Webinars

all right thank everybody for showing up today I'm glad you're all here

looks like we got about 60 people this is awesome great so thank you for showing up today I'm Joey Spooner I'm

your host for today's webinar they were lucky enough uh to have Chris Johnson here from eye trellis I am from Combine

University I'm the vice president for uh Mark for um product management and Community Development here and also with

me is Chris again from I trellis and Chris is the CEO of I trellis I'm going to let him share more about himself in

just a second here but we're excited about this partnership because this is one of our first companies to work with where they actually do a lot of

portfolio management and Azure devops so I know a number of you who are on this uh webinar today are probably working

with Azure devops probably having a good time with it maybe running up against some challenges so Chris is going to be

sharing with us quite a bit about his technology how it can really help teams and organizations benefit from kanban

but also at the portfolio level which is going to be a big deal I think days to come all right so Chris I'd love for you

to introduce yourself tell us a little bit more about you and also share some more about your product so uh go for it Chris

thank you Joey I'd love to um I'd like to start the presentation today with a little bit of gratitude

um I'd like to thank our partners at combine University we're thrilled to be here I'd also like to thank our partners

at Microsoft for the Azure devops Marketplace the analytics API and the extension program that's how we publish

our software and I'd like to thank key members of the I trellis team my co-product owner

region Llano our designer Matt Queen our lead engineer Matt Tabor

along with David Yeager and young Chan Kim and our quality assurance and video production uh engineer Greg France

my name is Chris Johnson and I serve in many roles at I trellis I'm a program

manager business owner product owner Technology Solutions consultant in a

nutshell I build end-to-end Solutions in azure I work with teams that practice varying

degrees of kanban every day and I'm here to share my experience and

provide suggestions for the application of kanban in azure devops and I would look at these as

recommendations and not rules at least now outside of your process template

those are pretty fixed now I've got about 30 minutes of prepared material and I'd like to

capture comments along the way or questions along the way so if you can use the chat to send Joey your questions

that would be fantastic and then we'll hit some q a at the end now when thinking about how to best

Showcase kanban in Azure devops I wanted I want this presentation to be engaging I want it to be real I want it to be

something that people can latch on to and so we're going to be doing it live um we're also going to be doing the

demonstration out of our QA environment we're about to release the next version

of portfolio plus plus that I'm showing you today that has many of the kanban features that people have been asking us

for in the community so this webinar is very Timely

um now I've signed a lot of client confidentiality agreements on behalf of my trellis and another constraint is

that I don't want to expose client data that would be kind of a killer in my role as the data officer for gdpr

compliance so we're going to be doing the demo with our own live data and our own Azure

devops organization Paradigm trellis this is going to allow me to Showcase how we use Ado and how we apply kanban

on our product projects it will also provide a basis for the

organizational maturity discussion around the usefulness of kanban that I'd like to have towards the end of this discussion

now the last thing is that I'm assuming that people who would sign up for a webinar on this topic have a basic

understanding of agile principles kanban and have worked with collaboration tools like Azure devops and since I only have

30 minutes I'm going to cover the basics of how we do kanban along with some you

know key setup and Azure devops and then we'll hit the QA okay so with that I'm going to switch

over to the presentation and turn off my video

because I'm on the west coast of the United States where there's a hurricane offshore and we lost power yesterday

and so things are a little uh scary when we lose power so can you see

my screen you should be looking at a PowerPoint right now okay cool yeah we see that we see the deck in just regular

deck mode not presentation mode by the way Chris okay um that's fine for now so there are two

types of kanban in Azure dot well there are four takeaways from this meeting that I hope you leave with and the first

is that there are two types of kanban in azure devops um the second is that you want to keep

your kanban simple the next is that you want to keep your kanban current

and the last is that kanban helps with organizational maturity

so with respect to the two types of kanban and Azure devops there are two the

Sprint task board and the portfolio kanban portfolio kanban is available through

our extension portfolio plus plus pro Now teams use the Sprint task board and

in the best way to explain the Sprint task board is to level set everyone with

respect to the scrum framework and how it works in azure devops

okay you should now just see the scrum framework on my screen full okay so in a

nutshell um anything most people on this call should be familiar with this I'll be brief but we want all of the work for a

project team here all the work that we can imagine um we want it in the product backlog

and then in a Sprint setting and typically we go about two weeks on our

Sprint teams we plan out the next Sprint with respect to that subset of work that's top

priority here and we take that into the Sprint we work on it in Azure devops

we have daily scrum meetings and this is where the Sprint task board kicks in this is where we do kanban at the team

level and then ideally we kick it out at the end and so the way that flows in

Azure devops is like this we've got a backlog and the taxonomy

here is epics features user stories and tasks we'll talk more about this in a minute

the other thing that's really key is the iteration path and so this is for your Sprint planning and so what I'm showing

here is a Sprint backlog where we've taken in work that was you know here at

the top of the backlog into the Sprint and as we work on it we move tasks

across the kanban so a couple key things to go over we

need to have a backlog we need to have an iteration path we need to pull work into the Sprint so

that we can see it on our kanbot and then as we move cards across the kanban the different states

they moved closed Okay so the thing I like about this the most is

it's just simple and it's easy to explain to people moving cards across the kanban

and we'll talk more about this as we get further into the demo but as you if you can get one team to do

it and you can get all of the teams to do it in your program then you can start doing portfolio kanban

now there's a lot of arguments around points and capacity planning and backlog grooming and how you get to this point

we're not going to cover that today let's just assume that we can pull work into a Sprint we can look at it on the

task board we can move it across the task board okay so now switching over to the demo

all right so here I have azure devops now this is the root level of azure

devops this is the project directory and we use projects in a variety of ways

um people tend to name them after domain areas of the business

or project teams or platform teams or Technologies

but the point is is that all of the work in your organization

that you're going to be working on should be somehow captured in one of

these project areas and the goal is to create a division of

the work that people understand and so it's pretty typical to see the

directory structure of projects mirror the organizational structure like the

finance team in this case this is it trellis this is our company the IP area is where we have our

development board for portfolio plus plots and we've got a business development team design practice our

software engineering team and so when we do work internally we put it into these

projects so I'm going to open up VIP project

and over here on the left this is azure devops

um you know this is where you can put your documentation at the project level boards is where we're going to spend the

bulk of our time today but from a development standpoint there's also repost house plan repos pipelines test

plans artifacts and down here you'll see portfolio plus plus now like I mentioned we're going to be demonstrating some of

the new features that we're releasing with portfolio kanban today so we're going to be demonstrating on a portfolio plus plus QA

and we're not going to be talking about repos pipelines test plans artifacts if you want to talk about them please give

us a call but today we're going to focus on boards and we're going to talk about backlogs like I showed you in the scrum

diagram now this is our backlog for our current

development project and as you can see we have uh that at the top of the list

is release 10 our customer appreciation release this is an epic this is a big thing that we want to

deliver and it's composed of

these features the things that it's going to do or enable when we release it

and the um next release below that we have user stories and bugs

but user stories are the the ways in which these features are going to be used and beneath that we have tasks

as you can see a lot of these are closed and as I scroll up and down you can see that there's a lot of work that goes

into each of our releases it's also overwhelming

and when I talk to clients or when I talk to other people I don't whip out my backlog and show them all the cool work

we're doing it's it just it it's a conversation non-starter

even if I take it down to this level it's still difficult to talk to someone using your backlog

but the good news is that we can express it

on a task board and the way that we do that I can't seem to move this

I'm going to have to move this over here it's underneath the panel I can't seem to move it

um and what we want to do is we want to pull work in here into the iteration path

now each one of these iterations ties back to

this so we've taken a bit of the work here in the backlog we've put it into our Sprint

backlog okay so I can click on this and now it will show me a subset of all

the work that we have in the backlog but just the things that we're working on for this release

as you can see we've been iterating for some time and we've had we're on our 10th release which is kind of cool

um but you can go back in time let me turn some of these things off

you can go back in time and let me switch it to the task board view because that's kind of the point of

this discussion sorry about that here's the task board and we treat bugs

as user stories so they sit here on the left hand side user stories though have

tasks as you saw in the backlog and these are the things that the developers need to do

so Epix decomposed to features features decomposed to user stories use the stories decomposed to tasks

tasks are what we move across the kanban now void of discussions about story

points or how big things are this is typically something that people can understand almost through the title

by itself and the act of accepting it into the Sprint working on

it and moving it to closed is meaningful

and as you close tasks those closed tasks are in a state that we can measure

and if we can measure the state of closed tasks and stories and features over time we can express express it at

the portfolio level Okay so

um this is the team kanban now as you can see there's a lot of

information here a lot of work going on um and what we want to do is we want to

be able to see the work that this team is doing in conjunction with the other teams that

are working in the internal program here to release portfolio plus plus

so what I'm going to do is I'm going to come over here to the backlog

oops sorry I'm going to come over here to portfolio plus plus QA

and I'm going to open up a webinar demo and these are the epics

that you just saw in the backlog well specifically release 10 because it's the one we're working on

in release 11. these have been closed so they don't appear in the backlog but we

can show them on the roadmap so that you can show people context over time

now each of these um each of these epics we can show their

children by clicking on this little Chevron here and that shows

all of the features that I just had in the backlog but this is in a road map

this is over time and while this is helpful it doesn't show the state of what's

going on right now at the portfolio level across teams

it tells you where you've come from and where you're going that's awesome don't get me wrong that's why we built

portfolio plus plus initially but then people started asking for the kanban and so we wanted to design something

that was complementary to what Microsoft had already produced in Azure devops at the Sprint task board level

and so here if we switch over to kanban view now we can see epics

in the Sprint task board you can only see the requirements level and the iteration level

in the portfolio kanban you can see the higher level items and we'll talk a lot more about this when we talk about

process templates and how to set up for kanban but at this level two things first it

looks like I'm the only one working on portfolio plus plus which is not true but second you can see

the work that we've closed and you can see the work that's active now that's not as useful

as looking at the features and as you dig down into the taxonomy moving from

epics to Features now you can start to see more true ownership like I'm

ultimately responsible at the epic level for the release but there are a lot of other people who are working on the

features that make it happen and so as you go down though

and you can see this list is getting rather long um we need to be able to manage

this view as we look at it at this level across all the other teams because they

have their cards too so what I'm going to do now is show you how we do that

now this is our 2023 strategic plan and when I take a look at it here

let me give me one second [Music] I have to move this over so I can

switch The View let's make it 2023

and today are now the end of the year

whoops I kicked myself backwards one

okay so now you can see the releases that we

have in IP but you can also see the other things that we're doing around the

release of our software at the program level so you can see that we have marketing

campaigns we built a relationship with kanban University over the course of

this year and I'm looking forward to the global get together in November

and then today we're doing kanban University I'm going to move that card to closed

we have to do design we have to update our website we have to update our Microsoft offers we have to make sure we

keep our people certified I can tell a story looking at this road map of what

we've had to do what we still need to do and where our Milestones are

but what I can't do is see what's going on right now

so that's why we built the portfolio kanban now as you can see there are quite a few

more epics and there are some features here because I'm looking at it using selected items

now what that requires oh there we go

okay let's put this back um

when I look at selected items that's showing me exactly what I've selected in

my roadmap so what I have here I can see here but those selected items have children

and so if I want to look at the features well now I can see all the features that all the teams are working on

and again you know we start having problems with information overload

so one of the things that we've built into this portfolio kanban that I'm very happy to

announce because it's coming out shortly is the ability to segment The kanban

View by project or by team or by query it just depends

on how you build your roadmap now what this does is it divides up the kanban by area of ownership so it's

easier to see the work by team in The kanban View

and if one of these is super productive you can close it

and or move them around change the order the point is is that this is the now

this is what's happening right now so you've got a road map but this shows State and I find it to be

super helpful as a program manager um so this is um the portfolio kanban which is

uh part of portfolio plus plus an extension for azure devops

we've got some helpful Links at the at the end of the presentation

um for people now in terms of setup where you can get

portfolio plus plus and other things now um the last thing is that we've got

options where you can change the cards like maybe you don't want to show who it's assigned to you just want to show that it's in flight

maybe you don't want to redundantly show the state sometimes the state columns are

expressed as categories here let's say for example you've

customized your work items and you've got a whole bunch of states and your kanban has gotten really wide you can

turn on state categories and all of the states in all of your

work items will be mapped to the four uh

named categories that never change across any process template at Microsoft I find this to be very useful especially

when teams feel like they've got states that nobody else does and they customize

the process template specific to their needs um you don't want those things showing

up sometimes so this is super helpful too anyhow when you make your adjustments you can say okay and then

you can save your view and it'll save whatever view that you're looking at here you can also name your views

and you can share your roadmaps here if you want someone to take a look at what you've been working on the only catch is

that they need to have the same permissions that you do to see it okay so this is how we do

kanban in Azure devops there's two levels Sprint task board

and portfolio kanban which is not time constrained both really help to limit work in

progress to make sure that you are working on the most important things and

I would like to assert that all of the benefits of Cloud9 that you read about can be found here

now in order to do kanban in Azure devops there are a couple things that I

want to share in terms of setup we have talked to lots of clients over

the past couple years since we released our initial tandemon board I'd like to thank any and all of you who've shown up

today who have contributed to some of the ideas that I've demonstrated at the portfolio level we really appreciate

Community feedback um but there's some gotchas gotchas and so

let's talk about um process templates for a second now

process templates deal with three things predominantly they deal with work item types

so as you can see in the backlog a big feature user story task we have bugs bugs can have tasks but we treat bugs as

user stories um and you may notice that

these process templates all look a lot alike they've just kind of had the labels

changed for different communities um and I guess I would say the

overarching continuous delivery agile principle space there's also a basic template that

doesn't look like the others that just goes epic issue task which is like uh

um probably the most notable competitors taxonomy now we're using the agile process

template here and the way that that process template looks

is this way we've put two customizations into the process template we've

introduced the notion of an initiative and we've introduced the notion of an idea at the feature level as different

from something that we think we're going to build as a feature just put it in there

now if I can switch back to Azure devops I'd like to go live again for a minute

and talk about process templates here this one is uh QA safe

and actually what I'm going to do is go back to the organization

and open up all the process templates so that you can see basic agile scrum cmmi

the way I was just showing you in the PowerPoint now we've inherited from the agile

process templates that we could make some customizations and the customizations may be that we

introduce a new work item type case initiative or we add States so if we click on one

of these we can check the states of how that moves through the kanban now

if you add any states that's going to be an automatic new column uh for this project and process template

in your portfolio and on your task board so just be careful about the number of

states that you add and the last thing are the uh whoops let's go back to

levels QA save the last thing are the levels

now the Sprint task board shows requirements and iterations

the portfolio kanban shows requirements iterations and portfolio items

so you can show epics you can show features you can show the state of now

at a variety of levels depending on who you're talking to so it's very important that when you

define a work item type that you put it at the right level now

this this second takeaway is that we strongly encourage you to keep kanban

Simple keep it to the minimum number of columns keep work item types to the minimum

required for your program practice abstraction and you know a user

stories a user story is a user story right like there are there are definite needs to add fields to a process

template work item type like a ticketing number uh to a system

and you can always add but if you change the defaults or you take away from the default work items

it's going to cause problems with Azure devops so I would strongly encourage you not to do that

all right so this was the process template that we were using for what I just showed you

and we try to keep our columns pretty short I think we've added

in the case of Ip we added a two states let me go back to backlogs

with this out of Way open up the Sprint

and open up the task board and you can see that we've got this

blocked now blocked isn't something that comes out of the box we like to have a

blocked column I like to have a blocked column as a program manager it gives me something to do

so that's something that we've added so try to keep it simple don't go crazy

with customizations now um with respect to keeping kanban current

and this is where we want to talk about organizational maturity

um it should not be that big of an ask to have people show up on a daily basis

or uh 7 to 15 minutes scrum maybe even 30 minutes

where at some point during that discussion they talk about what they do yesterday what are they doing today do

they have any blockers and to move their card across the board

if you can get teams to do that consistently that's a very easy first step toward

organizational maturity and consistency in Azure devops such that you can do program management and

portfolio management now there's a lot of other stuff that goes into defining these cards like size

the story level you know estimated story points when you decompose into tasks

putting in concrete hourly estimates but again these things are pretty small or they should be

and if they're not it's Nature's way of saying more decomposition we're not going to cover any of those

things we're just going to talk about how kanban is useful and I think that just getting people to move cards across the kanban is useful

because these states have meaning and um what I can show you is that when I say

they have meaning we can roll up done

based on things that are closed that's how we calculate these green bars

and so kanban plus roadmap equals a very effective portfolio

management tool in azure devops

all right um that is what I came prepared to talk about today

and at this point I'd like to move into q a

I see that this group yeah let me stop my share

okay all right so I I can run through the questions we hear Chris and and great

job by the way on the uh presentation there are a lot of things I think from our our uh our trainers Consultants are

supposed to be like oh wow interesting because there are a lot of things that we don't usually see paired up maybe we see it paired up behind the scenes uh in

the trenches so to speak uh in our Communications and our training it does look a little different which is kind of

an exciting to me because it shows us what you're discovering in the field when working with customers and what

they need uh for portfolio management which is really interesting we're trying to start with where they are now and where they are now is that blend of

things likes from with kanban maybe even story points are there sometimes like you shared or hourly estimates that's

just reality right now oh well I don't want to dismiss story points I love them but I also didn't want to start any uh

debates on the call today so right well and it's probably best that

you you keep that that love for story points to yourself for now even though there's probably a great debate come to San Diego with us Chris we'll debate

that I think people would love to hear your your affections with them and understand why uh and maybe have an intervention with you possibly if we can

but uh beyond that let's take a look at this question

awesome awesome so we have about 12 questions that pop up during your talk so the prayer comes from uh dimitro he's

asking I do not know if it is going to be covered but would it it would be great to see if we could measure flow

metrics cycle time lead time in a kanban board and Azure devops and is it possible to set whip limits that was

kind of metrics and whip limits was kind of his question yeah so uh yes it is and

we use power bi to do that and that is not I wanted to cover the basics today and that's a more advanced topic and um

we'd be happy to show you how to do that um I'm Chris at italus.com I can show

you examples of not that metric but other metrics and how we get it in power bi

excellent okay great uh Alex Miner also asked a question uh is the time frame

for each epic determined by the items parented by that Epic find iteration in which the Epic is

assigned or by some other value okay so um I'm not sharing anymore am I give me

one second

okay I assume that we're referring to the uh roadmap with that question in

terms of the Epic time box and so this is not um one of a couple ways

um like if we look at kanban University um you know that second open you can see

that we've got a number of user stories that have been occurring over time plus this kanban University feature and so

what we do is we take the very first uh work item and the very last work item

and so the very first work item the very first day of the iteration that it's in and the last work item and the last day

of the last iteration that this one is in oh one other nice feature that is show

full labels and so this is something that people have been asking for when you have like

really big themes and you drop the children down and they're very short in

short iterations you can't see the titles the other thing you could do is switch it to say weeks but you know

still that's it doesn't really work out so hot um so the calculation is done based on

the iteration path and that's part of the reason that I went over it that's a great question

all right awesome okay great and we have an anonymous question which is is it

possible to create a portfolio from different project boards in the same organization yes

that's exactly what we're doing here um and so if you look here marketing is

a project IP is a project design practice is a project and this is this was a big missing in um my opinion

I have to be careful there uh with respect to the design of azure devops because in my opinion it was designed

for cross project efforts um and just in terms of the way that

it's built but there was no way to show anything beyond Epic feature timeline inside of a

project and so this is why we build portfolio plus plus in the first place which was to give people some semblance

of a road map across projects um

okay we'll just uh for that Anonymous attendee they asked also can you show how to do it I don't know if you can do

it quickly or if it's better to say Hey you may want to check out uh I trellis's website to see how this is configured to

get the full scoop on how to do it yeah there are I should have included this in your helpful URLs link there are a bunch

if you go to our website um www.itralis.com there is a page on portfolio plus plus and a page on

tutorials on portfolio plus plus you can find our privacy statement our license agreement and on the tutorials you can

see how to build a roadmap and I would encourage everyone to check out the mastering Azure devops series it's five

videos and honestly most of it is what you need to do in Azure devops and it's

only the fifth video where you go to the point of creating a road map now in terms of creating roadmaps really

pretty simple um uh on the Fly road map

you select project we're going to hit IP we're going to hide all the closed epics

and we're going to just pick 11 10 and let's say that we want to go to

marketing and we want to pick the uh portfolio plus plus campaigns that go

along with it save it done

and then you can you know change your time and date range okay

um I think that answered the question did that answer the question yeah yeah okay I I definitely give them insight

and I put a link into portfolio plus plus into our answer question and answer system so that should be able to uh I

think help out with that question as well Rosario Morales also asked a

question I'm trying to figure this out he's asking how can it be

um they come by to you on dot Azure so I'm guessing he's asking maybe it's just

more like uh awareness that there's a Dev instance out there and that you can post this on the dev instance if you wanted to to like play around with it I

guess maybe like run the portfolio plus plus in your Dev instance for fun

well so you can I think I understand the question so if you go here to the

marketplace you can click on the marketplace browse the marketplace and I'm very proud to say that we're

currently being featured by Microsoft uh here if you click on it

um then you can get it for free and you can use all of the features that I showed today except for the ones that

have a little blue badge because it's a free medium model and so if you get it free

it's pretty much as simple as defining the organization that you want to load

it into so if you have a Dev and a prod organization you can load it into Dev and try it the other thing that you need

to do um is let me get back out of this

the other thing that you need to do is um

if you want to use the pro features that this is a pro version is you want to

pick up a trial and so you can use all of the features in portfolio plus plus for 28 days but then you have to buy a

license to use portfolio plus plus pro features after that

which I'd encourage you to do all right so uh what's the next question

uh the next question is is it possible to export the data like Azure analytic views which can be exported to power bi

to create other visualizations and bi chart is that kind of what you guys already are doing like you said you're using power bi

no um so we're hitting the analytics API and we this is a the extensions built in

react um and so uh the ability to export what you have out

of portfolio plus plus we don't provide that um portfolio plus plus is a reader

and there are a variety of reasons for that and what we have done is um let's

say that you're looking at a strategic plan you're in portfolio plus plus if you click on this well now you're

passing from our iframe into Azure devops and you're actually working in Azure devops

so we've tried to make it pretty seamless but if you want to get the data out of your devops backlog you need to hit the

analytics API and and pull the data into something you can work with is the short

answer yeah yeah so it sounds like it's possible with power bi but not with

portfolio plus plus it's kind of outside the scope of what you guys are trying to do well it's not just outside the scope we don't want to do it

um that could open all sorts of liability so right so we're pretty locked down you

know we're you have to log into Microsoft you have to use your ad you have to use your Microsoft credentials you have to go through multi-factor

authentication you have to have the right permissions to the projects and be on a team and then you can see the data

so and we want to we want to be as tight on data control as we can possibly be

yeah that's excellent still giving people access that flexibility yeah it's

quite the design so that that's that's definitely it so

um you know the next question here is from Alexander Miner uh he asked are the columns on The kanban View in portfolio

plus plus customizable or are they only map to state so they're mapped to State

um and you can customize them in your process template but you can also um change the view here like I can hide

proposed and I can hide um completed I only want to see what's

in progress and resolved you know it's kind of a I don't know why you do this but it answers your question so you

could have as many columns as you want and you can hide them

or you can turn on and this is my favorite trick which is let's put those back in here

and let's just imagine we had a bunch of other states I can turn on oh this is in categories sorry so these are just the

states that we've collected across all the work item types and if you turn on state categories it

will map all of those states to the respective category in the template

and they're and proposed in progress resolved and completed is exactly the same across

uh basic agile scrum CMI so if you inherit from them and use them in devops

Services that's exactly what you'll see and then if you want to hide you can

hide very good all right so one other question came

from dimitro he's asking about portfolio plus plus pricing he said is it based on the number of users how is it priced out

just so he knows so yes and also you can buy an unlimited

license so portfolio plus plus is uh ten dollars per user per month for an

individual license and two hundred dollars for an organization license that offers unlimited use across the

organization and we have um

I'm happy to say that we have had a lot of market adoption

um like to see more some of our some of the clients that are using us are very large

and they have put everything into one

organization or their company and they have lots of projects and lots of people using it same price for the Enterprise

license so it just depends on how big your company is whether you want to go the individual license route or the

organization route very cool that's nice

um we have another question here we actually have quite a few questions you have 21 Questions left so let's see if we can get through them all Chris uh we

don't I don't know if we can but we'll try our best um so they asked someone anonymously

said this view their operational tactical is there a strategic view in this plugin

I don't know can you maybe speak right here yeah I I think of the road map as um

you know the roadmap is based on your team's iteration paths and the work that they've pulled into those iteration

paths and so this is a Gantt chart Style View of the work that is in the iteration

path um so I think let's move this to months

and let's open up what's coming

so it looks like you can kind of dig down and really pull out tactical stuff pretty quickly then yeah and show full

labels and so let's see if you're in an executive discussion and you're working at the portfolio

level and you're talking about epics and features you can drill down as necessary if they're asking questions about a top

level item and you know well why isn't this complete yet I can see you're supposed to be delivering here in two days

um these are bugs that we're cleaning up just saying um but the point is is that um

this roadmap view helps you coupled with kanban is that strategic view that we

want to provide people for planning purposes and then there's another aspect that we

haven't talked about at all today which ties back to story points which is capacity planning in terms of how to do capacity planning

in your iteration path that's again another more advanced topic my goal is

to get people using the Sprint task board and the portfolio View and using kanban to talk about here's the now so

like we can talk about what's going on right now we can switch to the roadmap to talk about the context of that work

over time there's also dependencies Milestones things that we put in here this is

another Innovation that we're releasing which is a milestone tray where you can drop it down and you can actually see

our last release our next release coming up shortly don't hold me to this since

we're being recorded but this was the significance end that we put out there

and I definitely wanted to have these features working for this demonstration

so again a shout out to my team they work tirelessly and some of the debugging over the

course of the past two weeks much much appreciated yeah thanks so much for the hard work

here folks so um that probably answered that question somewhat related to this uh Derek chined asks what if the tasks

and iteration can't be completed what do they do in terms of what happens to them in azure devops

well we just move them to the next Sprint

in all honesty um and so there is a history button so

let's go and look at backlogs and let's look at our current Sprint

and let's just say for instance this one we're ending on the 29th and let's go to the task board and let's

pick this user story

uh here now the kanban video is finished so I'm going to move these over here and

move these over here and so now where is this

publish video now I can go in here I can actually look at the history

and see how long this has taken to do the publication

and by the way if you want to see the really tight perfect version of what I just walked

through in half an hour you can see it in five minutes in the video that Greg produced that goes over how to do kanban

in Azure devops we just published it and it's in the URL at the end of this presentation

so um if you move it you touch it you change its state anything you do to it

you can track it um so what do we do if it's not done well we

put it in the next Sprint and try and get it done we also take a look at our velocity how much you know we try to

limit work in progress and make sure that we're taking on reasonable amounts of work

pretty much like everybody else yeah yeah awesome yeah I'm kind of used to that

we've done quite a bit of research here at combine University on scrum audiences and we kind of hear that phrase we'll just put it in the next Sprint you know

that kind of sometimes you have to do that it's reality for you um okay so Amy Smith had a quick

question she said why not use area paths to structure a portfolio backlog and utilize boards to boards to visualize

and manage flow of work items um so some of our larger clients do

exactly that and the area path becomes a filter for the backlog in that project

um you know there's no there's no reason you can't do that one benefit of doing

that is that you can use the dashboard that comes along with Azure devops for

those areas however you can't go across project and also the more you subdivide a

project into areas and teams the more complicated it gets and the harder it is to find work and the more steps people

have to take to get there so I tend to err on the side of having

too many projects at the top level so that it's just really clear like if I'm on the software engineering team or

the digital app Innovation team I go here if I'm on the marketing team I go here it's not as obvious when you're using

areas that's just a personal preference but you can definitely use areas with portfolio plus plus in azure devops

at the portfolio level wow neat okay good uh Alexander Miner

had an easy question hopefully it's an easy one can you map dependencies visually in portfolio plus plus

string dependencies know but we can show dependencies pretty clearly

um let's see oh I'm in the wrong let me go to portfolio QA

and let's go here I believe I have some dependencies

here there we are

Okay so we've got a dependency here and if you click on the toggle you can

see the dependency now if you have multiple dependencies you would see the list here and it's a hot list and then

you can you know go to the item that's the dependency right then and there um

so we do not do string dependencies it's kind of visually unappealing in the

roadmap so we're using titles instead and you can have as many dependencies as

you want the dependencies are predicated on predecessors and successors as a link

item type to the work item

excellent okay great there's a lot of stuff here uh that you know we won't

have time to get through I mean all of it I mean it depends on your availability here Chris we have people

have been popping in questions that you've been giving answers which is fascinating this is a great webinar uh if you want to stick around folks you're

welcome to we could answer the questions here Chris or if you if your time box Chris because I know you're on vacation

you got other plans we can definitely come back and answer these questions and send out an email as well so what's the

preference here Chris for your schedule and availability can you hang around a little bit longer yeah I can hang around a little bit longer my uh my true boss

has not yet come back to the house so okay okay when that when that happens

we will uh wrap that up then so we have let's see how far we can get we have 22 more questions for those who want to

stay around stick around we're going to answer all these questions as much as we can uh Rosario had one more question for

us uh the question was the length of the line in the graph is sized automatically is it by the dates because today it is

necessary to do it manually so they must be an active uh Ado user in this case

okay so um there's two ways to generate a road map uh in portfolio plus plus and

this also applies to um portfolio kanban in terms of selection

criteria and that is um to where is it use manual mode

now if you use manual mode and if this is going to destroy my my

beautiful road map here oops I can't I seem to have lost control

of this there we go okay now I switched it to manual mode now it's going to be picking up start

dates and end dates and as you can see there's only one Epic that has a start date and an end date defined

um here on the card so if let's imagine why is why did we

even build this feature when we want to generate the roadmap based on the reality of what's in the backlog and the

reason is at the beginning of projects as a program manager I often don't have the luxury of a team to define a backlog

that I can then base the roadmap on that's just a huge amount of analysis and it's unreasonable to to do Beyond

like epics features maybe user stories to just kind of paint a picture of what it is that you're going to build we do

this as a Consulting Organization for clients who say here's what we're going to build but we can't take it much further than

that we can create an iteration path um but let's just say you're by yourself

in a corporation you need to be able to paint a picture for the executive team to get budget for your project and you

want to approximate when you think you're going to be working on things you can Define on epics and features

start date and Target date and paint a picture using manual mode it'll pick up

these dates and it will just automatically build the bars that size

um and that's it you can just you know create this shell of a of a road map

that has no interaction with the backlog at all it just reads the static State

um I short of that scenario I would get away from manual mode as quickly as I

could so that the roadmap was being generated out of the state and the and

the completion level in the backlog so that you get a true view of what's actually happening inside of azure

devops so that's manual mode or that's the other way to calculate

these epics and features awesome awesome

uh so you know Amy actually had a question as well somewhat similar but it's kind of a little different I guess

how do delivery plans compare to portfolio plus plus

well I really enjoy my standing at Microsoft and um that is uh

I think I will just leave it at personal preference um right what we're going for is a Gantt

chart styled roadmap that dynamically generates based on what you have in the backlog and the ability to show State

through kanban it's a little bit of a different feel

um I know of teams that have you know compared both you know go one way or the other

um so I delivery plans is great it just depends on what you're trying to

do all right awesome okay thanks for that

one Chris good to be safe uh in terms of how you share that so yeah um another

question that was asked is which is a simple one but it's worth mentioning here for those who are kind of new to Azure devops uh is that free to set up

and actually start to use so could someone set up a free Ado account and then grab portfolio plus plus and try it

out as well is that a thing they can do yes and yes so you can start an Azure

devops organization I think you can have up to six people with basic licenses which you need in order to hit the

analytics API which is something you need to have your administrator turn on or portfolio plus plus won't work

turn on the access to the analytics API um and then you can get portfolio plus

plus for free and you can use it forever but just at the epic level

like if I want to put other types of work items on the project

uh like in the case of what I was showing you earlier to get this thing out of the way again

um like let's say I wanted to put in features or I wanted to put in stories

you know something that was really super important that you know had a ton of dependencies that everybody was focused

on I want to put that story on my roadmap um you can do that

um and so you can try all of this for 28 days for free so yes to Azure devops yes

to portfolio plus plus and yes to trying out the pro services for free

that's awesome oh by the way I like that idea yeah notice right here that

customization that we made in the process template well here it is so

um your process template's super important um you just want to make sure you've got

the right types coming through and that's the curb I have to admit

having like something that you know will have dependencies attached to it obviously we can't always get rid of our dependencies having that visualize is

kind of the big big thing to pay attention to to make sure things are flowing as well as possible with that thing mixed in with everything else on

your your roadmap that's actually pretty helpful I think that's pretty darn useful for people who say well we got to make sure this one thing gets done

because it could easily get slowed down yeah I like it uh also uh just really quickly

here Alexi uh said thanks so much great presentation lots of good content here looking forward to seeing you at uh in

San Diego so Alexia fan of yours we'll probably see you in San Diego and shake your hand and say thanks um thank you Lexi with that

yeah thanks Alexi so um we also have a couple more questions here so someone

Anonymous that said have you thought about highlighting the epics features that are behind the expected state so

they're behind the expected State could be good to see at a quick glance some red color or warning to identify where

to focus yeah so things that are coming in late I guess yeah we we do have that so let's say

um this is the customer appreciation release and it's connected to finishing

portfolio plus plus release 10. let's say that we didn't do that let's say that the Milestone was actually supposed

to be done on the 15th well now it shows as uh not as a diamond

it shows as a triangle with an exclamation mark and that is your visual indicator that

something has gone wrong and you can color code these things however you want

um some people color code them the same as the as the work item type but then again there's lots of work item types so

it's really just a combination of the visual indicator dropping the tray and seeing the name like oh we didn't get

our customer appreciation release out so that's how we do it now we've had

some in the community ask us to color code cards like red yellow green

um or different conditions but that is not something that we've undertaken at this point like most things I say we'll

put it on the backlog now that's uh that's not just idle promises I do want

to show in the IP backlog now we keep talking

about this customer appreciation release and our community and everybody out there can thank Lisa

galano for championing this release as my co-product owner

and so we have a number of customer requests that we thought you know these are really great

things that we should put into portfolio plus plus so if you've got ideas for how we can make it better we'd love to hear

and we will put it in the backlog in the icebox [Laughter]

okay and also thanks Lisa for for checking this release I know it's a lot of work to get stuff out the door so

really happy that you guys are able to share this with us today uh and so for our audience to kind of understand more about how this stuff works

um a couple more questions here we're getting through them thank you very much by the way folks this is a lot of great questions

um there's a nested feature apparently uh Alexander Miner was asking he says it looks like you have a message feature as

a parent of another feature typically Ado recommends against this does portfolio plus plus function as expected

when this type of relationship is set so

yes and sort of I'm not exactly sure what you

would be looking for we do also suggest that you don't Nest you know epics of

epics features of features um because from our point of view they're all portfolio work items right

now if you have a child um let me switch back to

uh gosh this thing just keeps getting in the way

now let's say that I had a child Epic

here um

it would show up here as a child when I dropped this down if you notice here there's a black

triangle and a black triangle here so when I drop these to show the children

you won't see a black triangle until it gets to the next selected work item and selected work items are determined in

settings when you choose project and they appear over here these are selected work items they will

all have a black triangle and so we're trying to make it simple

to see all the children to the next selected item here so if you had an epic of an

epic it would show up as an epic here but there wouldn't be any sort of annotation that this is a child epic of

this Epic so it would work I I think the answer to the question is

it works the way I think it should work so yeah

okay okay good so uh now hopefully it answers your question Alex uh alloc had

a question for displaying entries on the roadmap based upon the first and last

item explanation does it mean that every item must have a start and end date populated I think we kind of answered

that to some degree that you don't have to have that it's Dynamic correct well you don't have to have explicit

start and stop dates defined on the work items but the work items at the requirements level need to be in

the iteration path so that we can pick up the start and stop dates of the iterations

so you don't have to put start and stop dates on your cards at the requirements level your user stories your tasks Etc

your product backlog items if you're using scrum um

and so when we see the iteration path of user stories and tasks

that are children of features and those features are children of epics we

basically do a left to right search through the entire child

um set of the entire set of relationships from the selected work item down

to show all of the work that's occurring um from end to end across its children

there's a whole lot of data set theory going on behind the scenes here

I bet I bet that sounds about right okay good so from there we've got Andre uh Andre had

asked can you build portfolio scenarios oh this you know in terms of data set theory that's kind of interesting can you build portfolio scenarios from

projects to check out different roadmaps and how they might be able to look so a little bit of forecasting possibly

well it so um it depends on your permissions if you

have permissions to another project you can very quickly construct a roadmap

in that project to see where things are if you don't have permissions you can't

see it and let's say for example that um

you were an i trellis employee in Italian

um and you had access to design and marketing but not IP you wouldn't be

able to see this road map because you don't have access to IP so if I share a link if I send you a link

to this roadmap and you don't have access to all of the projects and their work items you won't get to

see it now that's just something that we have to do um

because we have to follow the Microsoft license access

and your permissions very very strictly yep yeah that makes sense okay great so

with that uh we have another anonymous question here um it may be a pretty easy answer here

they were unclear how the items were pulled into the dashboard or into the portfolio viewer the roadmap where they

lower level items story items was there a roll-up activity here just to clarify that maybe a little bit

yeah so um you know there are three ways that you can build a road map you can build it by project

you can build it by team you can build it by query and this is our this was our last

release and query's cool so anything that you can produce through a wickl query in in queries over here

um that produces a flat list those become selected work items

um so any any time you like let's go here oops and it also stops you from

destroying your roadmap by choosing another method of generation um but we'll stick with the one that we've been using

so all of these work items are selected here in the settings

and you know I can choose this and it appears I can choose these I can choose all of them

um and you know the bigger your roadmap gets uh the worse the performance is

going to be I'll just caution you on that right now it's just a it's it gets to a point where it's just physics we

think it's as fast as it can go but we can only get the data in so fast and we still have to process it so when you

build a road map a lot of people oftentimes go to every project and they turn on everything and they want to see this huge wall chart I mean at that

point you've hit the same issue of complexity and so you want to design road maps that are Point specific to

tell a story in my opinion or just show at a high level you know here's everything that's going on in the

program you can have multiple road maps but the point is this is where you do

the selection in settings excellent wow okay so that's

makes sense by the way I remember back in the day when I was using project years and years ago a decades ago and it would sit there and compute all the

different scenarios and come out with a complete picture just for a Gantt chart so I can understand why this would still have a lot of dependency a lot of time

going on in the background to process and present things like you're talking about right um so okay so Andre had a one more

question and we're going to try and get the rest of these pretty quickly here um is it possible to create and

visualize dependencies between epics yes something that you can do okay

yeah the answer is yes yeah yeah it's what we we use the dependency feature that I

demonstrated a few minutes ago to do that um so it's a combination of milestones for visibility on the roadmap

and then dependencies between work items in the roadmap and you use that toggle feature I was

showing earlier here so here are we're going to show dependencies say okay

and so now you know we've got a visual indicator that says hey you didn't meet your deadline on this

and this work item and this one says hey I've got a dependency on this work item

so I believe the answer is yes okay right

um there is another question here uh kanban work items are not driven by iterations okay that's not correct at

all that's good how does the roadmap work for purely kanban based features and user stories so if we drop out the

idea of a time box isn't the timeline for an epic independent of What stages

the work items are in seems like two different questions here maybe no I believe that I believe that

what we're showing here is um based on State in the kanban and as you can see here in

the portfolio kanban it is not time constrained so what we're doing is we're showing all

of the selected work items and their state now if it's a generated roadmap and

you've got work items that are not in an iteration path they won't show up on the roadmap

but I haven't thought about that from a kanban standpoint

Lisa any thoughts on that yeah

Lisa can unmute herself yes okay but I I agree with you that the kanban

is void of time right it's showing the now in terms of what's coming and what's going

and so um you know there's you're kind of bridging into uh scrum and Sprints at

the task board level um that is time time constrained

yeah yeah okay well you know it looks like there's a good chance that some of this is built in but I think yeah there

probably it was a need for uh email to Eric or to Lisa and see where it goes from there uh if you want to know more about it and uh Chris by the way so uh

let's see what sorry about that Chris um another question was uh kind of a simple

one maybe uh if not we may want to have people go to the website and look it up what features do you get with the non-premium version of

portfolio plus plus you get everything that doesn't have a blue button next to it when you're using

it um you know our goal was to create a road mapping tool initially

um and so everybody can do roadmaps for free um now there's limitations on what you

can do as part of the freemium model but everybody can build roadmaps for free

awesome okay great and then Lisa your co-worker had mentioned how um she wanted to mention that there's a

snapshot feature to export the roadmap so you can share it with your team so just in case you need to get it out there you can do it pretty quickly

that's a good point so that's here um and uh here's a snapshot uh

uh of the kanban and then here's a snapshot of that same

set of selective work items as a road map

so you can put these kind of side by side take a look at them

um thank you for pointing that out Lisa so I assume that was as part of the data

export and so no there's no data export you can share road maps but in the event that someone doesn't have the same

permissions as you you can print a static image of what you want them to see and you can send it to them or post

it in SharePoint or do whatever you want it's a scalar PNG file

awesome very cool okay so we're near the end of these questions by the way Chris uh we've got three more to go here

um this is kind of a I don't know if you have an answer for this it may be more of a just a gauged answer but someone asked you know at which point in terms

of data volume does the performance start to degrade like a scale kind of question around how much data before it

starts to go you know we've spent a fair amount of time trying to Noodle that one out and right now we

are encouraging people in our fact and on the marketplace page not to select

more than 200 work items now if you think about that that's a lot of work items to put on a high level

summary roadmap um but uh that's when we start to see

serious performance degradation um the other thing is just you know do you have the bandwidth

um like if you can support this video you can interact with the cloud pretty easily but it's also a function of the

horsepower on your machine as well as your bandwidth that makes sense and um one other

question I think we have a big fan here they said uh caitan had asked he said you know why is portfolio plus plus only

with Azure devops why can't we use it with jira rally other conventils out there is there any special benefits to

using uh azure devops well I think there are that's uh part of

the reason that we chose to build the extension for Azure devops first um

you know what was this a person's name uh chaitan

all right well as a Consulting organization I'd be happy to build it for you in jira

um but uh we we chose Azure devops for the most

part because of the flexibility of the process templates and the ability to

have features so it goes epics features user stories tasks I also like the way that um

Azure devops parallels the scrum Bond framework that I was demonstrating

earlier and scales well so I'm I'm pretty big fan I also like jira but we

had to choose one so we went with devops first for the reasons we've been discussing today

awesome awesome thanks Chris all right well that's pretty much it for the questions for this round that is

probably the most questions we've ever got for webinar by the way folks so uh thank you all for the great questions thank you Chris for walking us through and answering every question this is a really interesting product I think people are going to get a lot out of it

so um with that I'd like to wrap it up thank you Chris for showing up Chris any final words before we take off

um yeah I'm gonna send this to you so you can send it out we've got a bunch of links to all of the materials that we've

put into this presentation and again I really would like to thank our partners at kanban University for allowing us to

present our experience um with Azure devops and how we do

kanban uh and the software that we built to do it thank you very much

you're welcome thank you so much all right folks have a great day we will see you later on hopefully you'll we'll see

you at the kanban Leadership Retreat in San Diego in November if you can make it show up we'll shake hands see you there

all right thanks Chris have a great day everybody