Replacing manual ticket walls and Azure DevOps's native dependency view with Nooga Scale, gaining live, visual cross-team dependency tracking across 20+ teams and 100+ contributors, with a 15 minute setup time.
To understand how enterprise teams are solving cross-team dependency management in Azure DevOps, we spoke with key stakeholders at Henkel, one of the world's leading consumer goods companies, headquartered in Düsseldorf, Germany, in an interview. Here's what they told us.
The Problem: A Dependency Map No One Could See
Henkel's DevOps organization coordinates more than twenty interdependent project teams across the globe. Four times a year, they bring 55+ stakeholders together for PI planning, and for a long time, getting everyone aligned on cross-team dependencies meant resorting to a workaround that no digital tool could match.
"We took the burden of printing out the different tickets and stitching them offline onto a wall to show the mere complexity of the overall teams working together." - Thoralf Bock, Compliance Manager and Agile Support, Henkel
Azure DevOps' native Delivery Plans wasn't enough either, it showed dependencies as small red or green icons with no directional context. For a programme spanning 20+ teams and hundreds of work items, that left teams flying blind: blockers went undetected until they became critical, and there was no way to see the full picture without physically assembling it yourself. Something had to change.
Why Henkel Chose Nooga Scale
In August 2023, Henkel's DevOps governance team ran a structured evaluation of Azure Marketplace extensions, screening on download volume, user ratings, update recency, and open bug count. Nooga Scale stood out immediately. But what sealed the decision wasn't the ratings, it was seeing it in action.
"This extension was the first one that was actually looking quite good for visibility in the board in itself. The arrow in the Nooga extension, that really for visualisation helped a lot." Alina Lata, DevOps Engineer, Henkel
Where other extensions showed icons, Nooga Scale showed directional arrows, contextual, directional, and rendered directly on the board where engineers already worked. Crucially, it required no data migration, no new platform, and no change to existing workflows. With over 100 licenses in active use across the programme team, adoption was both fast and sustained.
What Changed After Deployment
Since deploying Nooga Scale, Henkel's teams have moved from reactive to proactive. Dependencies that would previously surface as blockers mid-sprint are now visible on the board before the quarter begins, giving teams the agency to act while there is still time to reroute. Thoralf captures the shift precisely.
"It's not a feedback channel, it’s a feed-forward channel. Because they see things, and then they can react on this." Thoralf Bock, Compliance Manager and Agile Support, Henkel
Outcomes Reported by Henkel
- Cross-team dependency risks surfaced before PI planning milestones, not after
- Engineers access dependency state independently, no waiting for reports or status meetings
- Zero negative colleague feedback since rollout across 100+ users
- Full setup completed in 10-15 minutes with users productive the same day
Thoralf also noted something that matters greatly for any tool running inside a live enterprise environment:
"It's a simple, good, working tool. Reliable. Haven’t experienced hiccups or anything, or downtimes." Thoralf Bock, Compliance Manager and Agile Support, Henkel
Having experienced the benefits first-hand, Henkel's assessment of the value is clear:
"It's good value for money for what you get. We might consider continuing to reorder your product, and we’ve also reached out saying we might be interested in other add-ons. Set without words, that means we are quite content with what we have." Thoralf Bock, Compliance Manager and Agile Support, Henkel
Would Henkel Recommend It?
Haven’t heard any negative feedback from colleagues yet. Installation was quick, bringing it to the users was quick, it’s being actively used. Triple yes, all good." Thoralf Bock, Compliance Manager and Agile Support, Henkel
Henkel has since confirmed their interest in expanding further, they are currently evaluating Nooga Portfolio as add on, which gives programme managers and C-level stakeholders as a high-level view of how all running projects map against organizational OKRs and delivery timelines. It is the natural next step for any organization that has solved dependency visibility at team level and is now ready to bring that clarity to the executive layer too.
