Insights

The 60‑Minute Backlog  Heist: Azure DevOps Migration Hacks

Written by Anastasiya Naumova | Jun 5, 2025

 

What happens when 3,842 work items are holding your roadmap hostage?
You orchestrate a heist—one that finishes before the coffee in the break‑room pot turns lukewarm.

The Pain Nobody Brags About

You’re a Sr. Engineering Manager staring at two Azure DevOps organizations: OldCo (where the backlog lives) and NewCo (where the business just told you everything must live).

The backlog isn’t cute—epics, features, user stories, technical chores, tasks, all snaked together in four parent‑child tiers. Manually cloning them would take weeks, torch morale, and guarantee someone fat‑fingers an epic straight into production scope. Hard pass.

Mission Brief

  1. Zero data loss – preserve every parent‑child link.
  2. Zero downtime – teams log off Friday, log in Monday, no whiplash.
  3. One hour or less – because deadlines laugh at your weekend plans.

The Tool That Feels Like A Cheat Code

Microsoft’s Azure DevOps Office Integration (read: a ribbon that appears in desktop Excel for Windows—sorry, Mac folks).

  • Query List – sucks every work item (and its hierarchy) into a spreadsheet.
  • Input List – spits cleaned‑up rows back into any project you point at.
  • Publish – one button, thousands of API calls, zero hand cramps.

The Play By Play

T‑Minutes

Move

Why It Matters

‑30 min

Pre‑flight cleanup: run a Tree of Work Items query, filter out the junk, save the query as Migration_E1.

Garbage in = garbage migrated.

‑20 min

Query → Excel: Team → New List → Query List. Excel clones the hierarchy column‑by‑column (Title1, Title2…).

You now hold the entire backlog in a sortable, filterable grid.

‑15 min

Open a fresh sheet tied to NewCo and pick Input List.

Blank canvas ready for new IDs.

‑10 min

Copy‑paste rows from the first sheet. Delete the ID column—let Azure DevOps assign fresh IDs.

Avoid ID collisions and cross‑org ghosts.

‑5 min

Publish. Resolve inevitable red cells (state mismatches, missing assignees) via drop‑downs or by quickly adding users in Azure DevOps.

First‑time publish always complains; listen once, fix forever.

T‑0 min

Refresh & verify: run the same tree query in NewCo. Item counts match? Ship it.

Trust, but query.

 

Elapsed time: 53 minutes. The only pieces you still copy manually are attachments and threaded comments—everything else teleports safely.

Why This Scales Past One Migration

  • Bulk hygiene – Re‑label 500 stories in seconds.
  • Ad‑hoc analytics – Point a pivot chart at your refreshed sheet and watch defect trends update monthly with one click.
  • Greenfield jump‑start – Brainstorm backlog in Excel during discovery, then blast it into Azure DevOps when the project repo appears.
  • Jira escape hatch – Export Jira to CSV, massage it in Excel, publish straight into Azure Devops. No tears, no plug‑ins on the Jira side.

Pro Tips Your Future Self Will Thank You For

  • Work offline. Freeze that spreadsheet in source control before the publish; rollback is copy‑paste‑simple.
  • Automate the boring stuff. Record a VBA macro (or Power Automate) that cleans states and assignees while you refill the coffee.
  • Schedule the heist. Run it after hours; your devs log in Monday none‑the‑wiser (Or any other day, no disturbance for your weekend).
  • Train the crew. Teach teams to find “legacy” tickets in OldCo for attachment and comments archaeology—then sunset the old org after 30 days.

Still Hitting The 2,000-Item Ceiling?

The Excel plug‑in talks through the same REST API that caps bulk operations in the low‑thousands. Split your query by area path or iteration, run two passes, stay sane. Anything larger? Spin up the Azure DevOps Migration Tools CLI, pour coffee, brace yourself.

Ready To Steal Back Your Weekend?

The next time finance decides all product lines must live under one DevOps roof, you won’t grab a shovel—you’ll pop open Excel, click Publish, and watch the backlog move before Netflix’s “Are you still watching?” prompt appears.

Questions, war stories, or battle scars? Ping me, and we’ll plan your own 60‑minute backlog heist.
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