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At my organization we’re using TFS 2015 for source control and ALM. We have TFS projects for each distinct business capability e.g. there is a TFS project for ‘Risk Management’ and one for ‘Account Management’. This team project structure was setup many years ago.

We have a set of requirements that require enhancements spanning multiple business capabilities (and therefore multiple TFS team projects). How do we include PBIs (user-stories) from multiple TFS projects in a single sprint? This appears to be a limitation of the tools. If this cannot be done, are there some alternative approaches that have worked well for anyone?

Thanks

Ryan.Bartsch
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As you've discovered it's not possible to have work items shared between team projects. These days many people advocate a strategy of setting up and single team project and using a combination of Areas, Iterations and Teams to manage work.

However migrating to such a strategy can be time consuming. As an interim step, you could create a new team project, then branch the appropriate code in to that project.

Use the new team project to manage the work and then you can decide if this is a temporary fix, or the start of your migration to a new structure.

James Reed
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  • Thanks for the reply James. We've already got many team projects and it would be a significant amount of work to move everything to a single team project. Would there be issues keeping the multiple team projects for source control and having a single dummy team project to manage all the work-item/ALM stuff? This limitation seems like a massive oversight by Microsoft. – Ryan.Bartsch Feb 08 '16 at 23:29
  • IMHO Microsoft didn't get Agile until well after TFS was created so lots of it's functionality reflects that. Using a "Virtual" team project to do the management is viable, but you will probably get issues if you use TFS to update work items. For example if you have builds creating bug items on failure or if you use Test Manager. – James Reed Feb 08 '16 at 23:51
  • just seen [this](https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/release-archive-vso.aspx) on the TFS / VSO timeline. it looks like moving work items between Team Projects is on the agenda. In the next couple of months for VSO, but no date for TFS. – James Reed Feb 09 '16 at 09:53