Most leadership teams are good at defining strategy. Few can confidently say their teams are actually working on it. This post walks through how Nooga's Portfolio and Scale extensions for Azure DevOps close that gap, connecting OKRs to team-level delivery in real time, surfacing work that isn't tied to any strategic objective, and showing whether you're actually moving the needle on outcomes. No new platform, no migration, just visibility on top of the work your teams are already doing.
You leave the strategy session with clear goals. Everyone is aligned. Two quarters later, you still can't confidently answer: are teams actually working on these?
This is the defining frustration of agile portfolio management at scale, and it shows up regardless of which scaling framework your organization uses. SAFe, LeSS, the Spotify model, a homegrown hybrid, it doesn't matter. The gap between strategic intent and team-level execution is a structural visibility problem, not a framework problem.
In a recent joint webinar, Michael Ginart (Product Lead at Nooga) demonstrated a live solution built inside Azure DevOps, alongside Cprime consultant John Kosco and SAFe Fellow Rebecca Davis of Scaled Agile. What they showed was not a new platform to migrate to, it was a Portfolio and Scale Planning extension that brings strategy-to-execution visibility directly into the delivery system your teams already use every day.
This post covers the full session, and walks through each capability demonstrated, with context that helps portfolio leaders and delivery practitioners find and apply it, whatever their scaling approach. You can read the highlights here, or watch the full webinar replay for a live walkthrough of every capability in action.
The Strategy-Execution Gap: Why Every Portfolio Leader Feels It
Most organizations are reasonably good at defining strategy. Leadership teams align on objectives, agree on priorities, and walk out of the room feeling like something meaningful just happened.
The problem starts the moment people leave the room. Strategic goals end up in spreadsheets. Teams keep working in their delivery tools. And then status update time arrives, and leaders get a round of color-coded decks from their directs.
John Kosco of Cprime put it sharply during the session: "The moment someone cuts you a PDF or a presentation, it's already dated. " That's the real problem. By the time insights reach leadership, they no longer reflect reality. And yet most organizations have no alternative, the work lives in Azure DevOps, the strategy lives somewhere else, and the only bridge between them is someone manually assembling a report.
Kosco also shared a client analogy that captures the feeling well: one organization told him they felt like they were in a submarine, looking through a single portal. They could see their one small view, but not the whole picture.
As Rebecca Davis framed it, playing the role of a large-org executive during the session: "I feel like we walk out with some really clear OKRs. And then a lot of my reports and myself are just having a really hard time knowing if the teams actually end up working on them, or if we're just talking about them and nothing's happening."
What leaders need is not a better deck. It's a live view of their portfolio that updates as teams work, in the same tool where the work is already happening.
OKRs as Native Work Items: A Single Thread from Strategy to Delivery
The foundational design decision in Nooga's Portfolio extension is treating OKRs as first-class Azure DevOps work items, not tags, not metadata, not a linked spreadsheet. Two new native work item types are introduced: Objective and Key Result, linked as parent-child, fully queryable alongside epics, features, and stories in the same system your engineers already work in every day.
This creates what Nooga calls the "golden thread": a traceable, clickable connection from strategic intent all the way down to the task being worked on today. As Michael Ginart noted during the demo: it's also important for teams to feel that they're making a difference. When engineers can see how the work on their board connects to an enterprise objective, the strategy stops being something that lives in a leadership deck and starts being something everyone can see themselves contributing to.
The three-tier OKR hierarchy:
1. Enterprise OKRs: strategic objectives spanning multiple portfolios, visible to everyone in the Azure DevOps organization
2. Portfolio OKRs: specific measurable outcomes per portfolio, connected upward to enterprise objectives
3. Delivery work: epics (large initiatives), features, and stories (team-level tasks) linked to the OKRs they serve, at whatever hierarchy level your organization uses
When Rebecca saw the OKR-to-work connection live for the first time, her reaction summed up what most leaders feel: "We don't just have words on walls running around without them actually being connected to what's actually happening. " That connection, between stated strategy and real delivery work, is what Nooga makes visible.
Framework-flexible by design: Nooga uses configurable backlog levels. Organizations that connect strategy directly to features, skipping epics entirely, can do that. Nooga itself uses features rather than epics for its own internal portfolio. Smaller teams, squads, or organizations not following a specific scaling framework aren't forced into a hierarchy that doesn't match how they work.
Important for Azure DevOps users: This OKR capability is not built into Azure DevOps out of the box. It is the Nooga Portfolio extension, available on the Visual Studio Marketplace. Your Azure DevOps administrator installs it; teams continue working in the same ADO environment they already use. No data migration, just using the same data you already have inside Azure DevOps.
Real-Time Portfolio Visibility: The Whole Picture, Not Last Week's Slide
What the Nooga Portfolio view surfaces:
• Planning period columns: color-coded quarters or planning intervals, with a blue diamond "today" marker showing precisely where you are across past and future work
• At-risk initiatives: work items that have passed their target date while still active are automatically highlighted in red, flagging them for leadership discussion without anyone having to build a report
• Delivery unit zoom: contextual zoom from the enterprise level down to the specific team or group of teams working on an initiative, with its features and sub-teams visible
• OKR-to-work traceability: click any objective or key result to see every initiative, feature, team, and delivery group connected to it across the entire portfolio
Works with any team structure: Whether your organization is structured by ARTs, tribes and squads, value streams, departments, or something entirely custom, Nooga works across any team grouping within a single Azure DevOps organization. Support for multiple ADO organizations is on the roadmap. Having that full picture also reveals something most leaders don't expect to find.
Shadow Work: Surfacing Large Initiatives That Aren't Connected to Any OKR
Even with a well-defined OKR hierarchy, there will always be active large initiatives (epics) in your portfolio that aren't connected to any strategic objective. This is what Nooga calls shadow work, and it's a Nooga Portfolio capability that makes it visible with a single click.
By toggling the shadow work view, portfolio leaders instantly see all epics in their Azure DevOps organization that have no OKR connection, whether they are closed, currently active, or planned for future quarters. As Michael noted during the demo, "some reports are saying that like 30% of the actual work is not connected to the strategy", though this varies by organization and shouldn't be taken as a fixed benchmark.
Critically, shadow work isn't automatically a problem. Some operational, compliance, or infrastructure work legitimately sits outside strategic themes. The point is not to eliminate it, it's to make it a conscious, visible choice rather than an invisible default. As Michael put it: "this might not be wrong. It might be valid. But this is a basis for discussions."
For portfolio leaders, this shifts the conversation from "I think we're broadly aligned" to "here are the specific epics outside our strategy, let's decide together whether they stay." John Kosco framed the broader practice: organizations should run regular portfolio audits to understand not just what is aligned to strategy, but what is actively being worked on that isn't. Most try to do this manually, and it takes significant time. Nooga surfaces it automatically.
Cross-Team Dependency Management: From Sticky Notes to a Live System
Cross-team dependencies are one of the most operationally painful aspects of scaled delivery, regardless of framework. Most organizations manage them manually: spreadsheets, planning walls, or a dedicated person whose job is to keep track. John Kosco noted that this is common enough that many organizations he's consulted with have hired a full-time or part-time person just to manage dependencies. When planning cycles end, that information goes stale, and dependencies discovered late become the blockers nobody saw coming.
Nooga Scale replaces manual dependency tracking with a live system built directly on Azure DevOps native work item relationships, no separate tool, no export, no reconciliation needed.
How dependency management works in Nooga Scale:
• Visual dependency arrows on the planning board: green means correctly sequenced; red means a dependency is scheduled out of order. Teams see it immediately and can resolve it during the planning session rather than discovering it mid-delivery
• Filter to dependencies only: hide all non-dependency cards to focus planning discussions on exactly what needs to be resolved before the period begins
• Dependency requests with a digital handshake: one team formally requests that another deliver something by a specific iteration. The receiving team accepts or declines. When accepted, a work item is created on the receiving team's board, which they then need to plan into a sprint to fulfill the commitment
• Late dependency tracking: commitments that haven't been honored are flagged automatically, surfacing them for cross-team syncs and coordination discussions
• Flexible dependency scope: links can be created between any work items across any teams or delivery groups within the ADO organization, regardless of how those groups are structured
As Rebecca put it after seeing this: "I just have a bunch of leaders saying we have dependencies everywhere and everything is awful. Let's at least give me reality so I can see what awful actually means." That's exactly what this view provides.
Portfolio Risk Visibility: From Team Level to Strategic Objective
Risks identified during planning tend to stay at the team level, logged, discussed, and then lost to the people who most need to act on them. Nooga makes those risks visible at every level above the team, connected to the strategic outcomes they threaten.
Two risk configurations depending on your Nooga setup: If you use Nooga Scale standalone (without the separate Nooga Risk product), risks are managed on a board during planning and connected to features. If you also use the Nooga Risk product, you get the full risk matrix at portfolio and enterprise level, rolling up from execution all the way to strategic objectives. The demo showed the latter. We did not have time to show every details in the webinar, If you are curious about the features of Nooga Risk and would like to see how it fits into your own case, please visit nooga.net/risk or book a demo.
The risk matrix per initiative shows:
• All risks connected to that initiative and all its child work items, features and stories, pulled from the execution level upward into one consolidated view
• Risk scores with severity flags, immediately identifying which risks are critical and unmitigated, so discussions focus on what actually matters rather than an exhaustive list
• The strategic objective this initiative serves, so risk conversations stay grounded in business impact, not just delivery mechanics
The predictability score:
Each initiative carries a predictability score, visible in the top-right corner of the epic view. It indicates whether the team is able to deliver value as planned, combining three signals drawn directly from AzureDevOps data: schedule adherence (are milestones being hit?), scope adherence (is the content changing?), and critical unmitigated risks. As John Kosco noted, this gives leaders an objective basis for knowing which conversations to have before a miss becomes a surprise, rather than being told at review time that a commitment won't land.
OKR Pace: Are You Delivering Work, or Actually Moving the Needle?
This was the last capability Michael showed in the demo, and the one that most directly answers the question leaders care about: are we actually making progress on our strategic objectives, or are we just busy?
In the demo, one portfolio OKR, aimed at lifting app store ratings from 4.2 to 4.7 by inspiring users to rate the app more quickly, showed the following picture: 34% progress on a key result that should have been at 89% given the elapsed time in the period. Six active epics and multiple delivery teams were running against it. Teams were busy. Work was being completed. But the outcome wasn't moving.
As Michael put it: "We're doing a lot of work, but we're not pushing the needle." In the same view, leaders can see:
• Investment volume: how many epics and teams are working against this objective
• OKR pace status: where the key result metric actually stands versus where it should be at this point in the period
• Execution status: what is complete, in flight, and planned across all connected delivery work
This is the distinction that agile portfolio management is built to surface: the difference between output completion and outcome delivery. If you are only measuring whether work is getting done, you may be optimizing delivery in the wrong direction. Nooga puts both signals in the same place, so leaders don't have to choose between operational detail and strategic perspective. The work is already in Azure DevOps. The visibility just hasn't been there yet.
See Portfolio Visibility in Azure DevOps Live
If your organization runs scaled delivery in Azure DevOps, whether you follow SAFe, LeSS, the Spotify model, or your own approach, and you want a real-time, traceable view from strategic objectives to team-level work, Nooga Portfolio and Nooga Scale extensions are worth exploring.
• Book a personalized demo with the Nooga team
• Start a free trial on the Visual Studio Marketplace
• Watch the full webinar replay
About the Contributors
Michael Ginart is Product Lead at Nooga, where he shapes the roadmap for Nooga Portfolio, and Scaled Agile Tooling built natively on Azure DevOps.
John Kosco is a Senior Consultant at Cprime with 30+years of experience in agile transformation, portfolio management, and delivery across aerospace, healthcare, financial, and energy sectors.
Rebecca Davis is a SAFe Fellow and Framework Team member at Scaled Agile, specializing in portfolio management and scaled agile competency development. She hosted and facilitated this webinar session, playing the role of a senior executive to bring the challenges to life.
