Looking to setup Azure DevOps organisational dashboards? This is harder than it probably should be today. At present there’s no notion of cross-project widgets or organisational status views. There is a user feedback request, but it has been ‘under consideration’ for years.
In leu of that, here are some options for getting a view of how your teams are going across multiple projects.
Using PowerBI and OData
One option for creating your own reports and dashboards is to use OData support in PowerBI to import data via the Azure DevOps APIs.
While an option for the more technical-minded – at least initially during the setup phase – this is a great way to explore your DevOps data without paying a premium for a third-party solution if you already have PowerBI setup.
Cross-project queries
This is another more technical approach, but you can create queries under Azure Boards that allow you to query across multiple projects. This in turn allows you to build charts and dashboards using widgets.
With this approach though you’ll need to pick one project to host your cross-project dashboards – there’s no way to have an organisational dashboard as yet.
Portfolio overview
If you’re looking to get a view of how your portfolios are going across projects, then there is a free third-party tool available – Portfolio++.
You can upgrade to the paid PRO version to unlock additional program management functionality, but the free version allows you to create cross-project roadmaps, filter through epics and boards and more.
DevOpSmartBoard
If you need more than just cross-project portfolio management, then this plugin could be for you. It is a paid plugin (at the time of writing ~$40USD per year, per user) but it offers perhaps the most comprehensive out of the box cross-project reporting solution.
It supports organisational level reporting across boards, CI/CD pipelines and more. You can drill down into charts and even traceability reports.
If you’re after a more practical experience – ie. a developer who wants to see all pending pull requests across multiple projects, then this probably isn’t for you. But if you’re a program or portfolio manager, then there’s a lot to like here.