A digital transformation strategy is the right mix of strategy and execution. It’s about reshaping your business model in a way that will engage your stakeholders, empower your teammates, transform your services, and optimize your operations. Digital transformation focuses on keeping up with innovation and utilizing the right technologies to achieve organizational goals.
It isn’t enough to merely work on your projects and complete them within the due date. No, digital transformation means ensuring a holistic infrastructure that provides successful project execution in the best way possible. It means making the most out of your resources through data-driven decisions and not random estimates.
Therefore, with a rapidly changing environment, digital technology strategy requires speed. And what better tool to use for this purpose than Azure DevOps?
Azure DevOps And Digital Transformation
In this era of the digital revolution, everything at work must run hand in hand. While one team may focus on backend infrastructure, another may just as well work on software development or designing a new product. All of it has to be coordinated in a way that ensures absolute visibility of each other’s timelines.
With Azure DevOps, you can simultaneously track multiple teams and drive your project plan forward. You can also monitor the visibility of different teams in a collective milestone. Because digital transformation demands speed and agility, Azure ensures seamless collaboration across teams to eliminate gaps between groups. Azure’s rich set of tools facilitates faster execution of projects by speeding up planning, deployment, delivery, and tracking.
In this article, we’ll walk you through 5 steps for successful digital transformation using Azure DevOps. We have also considered Azure’s shortcomings in terms of portfolio visibility and highlighted how they could be resolved through a simple integration with PPM Express.
5 Steps for Successful Delivery of Digital Transformation Initiatives
Prioritization – Selecting Projects That Deliver Maximum Results
While a handful of organizations consider project prioritization to be a budgeting process, it is, in fact, a lot more than that. Did you know organizations that focus on strategic prioritization deliver almost 40% more value?
Project prioritization thus stands as the basis of successful project implementation. This is where project managers align their projects with vision and strategy. It’s where they identify a roadmap, address the risks, and eliminate waste.
Poor project prioritization is one of the leading causes of project failure. With the ever-changing business environment, prioritization has become key to proactive change. When you do not have a structured process for identifying and reacting to environmental changes, your organization will fail to meet its digital transformation goals.
When done well, project prioritization will facilitate strategically aligning your decisions related to resource allocation – all while delivering better results and successful projects.
And the right project portfolio management software can help you do just that. With the help of PPM Express, you gain access to your entire project portfolio. This means you can view which projects are lagging, low priority, and need immediate attention. You can also access project ROI and re-prioritize your projects if and when required.
Resource Planning
Resource planning is the segment where you allocate different tasks to human and non-human resources for optimum efficiency. Resource planning helps project managers efficiently give resources, track resource capacity, and handle budgeting when done right.
As a project manager, you ought to know which projects each of your teams are working on. A good resource planner makes sure you’re allocating the right resources to every project, effectively tracking and managing resources, and resolving resource conflicts at the earliest.
More importantly, effective resource planning means you’re dividing project tasks proportionately among the team members and not bulldozing a single member with overload.
To ensure efficient resource planning, you must balance multiple project deadlines, capacities, priorities, and skill sets. You need to know which team member has the right skill set to tackle a challenging project, or who can deliver the most within the least amount of time.
As such, PPM Express helps you plan new projects, find available resources, and maximize resource utilization. Project managers can thus reduce waste by mitigating burnouts and work overloads. This is the platform where you manage resource utilization seamlessly.
Work Planning
Now that you have planned your resources, you need to plan the work you’re doing. This includes using an agile methodology and proper planning of backlog.
Work planning is a crucial part of project management that manages the people who perform that task. It’s the part that ensures all team members approach their work in the best possible way to meet organizational goals.
Planning your work gives you a way to coordinate the tasks that need to be done, along with a keen focus on innovation and improvement. It’s based on cohesion, cooperation, collaboration, and increasing productivity. And to work effectively, all team members need to have a clear conception of the business’s strategic direction.
And Azure DevOps ensures just that. Azure DevOps facilitates end-to-end delivery with steller tracking across the team, from envisioning your software to putting it in front of end users. Azure gives you the platform to plan your entire project using agile tools:
- handle your source codes via multiple code repositories,
- automate and release your build through an exceptionally scalable build
- release pipeline
- handle your test plan
- automate your test execution
Overall, Azure offers the perfect end-to-end dashboard for software developers, business users, and other team members. This software facilitates real-time insights into a project, including but not limited to capacity tracking, defect tracking, deployment results, and automated build.
Tracking & Monitoring Progress
By tracking your project and monitoring your progress, you can compare it with the actual plan and see where you stand. Project managers can then identify the obstacles hindering the project from staying within budget and on schedule.
Tracking your project helps you know which work has been completed, which needs to be done, and what resources have been utilized to accomplish those tasks. Therefore, it enables you to measure project variance and track milestones.
Azure DevOps Boards ensure all that and more. This is where the action begins. Azure boards enable you to track work in backlogs and use Kanban boards. Once you create work items in user stories, features, epics, and tasks, you can finish your work based on available capacity.
Moreover, you can track items and review details with your team using Scrum discussion and implement necessary actions accordingly. You can track and manage your everyday efforts as a team, which will significantly help you progress toward the result.
While Azure is flawless for anything remote software development, it still lacks features that will ensure viewing the big picture across multiple teams and portfolios. That’s where PPM Express comes in handy.
PPM Express lets you integrate more than one PM tool – all under a single dashboard. You’ll thus have guaranteed visibility and transparency across all projects. With PPM Express, you can visualize project portfolios, solutions, and epics.
Moreover, PPM Express predicts project statuses and constantly looks for variances, anomalies, and problems in existing projects. Hence, project managers can proactively address project issues and implement steps to ensure optimum results.
Reporting
As a project manager, you’ve faced scenarios where stakeholders demand to know the project status even before you’ve started working on it. This is what creates the need for consistent reporting.
Lack of consistent reporting means unsatisfied stakeholders. Imagine how it’d feel when a client is asking for an update, and all you can come up with is, ‘I’ll let you know in a while.’
Project management reporting lets you stay in the loop about everything at work. It enables you to manage everyone’s expectations, including team members and stakeholders. Reports also facilitate consistent monitoring to effectively communicate your project delivery, scope, budget, and digital transformation progress at any given time.
You can use Azure DevOps for project-level reporting. Azure Boards offers several in-context reports that are derived from analytics data. In case you’re looking for portfolio-level reporting, PPM Express with Microsoft Power BI is at your disposal.
You’ll never have to worry about staying up to date – PPM Express refreshes all its data several times a day. It also offers a deeper insight into project portfolio statuses using machine learning.
Using these highly detailed reports, you can access financial analytics, and budgeting information and implement better and more informed data-driven decisions within your organization with our artificial intelligence processing.
Final Words
Digital transformation demands speed and accessibility – and Azure DevOps ensures just that. And when integrated with PPM Express, collaboration within the organization will be more seamless than you can imagine. If you’re eager to give it a try, all you need to do is sign up for our 30-day free trial today!