A lot of organizations, with multiple projects running in DevOps, are often looking for an easier way to show key “Epics” and their progress – preferably from a single timeline view. Luckily, the “extension” for DevOps, called “Feature Timeline”, just got an update, and its called “Portfolio Plans”.
What is “Portfolio Plans”?
Portfolio Plans allows you to report, across multiple projects, the status of all Epics. Furthermore, it also allows you to change the start date, finish date and the duration by a simple drag´n´drop motion.
To get started you should first install the extension from the Azure DevOps marketplace (LINK). Look for the “Feature Timeline and Epic Roadmap” extension.
After a 1 minute installation, go to one of you projects and find the new “Portfolio Plan” from the menu within “Boards”
Once inside “Portfolio Plans” you can only change one setting, which is how you want progress tracking to be calculated – in either effort or count of completed style.
To insert Epics simply click on the upper right corner “Add Items” -> Select a project within the organization -> and then find the Epic you want inserted.
Congratulations – you now have a cool organizational view of all your Epics, when they occur and their progress. Great start for this extension which is currently in beta. I would expect more functionality to be added over time.
For those of you who have tried out the Project Online feature called “Roadmaps”, then this is somewhat similar except it only shows elements from Azure DevOps (within the same organization), and you cant edit the dates from the Roadmap view itself. In my opinion there is a need for both ways of viewing data depending on the role, and the organizational design in regards to “controlling” agile e.g. DevOps, SAFe, traditional etc.
Enjoy!
Hi, we installed the extension on our Azure DevOps Server (on-prem) and can see the Feature and Epic Plan links, but there is not a Portfolio Plans (Beta) link in the left Nav. (Yes, Analytics is installed.) Any help is appreciated.
Hi Ed,
I would suggest asking the question here for faster and more accurate response from the product group: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-devlabs.workitem-feature-timeline-extension&ssr=false#qna
i created a portfolio plan but it is not accessible to other in my team, though they are team members. Kindly help.
Absolutely, its super old so dont know how much you benefit from it. Will send you the PBIX through email.
Hi Kesten. I installed the Portfolio plans and I must say I like it, so far so good.
It’s missing a feature: When viewing the plan that spans multiple years, there’s no way to navigate, you can’t scroll left or right. This would be an expected feature in my eyes.
I started a Portfolio Plan and would like for the Dependencies to be tracked. I see that when I click on the ‘…’ on a feature there is a link to Dependencies. But when I click on it, none of my dependencies display? How do I get dependencies to show here?