Top 7: Azure DevOps Benefits For Your Business
Azure DevOps is Microsoft’s Software as a Service (SaaS) developer service that supports product delivery. It provides a single platform that integrates, manages, and enhances DevOps approaches into your organisation. Built on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, it’s the services which impact the computing, storage, networking, databases, and monitoring domains. These are our top 7 benefits of using Azure DevOps.
Benefit 1: Collaboration
Seamless collaboration is one of the main challenges of effective product delivery. With Azure DevOps, teams can benefit from hosting and managing code centrally. Through this, they can fully optimise their processes. Even if your team uses PowerShell or VB scripts, the Azure DevOps cloud ensures you can manage all code from a central location.
But the collaboration benefits don’t stop at coding. Teams can easily integrate prominent collaboration services like Microsoft Teams within the Microsoft ecosystem. In addition, you can link non-Microsoft applications, or any other external data sources, with ease.
Benefit 2: Continuous Delivery
The Azure DevOps platform optimises pipelines, and ensures you can develop and deploy solutions continuously. It doesn’t matter if your team deploys a solution hosted in Azure or another external cloud platform. The Azure DevOps CI/CD pipeline can process the entirety of your solution lifecycle.
Additionally, the integration capabilities of Azure DevOps means that your workflows, delivery, and handover process are completely seamless.
Benefit 3: Platform Agnostic
Microsoft has always been a leader in promoting cooperation, even with their own competitors. By extension, Azure DevOps is a master of integration. It offers perfect connectors and extensions to industry and community tools like Slack, ServiceNow, and many more.
If Azure DevOps has not built the connection you need, there is a marketplace with hundreds of extensions avaiable to use. This ensures you can to fully optimise and customise your workflows. No matter what platform, data source, or applications you use, your team can still use Azure DevOps.
Benefit 4: Reliability and Security
Microsoft’s Azure data centers have secured IRAP certification, which ensures the highest grade of cyber and data security. Azure DevOps receives 24/7 support, and so has a guarantee of running 99.95% of the time. Additionally, you can manage Azure DevOps deployment across multiple instances, therefore, you can keep applications within compliance regulations. This gives teams confidence when building solutions. They know Azure DevOps is a highly reliable and secure platform, yet it doesn’t compromising on its integrative capabilities.
Benefit 5: Maintenance Free
Because Azure DevOps is an SaaS product, users don’t need to worry about upgrades. Microsoft handles the updates, so users of Azure DevOps have access to upgrades as they become available. For businesses running on a CI/CD model, down times are no longer necessary to facilitate upgrades. This brings extensive time and cost savings for teams, so they can instead focus on more valuable activities.
Benefit 6: Customisability
The integrative capabilities of Azure DevOps means users can build solutions with tools that suit them best. As a result, it’s easy to customise the solution, and experiment in the delivery process. This encourages flexibility within your teams. Microsoft has created Azure DevOps to specifically fit to any organisation’s workflows and practices.
Benefit 7: Enhances Culture
With its roots in Agile philosophies, the implementation of Azure DevOps encourages more proactive and collaborative teamwork. You can adapt Azure DevOps to the needs and scope of every team, while also facilitating uninterrupted collaboration. As users tap into the benefits of Azure DevOps, teams begin to work more efficiently and achieve better results.
Enjoy the Azure DevOps benefits in your organisation
If you’re interested in how you can best utilise Azure DevOps in your organisation, book a free demo. We can show you how utilising the Microsoft ecosystem will take your PPM activities to the next level!
IIR: Introduce, Integrate, Replace
Step 01
Introduce
You cannot run a portfolio on Excel and PowerPoint alone.
Project portfolio management is the discipline of seeing every project in one place, prioritising the work that matters, allocating people against demand, and governing delivery with real numbers. It is not optional at any serious scale. The moment you have more projects than one person can hold in their head, you need a single, current view of status, schedule, cost, resource and risk.
Excel and PowerPoint feel free because there is no licence conversation. The real cost is elsewhere. It is the hours spent maintaining workbooks, the version confusion, and the numbers that go stale the moment they are pasted.
A spreadsheet cannot tell you, on demand, which projects are at risk, where your people are over-committed next quarter, or how much of the portfolio budget is actually spent.
Introducing a proper PPM platform is the first step. Not to add another tool for its own sake, but to give the portfolio one place where the data lives together and stays live.
Step 02
Integrate
The instinct after buying a PPM platform is to make everyone move into it. That is the fastest way to fail. Project managers already have tools they trust, and finance already has systems of record. Force a migration on day one and you get resistance, shadow spreadsheets, and a dataset nobody believes.
Integrate first. Meet the data where it already is. Two directions matter.
Direction 01
Enterprise systems
Connect to the finance or ERP layer so actuals, commitments and budgets flow in automatically. Reporting stops being a monthly reconciliation and becomes a live view. Nobody rekeys a spend figure again.
Direction 02
The tools PMs already use
The direction most platforms neglect, and arguably the more important. The portfolio should read from the PM's own tools, not force people to abandon them.
The reason this matters is simple. That data is already there, and it is kept current by the person closest to it. When the portfolio reads directly from these sources, the status report updates itself. No chasing, no copy and paste, no reporting lag. The PM keeps working the way they always have, and the board gets a live picture as a side effect.
Step 03
Replace
Integration buys you two things: trust, and live data. Once both are in place, you look at what can go.
Every organisation carries tools and spreadsheets that either do not do the job well or carry a heavy maintenance overhead. The classic example is the resource spreadsheet. It is a workbook someone maintains by hand to track who is on what. It is always slightly out of date, owned by one person, and impossible to reconcile against real demand.
Replace it with the equivalent function in your PPM.
A proper demand management capability does what the spreadsheet was reaching for, with none of the overhead. It models demand against capacity across the whole portfolio, updates as projects shift, and needs no manual upkeep.
Replace deliberately, one function at a time, and only after the platform has earned it. The test is simple: if a spreadsheet is high overhead or low quality, and the platform does the same job natively, retire the spreadsheet.
The payoff
You stop producing reports and start reading them
Follow IIR and the nature of reporting changes. The status view is current because it is fed by the tools people already use and the systems that already hold the money. The overhead that used to consume the last week of every month disappears, because there is nothing to assemble.
That is the whole point of real-time reporting. Not a prettier deck, but a portfolio you can look at any day of the month and trust, at a fraction of the effort it takes today.
Built on Microsoft 365. Native ground for IIR.
pmo365 integrates with the tools your teams already run in, so the path from Introduce to Integrate to Replace is a natural progression rather than a rip and replace.