Azure DevOps Delivery Plans

With the high volume of projects that teams today handle, it is more important than ever that we can keep track of all work items so that nothing falls through the cracks. We must also ensure that the work of an individual team is consistent with the overall goals of the organization. This is where Azure DevOps Delivery Plans come into play.

What are Delivery Plans?

Azure Boards includes Delivery Plans 2.0. It is currently available natively in Azure DevOps Services and will be available in Azure DevOps Server in 2022. Delivery Plans 1.0 is also available as an extension in the Marketplace. In a calendar view, Delivery Plans displays multiple sprints from multiple teams. With this view, you can see how work is progressing and make adjustments as needed to deliver on time. Delivery Plans also includes dependency tracking, which allows you to quickly determine if there is a dependency problem.

Getting Started with Delivery Plans

There is no bad time to begin using Delivery Plans. Even if you have already planned and begun working on a project, the information provided will be invaluable in the future. However, you should review Agile culture for best practices on sprints, autonomous teams, and organizational alignment.

Navigate to your Azure DevOps instance to create your first delivery plan. Select Delivery Plans from the Boards menu. Then, select New Plan. Then, enter a plan name, a description, and the backlog you want to use. In addition, you can specify the project, team(s), and field criteria. Once the delivery plan is created, a calendar view of the teams’ backlogs will be displayed in parallel.