Most Azure DevOps dashboards fail the same way: one page tries to serve everyone. The Scrum Master scrolls past quarterly trends to find what is stuck today, and the executive scrolls past a list of work items to find a date. The fix is not a better widget. It is a separate dashboard for each person who reads it, built around the one question they bring and how often they bring it. Below are four examples, one per role, using the views in the Agile Analytics hub and the tiles it adds to Azure DevOps dashboards.
Two places a dashboard can live
Agile Analytics gives you two surfaces. The hub, under Boards in each project, has its own Dashboard of cards you can show, hide and reorder with Customize, plus the full views in the sidebar. Azure DevOps dashboards get six tiles from the widget catalog under the "Agile Analytics" category: Team Health, Cycle Time, Throughput, Sprint Forecast, DORA Snapshot and AI Adoption. Each tile shows one team, and the team list includes teams from other projects, so one dashboard can cover a whole portfolio. The tiles summarise; the hub views are where you go when someone asks "why?".
Example 1: the Scrum Master standup view
Question: what needs a conversation at standup today? Cadence: every day, read in under two minutes. This view is about items, not trends, and none of the six tiles shows aging, so it lives in the hub.
- Aging & Blocked first. Every item in flight is a dot at its days in flow, with thresholds from the team history (p50 and p85), and a ring marks blocked items. The list underneath is ranked by urgency, so the first row is the first conversation.
- WIP Monitor next. It shows work in progress against the team WIP limits. When the team is over its limit, the useful question is "what can we finish?", not "what can we start?".
- Sprint Burnup on the hub Dashboard. Turn on the card labelled Sprint Burndown under Customize (it is off by default); the chart it draws is a Sprint Burnup, with Scope, Ideal and Completed lines and an Items / Story Points toggle. When the Scope line rises mid-sprint, the team sees added work without anyone having to raise it.
Leave off
Monthly trends, forecasts by date and DORA figures. A daily view that mixes in numbers that only move once a month teaches people to stop looking at it.
Example 2: the delivery lead flow view
Question: is work flowing, and where does it wait? Cadence: weekly. A delivery lead needs distributions and trends rather than one sprint, so this view leans on the Measure and Plan groups.
- Cycle Time, with p50, p70, p85 and p95 lines. Switch between Scatter and Histogram. When someone asks how long a story takes, quote the p85 rather than an average.
- Cumulative Flow. A band that widens over weeks is a queue building up in front of a step.
- Flow Efficiency, the share of cycle time that was active work rather than waiting. A low share usually points at handoffs and queues, not at people working too slowly.
- SLE Violations: how often completed items met each service level expectation, with a worst-first list of the ones that missed.
- Process Behavior, an XmR chart with upper and lower limits, so you can tell normal variation from a real change before reacting to one bad week.
Related: How to build a sprint and flow dashboard in Azure DevOps
Check Workflow Mapping before you share it
Every number in this view depends on which states count as Done. Done is the first state mapped as Done under Configuration, then Workflow Mapping, and time after that state is not cycle time. Cumulative Flow completions follow the same mapping, not the Azure DevOps closed date. If your process has a Ready to Release state mapped as Done, cycle times end there. A two-minute check by an admin saves a long argument later.
Example 3: the engineering manager view across teams
Question: which team needs my help, and is each one getting more predictable? Cadence: once per sprint, after the sprints close. An engineering manager reads several teams side by side, so this view is built around comparison.
- Sprint Summary with two or more teams selected. A "Teams at a glance" table sits above the team cards, with Team, Sprint, Delivered of committed, Done of all items, Scope change and Carryover on one row per team. A running sprint is marked (in progress) and shows a dash for carryover, because its figures are partial.
- Delivery Signals for the trend: commitment reliability, carryover and time to start across past sprints, each card marked Healthy, Watch or Low.
- Multi-Team Aging, to see aging work across every team in one place.
- A Team Health tile per team on an Azure DevOps dashboard, when you want the summary without opening the hub.
Agree on carryover before comparing teams
Carryover is counted only for finished sprints; a running sprint shows a dash with the note "Carryover is counted when the sprint ends." An item is carryover when it was in the sprint at the end of at least one sprint day, was not done when the sprint ended or when it left, and either stayed in the sprint or moved straight into the next one. Work moved back to the backlog unfinished is removed scope, not carryover. If two teams count it differently by hand, the comparison is meaningless.
Example 4: the executive monthly view
Question: will we hit the date, what is at risk, and where is the effort going? Cadence: monthly, and usually read outside Azure DevOps. Executives rarely open a hub, so this view is built to be sent.
- Exec Report as the page itself: a one-page summary of forecast, risks, delivery trend and DORA. Use Export leadership report (PDF), Copy summary, or Share, then Copy email text and paste it into your own email. The report is built in the browser and sends nothing to Baytek.
- Monte Carlo behind the forecast: 10,000 simulations on the team throughput history, answering "how many by a date" and "when will we be done" at 50%, 70%, 85% and 95% confidence.
- DORA Metrics for deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate and time to restore, from work items and pipelines.
- Investment Allocation for where finished work went: features, bugs, maintenance and exploration per team, plus a row for the whole project.
- On an Azure DevOps dashboard, the Sprint Forecast and DORA Snapshot tiles cover the same ground in two tiles.
Related: Delivery metrics for executives
Leave off
Individual work items and per-person numbers. Keep the layout the same from month to month, so the trend is the only thing that changes.
Rules that hold for every example
Whatever the role, three rules keep a dashboard trustworthy. They matter more than which tiles you pick.
- Averages, trends and forecasts use finished sprints only. Agile Analytics keeps the running sprint out of them, because a half-finished sprint always looks slow.
- One definition of Done for everyone. The views read Done from the same Workflow Mapping, and Sprint Summary, the Dashboard, Delivery Signals and the Exec Report count carryover with the same rule, so the Scrum Master and the executive quote the same number.
- Start small. The Sprint Forecast tile is free for every organisation and keeps working after the trial ends, so you can put a forecast on a team dashboard before you decide anything else.
Try it on your own project
Agile Analytics runs in your browser against the Azure DevOps REST API, with no Power BI model and no personal access token. It supports Azure DevOps Services (cloud). The 30-day free trial starts automatically on install, with no credit card and no sign-up form, and everyone in the organisation has full access while it runs, so each role can open its own view on real data.
Related: Azure DevOps dashboard extension · Install instructions · Pricing