Add Your Definition of Workflow (DoW) to Azure DevOps

While Azure DevOps will present some challenges in visualizing connected workflows in a single view (e.g., Features and PBIs in a single view), for a given work item type, you can visualize all the six elements of your DoW in Azure DevOps Kanban boards. 

The following describes how to visualize your DoW with “out of the box” functionality in Azure DevOps. 

Note: The instance of Azure DevOps that I used for the examples below uses the Scrum Process Template. Microsoft provides four different process templates (Basic, Agile, Scrum, and CMMI) for managing work items. Depending on the Process Template you are using, there may be some differences in how the Kanban boards can be configured. 

Customizing the board with your DoW Elements

To begin configuring your board, select the gear symbol in the upper right corner of the board view.

• Unit of Value: The PBI is your smallest unit of value. What makes a PBI a PBI? What makes this valuable? Consider defining policies for this.
  
  • In this example, I added information to the Definition of Done field for the column before the start point as pull criteria.

• Information entered in the DoD field can be viewed from the board by hovering over the "information" symbol

• Definition for when work items are started and finished within the workflow
  
  • For purposes of Azure DevOps, we will use the State of Committed to Done
  • Azure DevOps bases Cycle Time between the times of when the State changes to Committed to Done (yes, weekends and holidays count!)
  • Even if you change the names for Committed stages, you can visualize the current State of the PBI on the board view by adding that in Fields.

• One or more defined states that the work items flow through from start to finish
  
  • Since Azure DevOps has States of New, Approved, Committed and Done, I like to refer to these as Stages, which can be mapped to one of the two, Approved or Committed, PBI States.
  • Columns may be added to the board and moved in settings. 
  • The State that the PBI should be in when moved to the column are mapped to the column
  • Columns may be split into sub-columns of Doing and Done
  • WIP limits can be set for the Column

• Column names can be changed directly from the board view

• A definition of how WIP will be controlled
  
  • Explicit WIP Limits and/or policies may be leveraged
  • Out of the box and as columns are added, the default WIP Limit is set to 5. If you are only concerned about total WIP or have columns without a WIP Limit, change the WIP Limit to 0

• Columns with a 0 WIP Limit will still show the number of items in the column

• Explicit policies about how work items can flow through each stage from start to finish
  
  • As shown in the PBI as Unit of Value section, use the DoD field for each column to enter your policies for when to pull work from one stage to another 
• A Service Level Expectation (SLE), which is a forecast of how long it should take a work item to flow from start to finish
  
  • You will not be able to get your SLE from the out of the box widgets that are available with Azure DevOps Dashboards so you will need to calculate that in some other manner. In our environment, we can use a custom PowerBI report, which pulls in Azure DevOps data or with the Actionable Agile Analytics Azure DevOps extension. Once established, there are multiple ways to make your SLE visible on your board
  • You can include it in the name of one of your columns or add it to your DoD to the column before the Start point

• Note: An issue with adding the SLE to a column name is that you might update your SLE occasionally and changing the column name frequently could cause issues with historical column level data. 

Additional visualization tips

This covers some of the ways that all 6 elements of your DoW can be made visible on your Azure DevOps Kanban board. There are many others, and your Azure DevOps Dashboard might be leveraged for additional information about policies that are more global (apply across the entire workflow), charts associated with queries, reports from other sources, etc.

Setting up rules for more visualization

Styling rules can be added for things like changing the color of a PBI once it ages beyond your SLE. 

Or you may want to highlight important tags such as one indicating a work item is blocked

Adding Swim lanes

Swim lanes may be added to separate different types of work

You can also add information to Swim lanes. For example, you may want to limit WIP by swim lane

Some things to be cautious of:

• Overuse of style rules for color coding cards and tags, which can cause confusion about what a certain color represents or distract from the most important visual signals
• Too many columns, which may require lots of horizontal scrolling
• Overuse of swim lanes, which may make it difficult to prioritize or limit work as you are pulling from one stage to another

Summary

All elements of your DoW can be visualized through Azure DevOps Kanban boards, it just takes a little work to get there. Getting started, you may want to keep it simple, so your Kanban System Members are not overwhelmed with the visual information presented. 

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