Delivery Plans 2.0 Public Preview

Dan Hellem

Welcome to the public preview of Delivery Plans 2.0. We can’t wait for you to get in and try the new features. Your early feedback will help us shape the product into great user experience.

Our intent of Delivery Plans 2.0 was to provide a simple and elegant roadmap solution to the following problems…

  • Provide a timeline view of work in progress, how long it is taking, and when it will be completed.
  • Understand what work not being delivered and why.
  • Show progress being made to achieve certain business goals or initiatives.
  • Support multiple teams and projects.
  • Understand dependencies across teams and projects.
  • Make Delivery Plans part of the core product and not longer an extension.

To enable the public preview simply go to the “Preview Features” link and turn on the “New Delivery Plans Experience”.

Please be patient, sometimes our deployments take longer than expected. If you don’t see the Delivery Plans 2.0 feature right away, you will in a few days.

What can you expect?

Please keep in mind this is a public preview. You are going to run across some rough edges. In fact, we are addressing and deploying bug fixes on a daily basis. Also note that some of the capabilities are not going to be included in the initial public preview. We expect to rollout the remaining features between now and the end of the year.

Let’s start with what is done and ready for preview…

Part of the core product

Delivery plans is now part of the core Azure Boards product. When you turn on the public preview you will see two “Plans” in the Boards navigation. One is for the existing delivery plans extension and the other is for the new delivery plans preview.

Image left nav 1

You are able to use the new delivery plans preview and the delivery plans extension side by side. Existing plans can be opened and used with the public preview without any data loss.

Spanning iteration boundaries

Work items can now span across iteration boundaries. We use the combination of Start Date, Target Date and Iteration Path dates to plot the work item on the timeline view. You can change the dates and the card size by dragging and dropping the right or left edges of a card.

Image delivery plans 1

Stakeholders access

Stakeholders now have read-only access to delivery pans. This allows your users to share a plan with anyone else in your organization without having to purchase additional licensing.

Compact view

Most organizations need to report their progress up to a leadership team. Typically a leadership view will contain less of the details and will span over a broader timeline. Create your own leadership/compact view by removing extra fields from the cards and zooming out to the desired level.

Image compact view

Coming soon

  • Show roll up child rollup information on each card.
  • Notification and views of dependency problems across work items.
  • Display the parent on the card and allow filtering of the parent field.

Known issues

  • Hard limit of 10 team backlogs per plan. We hope to increase this to 25 in the future.
  • Multiple zoom in/out card formatting issues.

Feedback needed

Please email us directly with any questions, comments or issues you may have. We take your input seriously read every bit of feedback.