Large cloud projects can be sprawling, complex programmes of work, covering a multitude of different activities and technology areas: networks, applications, platforms, migration, operations, etc.
Projects that have adopted an agile delivery approach are helping set themselves up for success. Using tools such as Azure DevOps or Jira, it’s possible to break down activities into epics, features, user stories and tasks.
The benefits of agile delivery are well documented, especially for the project team. But, one of the questions the team is often asked by senior management and stakeholders is -
How is the project doing? Are we making progress?
For these stakeholders, being pointed to a Kanban board or lengthy backlog isn’t always that helpful.
Something that I’ve seen used to good effect is a heat map. These are often used when presenting large amounts of correlated data i.e. average monthly temperatures for New York —
How do we create a heat map that's helpful for cloud projects, especially Azure-focused ones?
Cloud Adoption Framework Heatmap
Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) is useful for many organisations by providing comprehensive guides and best practices for adopting Azure.
However, there is a lot of information available. Not all of it is relevant to a specific project, so sometimes it isn’t easy to get a simple view of which components are in scope and their delivery progress.
Below is an example heat map for an enterprise organisation adopting Azure for the first time. So we see the usual components such as management groups, subscriptions, identity and connectivity -
With this, we can more easily -
Get a view of progress across the different areas
Identify areas at risk, challenges, blockers
Where we need to focus team members and effort
Assuming agile delivery, these areas should ideally map back to an epic or feature in your backlog tool, i.e. Azure DevOps. This ensures consistency between what the project team is delivering and what is reported to the broader programme, organisation or customer.
Landing Zone heatmap
The previous heatmap was relatively high level. An Azure project may focus on migrating or building a single application in Azure. In this scenario, we require a more detailed view of that application or workload’s specific landing zone -
In this example, a few areas are highlighted in “purple”. This is useful to show where a 3rd party or vendor is responsible for delivering different parts of the solution. By highlighting these, it raises the visibility of dependencies and any blockers.
Conclusion
I’ve shown just two examples of how heatmaps can be used to track progress for Azure projects.
I’ve aligned these against the Cloud Adoption Framework, but they needn’t be and should be tailored to your specific project.
As well as status reporting, the same heatmap can also be used for -
Sprint review and planning within the project team
Generating ideas and brainstorming new features and user stories
Identifying dependencies and priorities
As an aside, if you’re interested in heat maps and data visualisation in general, check out Azure Charts — Clarity for the Cloud. This is a neat resource for graphically displaying Azure services and their updates.
I hope you found this post useful, and as always, comments are welcome.