Azure DevOps is built for engineering teams, not ITSM. Still, if you already use it and need a very low-cost ticketing flow for an SME, Boards can be adapted into a simple helpdesk with decent ergonomics and zero additional license costs.
Disclaimer: this won’t replace full ITSM tools (Jira Service Management, ServiceNow). It’s a pragmatic, minimal solution for small teams and simple workflows.
Prerequisites
Notes
Step-by-Step Setup
1) Organization Settings → Processes
2) Organization Settings → Users & Access
3) Create the Project
4) Project Settings
Well done you're ready to setup boards and customize user experience!
Boards and customization
While Azure DevOps isn’t the most user-friendly platform, its Boards feature delivers a reasonably good experience for both customers creating tickets and agents handling them.
Notifications
More...
Disclaimer: this won’t replace full ITSM tools (Jira Service Management, ServiceNow). It’s a pragmatic, minimal solution for small teams and simple workflows.
Prerequisites
- Azure DevOps organization (free to create)
- Microsoft Entra tenant for user management
Notes
- The first 5 seats are free on Azure DevOps
- To add all users of your company to Azure DevOps you can use Entra Groups
Step-by-Step Setup
1) Organization Settings → Processes
- Create a new custom process based on Agile.
- Simplify: hide Development/Deployment groups and remove fields you won’t use.
- Add custom fields (e.g., Category, Impact, SLA Target). Consider required validation for Description.
- Define work item types: Incident, Request, Idea with tailored templates.
- Keep everything tracked at User Story (Requirement Backlog) if you want a single backlog view.
2) Organization Settings → Users & Access
- Set default access level for end users to Stakeholder.
- Add support agents with Basic access.
3) Create the Project
- Name it Support, Helpdesk, or Tickets.
- Assign your custom process.
4) Project Settings
- Disable everything you don’t need (Repos, Pipelines, Test Plans).
- Define Areas to group tickets by team, topic, or project for better reporting.
- Create the Support Team and add agents as members.
Well done you're ready to setup boards and customize user experience!
Boards and customization
While Azure DevOps isn’t the most user-friendly platform, its Boards feature delivers a reasonably good experience for both customers creating tickets and agents handling them.
- Create a board for your customers: shortcut to create tickets, see all the tickets created by current user, logo and simple README or introduction panel
- Create a board for your support agents with swimlanes (Urgent/Normal), KPIs, assigned work, ticket of the day,…
Notifications
- I set up Power Automate to send notifications to Microsoft Teams each time a new ticket is created (feel free to ask if you want more info)
- By default, Azure DevOps doesn’t automatically notify users—someone has to tag
@user
in the conversation feed to trigger a notification
- On top, notifications can be customized in the project configuration
- Banner Settings is also an interesting extensions to display global alerts in Azure DevOps
More...