end up with something like the roadmap below.

The next post in this series will go into detail on how to setup Step 1 Azure DevOps. Configuring the iterations, teams and backlogs to work properly with Project and teams.