Regarding non-availability of Project Management Chart

Question

Our company has recently introduced Azure DevOps to streamline project management process. Currently, 140 projects are created under our organization in Azure DevOps. As and when requirement comes from client for any specific project, we create tasks/bugs for different developers under that project. Currently we use only two Work Item type - Bug and Task. Now the issue is Management of the company wants to see Project-wise number of "New/Open", "Active" and "Closed" Tasks and Bugs in a SINGLE chart. That means, that single chart must fit consolidated data of 140 projects. If a person views that single chart they must get idea, for example that - Project 1 has 2 new/open work items, 2 active work items and 2 closed Work items , Project 2 has 1 new/open work items, 10 active work items and 3 closed Work items and so on.. This is done so that management in a glance can understand which project is lagging behind for customer delivery. So that they can work accordingly build more manpower for those Projects.

I have tried to create various such charts and widgets with different queries in Azure DevOps. I used widget burn up and burn out charts but it gives data for tasks of single Project only. Also when we add multiple projects to it, it shows summation of completed/remaining tasks for those Projects & NOT Project name-wise completed/remaining tasks bifurcation. I also tried "Charts for work item" widget but it also fetches count as per- Assignee, State and Work Item type and not project name wise count is fetched.

I don't want to navigate through 140 projects pages to see it's open, active and closed tasks. So please help me out in suggesting the ideas on How can I build a single chart from where we can get all this data? I will be forever grateful for your answers. Thank you!

Answer 1

You could create a query across projects, select Team Project column in Column option, ad save the query as shared query. Check the screenshots below:

Then add a chart widget to a dashboard, select Pivot table, and set Team Projects, State as Rows and Columns. Check the screenshot below:

You could expand the view to see more details:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/report/dashboards/charts?view=azure-devops#add-a-chart-widget-to-a-dashboard

Answer 2

I'd be slightly careful based on what you've put down because I don't think your management team quite understand what they need, and DevOps can only do so much. I'd be challenging them around the setup of your DevOps process personally because I don't think it's advisable to not have user stories as part of your setup. Although it simplifies some aspects of DevOps, our experience has been that people have been able to group things together better with user stories as well as tasks.

Appreciate it's a good idea to be able to see what's going on across all projects, but I think there are probably further criteria to think about. E.g. do you want to see estimates instead of/as well as the count of the items since that will have a better reflection of the effort required. In terms of completed items and in fact, probably all that you're displaying, again it's more on your project process, but are management genuinely interested in everything? For example, do they need to know that something was closed 6 months ago, or are they just interested in the last month?

I suppose what I'm getting at is you probably need a bit more information from management about what they want to use the report for so you can give them what they need rather than they want. There's a temptation to say you want everything because you don't understand the capabilities of the solution or what you're going to use it for, and my recommendation would be to challenge them on this so you can better present things (giving them what they need rather than what they want).

In terms of what you're looking to do, I'll openly admit I'm not clued up on everything DevOps related but I doubt you'll be able to report at a project level within DevOps. I think what you'd need to do is set up your query, which would look across all projects in your organisation, and then export the results to Excel. From there I'd create a pivot table (or perhaps more than 1) with the data that you need. Have Project names down the left side (row headers), and bring in whatever else you need as columns. I think that's probably a good quick win to get something in front of your management team, and then you could challenge from there - almost picking holes in it so that they realise that the business decisions that they'd make from this may not be fully informed, and suggesting some changes. From experience, it's probably better to consider it almost as a prototype and not get bogged down with a solution at this stage because you may be asked for changes when they can visualise what they've originally asked for. Once management is happy you could look at other solutions to provide the report, but Excel is typically a good starting point I've found in the past when working on something new like this.