Most leadership teams are good at defining strategies. 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.
This blog is sourced from a recorded webinar. Prefer to watch instead? The full webinar recording is available here:
You leave the strategy session with clear goals. Everyone is aligned. And yet, you still can't confidently answer: are teams actually working on these?
This is the defining frustration of 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, Nooga and Cprime alongside Scaled Agile Inc. (SAI) demonstrated a live solution built inside Azure DevOps. 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 Azure DevOps, where many of your teams already work.
This post covers the first part of the 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 above 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 And by the time a status update reaches leadership, it's already outdated.
Cprime’s John Kosco raised a point that resonates with most portfolio leaders: by the time a PDF or presentation reaches leadership, it’s already out of date. And yet most organizations have no alternative; the work lives in software development tools such as Azure DevOps, the strategy lives somewhere else, and the only bridge between them is someone manually assembling a report.
Kosco also shared a client's 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 SAI's 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 tools where much of 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 (large initiatives), features, and stories (team-level tasks) 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 Nooga's 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:
- Enterprise OKRs: strategic objectives spanning multiple portfolios, visible to everyone in the Azure DevOps organization
- Portfolio OKRs: specific measurable outcomes per portfolio, connected upward to enterprise objectives
- Work items & execution level: epics, features, and stories 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, so organizations are not forced into a hierarchy that doesn’t match how they work. Whether you connect strategy directly to features, use a full epic-feature-story structure, or something in between, the tool adapts to your setup. Smaller teams, squads, and organizations not following a specific scaling framework can benefit just as much as large enterprises.
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:
- At-risk initiatives: the Predictability Score automatically surfaces work that may be at risk, giving leadership an early signal 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
Not all work connects to Strategy. Epics running outside your OKR hierarchy are easy to miss. Nooga Portfolio can surface shadow work, large work such as epics that are not connected to strategic objectives, making misalignment visible without anyone having to go looking for it.
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.
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.
Coming in Part 2: Are your teams delivering work, or actually moving the needle on outcomes? Nooga’s OKR Pace view answers that question in real time. Read Part 2 to see how.
The capabilities above give portfolio leaders a clear view of what is connected to strategy and what isn’t. But visibility into alignment is only half of the picture. In Part 2, we cover how Nooga Scale handles cross-team dependencies, risk visibility, and whether your teams are actually moving the needle on outcomes.
> Part 2: How to Manage Dependencies, Risk and OKR Pace in Azure DevOps
See Portfolio Visibility in Azure DevOps Live
If your organization runs scaled delivery in Azure DevOps, 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.
