OnePlan bridges this gap by enhancing Azure DevOps with advanced scheduling and comprehensive PPM functionalities, enabling organizations to manage not only individual projects but entire portfolios. By expanding the capabilities of Azure DevOps, OnePlan supports hybrid methodologies and empowers leadership to make informed decisions based on a unified view of project portfolios.
The Limitations of Azure DevOps for Project Portfolio Management
Azure DevOps provides a comprehensive suite of tools that support the entire software development lifecycle. One of its key strengths is flexibility – teams can use its integrated services independently or alongside existing tools, allowing for adaptable workflows. Azure DevOps also scales effectively, ensuring secure, compliant environments through its Microsoft Cloud foundation.
Azure DevOps excels in work management through Azure Boards, a feature designed for planning, tracking, and discussing work across development cycles. The tool also offers visual management capabilities like Kanban boards, which help track the status of work, identify bottlenecks, and optimize workflows, and Scrum boards to support sprint planning. Integration with GitHub helps to strengthen collaboration between development and operations, while integration with Microsoft Teams and Slack enhances communication across teams.
Despite all of these capabilities, Azure DevOps is primarily geared towards individual teams and projects. When organizations need to manage multiple projects across departments, scale resources efficiently, or track financials at the portfolio level, Azure DevOps on its own falls short. To truly optimize resource planning and ensure that projects align with broader organizational goals, Azure DevOps requires portfolio management tools. OnePlan extends and enhances Azure DevOps by introducing critical portfolio management capabilities, including:
- Portfolio-level visibility: Native features for tracking and managing multiple projects at once.
- Resource capacity planning: Ensuring teams do not overcommit by providing insights into resource availability across projects.
- Financial planning: Tracking and managing project-related financials at a portfolio level.
- Strategic alignment: Ensuring that all projects contribute to broader organizational goals.
With OnePlan, organizations are able to manage multiple agile projects within a unified system. While agile teams in Azure DevOps focus on specific work efforts – such as managing backlogs, features, and user stories – the leadership team can oversee these efforts at the portfolio level through OnePlan.
Supporting Hybrid and Adaptive Portfolio Management with OnePlan
Traditional project portfolio management (PPM) has long been rooted in the waterfall methodology, with its linear, stage-by-stage progression. However, as organizations shift toward agile transformation, many are striving to adopt more agile portfolio management practices. This transition typically involves years of gradual change, during which time companies find themselves in an adaptive portfolio management state – a blend of both agile and waterfall methodologies.
One of the primary challenges in this adaptive state is the risk of creating information silos. When different tools are used for different purposes – e.g., agile tools for development teams and waterfall tools for traditional project management – organizations can struggle with:
- Data inconsistencies: Manually combining data from different tools can lead to discrepancies and errors.
- Time inefficiencies: Manually collating information for reporting takes time, which could be better spent on more strategic activities.
- Duplicated efforts: Teams may find themselves entering the same data across multiple tools, increasing the risk of errors and draining productivity.
- Fragmented resource planning: Resource capacity data may be isolated in separate systems, making it difficult to get a comprehensive view of availability and allocation.
To overcome these challenges, OnePlan enables the seamless integration of different methodologies, including agile and waterfall, within a single portfolio management system. This hybrid methodology enables teams to manage backlogs and agile work items in Azure DevOps while combining them with waterfall schedules for a more comprehensive project view. For instance, an approved epic in OnePlan can be created in Azure DevOps, where the agile team builds out its backlog with features, user stories, and tasks. This data automatically syncs with OnePlan, ensuring that both operational and financial data are rolled up into a detailed portfolio view.
One of the key advantages of integrating OnePlan with Azure DevOps is the ability to roll up detailed project data into a portfolio view. OnePlan consolidates information from Azure DevOps, Jira, and other agile tools, aligning these work efforts with larger business strategies and objectives. Additionally, OnePlan supports hybrid schedules, where waterfall-based project elements can coexist with agile tasks from Azure DevOps. This flexibility allows organizations to manage complex projects, all while maintaining clarity at the portfolio level.
These hybrid PPM capabilities enable leadership to make informed decisions based on key financial metrics, project ROI, and the alignment of projects with business goals. By integrating Azure DevOps with OnePlan, organizations eliminate silos and integrate agile and waterfall tools into a unified platform.
How OnePlan Extends and Enhances Azure DevOps for PPM
OnePlan’s seamless integration with Azure DevOps allows teams to continue working in their preferred environments and in the ways that best suit their needs, while leadership gain portfolio-level views that help them track investments, delivery timelines, and returns on investment. Work items, sprints, and backlogs from Azure DevOps automatically sync with OnePlan, ensuring that all data is up to date. OnePlan can be accessed directly within Azure DevOps, eliminating the need for teams to switch between platforms.
Advanced Scheduling and Hybrid Methodologies
With OnePlan, organizations can combine agile and waterfall elements into a single, cohesive schedule. Azure DevOps backlogs can be integrated with traditional project schedules, providing a comprehensive view of both. For projects that follow a more traditional lifecycle, OnePlan supports detailed Gantt charts and dependency tracking. This allows for dependencies between waterfall tasks and agile user stories from Azure DevOps, ensuring all aspects of a project are aligned.
Resource Capacity Planning
OnePlan enhances Azure DevOps with detailed resource capacity planning, which is essential for avoiding over-commitment and ensuring that resources are optimally allocated across multiple projects. With OnePlan, organizations can manage top-down capability planning, as well as bottom-up tracking by rolling up work item resource assignments from Azure DevOps to monitor actual effort. OnePlan provides visibility into over-allocated resources, ensuring that teams are not overwhelmed and projects are delivered on time.
Financial Planning and Tracking
Financial management is a critical aspect of PPM that is often missing from agile-focused tools like Azure DevOps. With OnePlan, organizations can track project budgets, forecasts, actual costs, and benefits at a granular level, and manage scenario planning using what-if modeling to compare different project plans, budget allocations, and resource assignments to determine the most viable options. OnePlan also supports benefits analysis based on financial metrics, helping leadership make data-driven decisions.
Strategic Alignment
OnePlan enables organizations to align work efforts with business objectives and key results (OKRs) by tracking the alignment of project efforts with business goals and ensuring that resources are being invested in the most critical initiatives. OnePlan’s portfolio-level views help organizations gain visibility into the progress of multiple projects across programs and portfolios, ensuring strategic alignment and timely delivery.
Comprehensive Dashboards and Reporting
While Azure DevOps provides useful dashboards for tracking individual projects, OnePlan elevates reporting to the portfolio level. Leadership can track progress across multiple projects, analyze resource allocation, and measure financial performance using real-time data. Portfolio dashboards help visualize project progress, resource allocation, and financial metrics, while Power BI integration helps generate rich, interactive reports that provide stakeholders critical insights.
Explore Advanced Project Portfolio Management with OnePlan
While Azure DevOps is a powerful tool for managing software development projects, it lacks the comprehensive PPM capabilities that organizations need to manage complex portfolios. OnePlan extends and enhances Azure DevOps by providing advanced scheduling, project and resource management, financial tracking, and strategic alignment tools. This integration enables organizations to manage their entire project portfolio within a single, unified platform, ensuring that resources are optimally allocated, projects are aligned with strategic goals, and financial performance is tracked at every step.
By integrating Azure DevOps with OnePlan, organizations can supercharge their project management capabilities, improving visibility, efficiency, and decision-making across the board. For more information on how OnePlan can enhance your Azure DevOps environment, visit our website, or reach out directly for a consultation with a member of our team. Whether you’re ready to dive in or just exploring, OnePlan is here to support your journey towards strategic excellence.
