I hold my hand up: I am a massive fan of Microsoft Azure DevOps. Something else may topple it in future, but right now, it’s the best tool out there for most project needs.
It’s taken me a while to warm to it, having been distinctly underwhelmed when I first started using the earliest iterations. But now it’s my go-to tool for any project that needs to deliver quickly and reliably.
Planning isn’t Azure DevOps’ forte
To be fair, ADO is not a great tool for planning a project upfront, waterfall-style. Mapping dependencies can be done, but not as easily as Microsoft Project’s drag and drop. It also works better with a fixed number of levels in its hierarchy, whereas Project doesn’t care if you only need to go two layers deep in one part of the project and 15 in another (OK, so maybe that’s a bit of an extreme). But there are all sorts of clever tricks, workarounds, tools and plugins that go a long way to making it more than adequate for the job. Including displaying work in a Gantt chart.
Any project can be planned on paper: project delivery is where the rubber hits the road
Where Azure DevOps truly shines is in project delivery. When you’re tasked with managing a larger, more complex project, this tool becomes as invaluable – and multi-purpose – as a Swiss Army knife on a camping trip. It’s great at handling complexity with ease and enables teams to work in a highly collaborative, agile manner.
A standout feature of Azure DevOps is its transparency. The platform is designed for team members to log their progress, add comments, and flag issues in real-time. This means no more chasing people for updates or getting caught out by unexpected roadblocks. Once your team have embraced ADO as where they do their work, you’ll have a live feed of your project’s status – a project manager’s dream!
Perhaps the most significant advantage of Azure DevOps is its ability to handle distributed teams with aplomb. Regardless of where your team members are located, they can access, update, and collaborate on the project as if they were sitting right next to each other. ADO can even support meetings that are typically best done face-to-face, like stand-ups, planning and retrospectives.
Up to date reporting, instantly
For my money, the standout feature with Azure DevOps is that you get amazing, up-to-the-minute reporting without having to put in extra hours. Your team are already recording the data. A few clicks to configure the right queries and visualisations and you have a tool that automates pretty much all of the reporting process, giving you more time to focus on steering the ship rather than taking roll call.
And finally, whilst upfront planning isn’t quite as seamless as I’d like, nothing can beat ADO when it comes to reacting to change. Whether the update is at low-level tasks, or whether major parts of your project need to flex, Azure DevOps helps you make and communicate the change with minimum fuss.
ADO: easily worth the planning pain for the project delivery delight
In a nutshell, Azure DevOps may initially come across as a tough nut to crack when it comes to planning and visualisation. Still, with a bit of tinkering, you can harness its potential to turn it into an efficient planning tool. And where it truly excels is in its capacity to deliver larger, complex projects, especially those with distributed teams. It offers transparency, real-time updates, and low overhead, making it a strong contender in the project management arena.
One final caveat: ADO is powerful, with lots of functionality that might seem overwhelming at first. Most of us use a tiny fraction of the features in Word or Excel without worrying about the more arcane ones. Take the same approach to using Azure DevOps: start with what you need and slowly introduce more complex functions as you need them.