The development of a product and its timely launch depend on good coordination between multiple teams and projects.
A major difficulty for every project manager is keeping track of deliverables across several projects and figuring out dependencies.
Delivery Plans, a fantastic feature in Azure DevOps, make tracking easier by offering thorough visualization.
We'll build a delivery plan from scratch in this tutorial.
Imagine that on October 29, 2023, we need to launch an online store worldwide.
For the sake of simplicity let's assume the following
- We need to create a website
- We need to create a mobile app
- Host the services in cloud
- Two teams involved
- E-commerce DevOps team – responsible for the application design and development
- Cloud DevOps team – responsible for the cloud infrastructure
The backlogs for both teams will resemble the ones shown below.
Navigation:- [Organization_Name] → [Project_Name] → Boards → Backlogs
Let's create a delivery plan now
Navigation:- [Organization_Name] → [Project_Name] → Boards → Delivery Plans
That’s it, scrollable calendar view of our plan is ready!
if you are lucky enough to have a big curved monitor then you are likely to fit several months of the plan in a single screen
The best part about delivery plan is that its real-time
The updates being done by various parties on the work items will reflect in the delivery plan in real-time
In addition to the default "today" marker, we will add a few customised markers from the plan settings.
The plan effectively depicts the markers as vertical lines. These lines reflect project milestones that must occur on the dates specified.
Throughout the project lifecycle, we can compare the actual progress to these markers.
Another best-in-class feature of delivery plans is its dependency management.
To view the dependencies of any work item, click on the chain link icon.
“Repo for website” must be completed before “E-commerce website frontend” and “E-commerce website frontend” must be completed before “E-commerce website reconciliation”
A connecting line with an arrow is displayed when you click on any worktime to reveal all of its dependencies.
Notice the chain link on “E-commerce website reconciliation” is red, it indicates that there is something wrong with the dependency. Click on the chain link
“E-commerce website backend” must be a predecessor for “E-commerce website reconciliation” but they are not scheduled in proper order
Let's drag and drop the work item into suitable sprint to correct the schedule
We see that the dependencies are now in order and the chain links are green
Best Practices:
- Align sprint schedules across teams and projects
- Avoid specifying both Iteration and Target Date for a work item because Target Date will always take precedence over Iteration End Date on the plan.
- When creating worktimes, properly utilize predecessor and successor linkages.
My two cents:
The delivery plan is a one-stop shop to ensure that all the teams are working towards organisational goals in a coordinated manner.
Imagine walking into a meeting room with a printout of the delivery plan and reviewing the plan with the team. I am sure, several hours are going to be saved because of the vivid and simplistic visualization in delivery plans
The delivery plan feature is evolving nicely – are we using delivery plans yet?