How To Run An Agile Sprint Planning Meeting + Agenda

Keep in mind that this approach is just a popular technique for estimating development time. The Planning Poker meeting aims to achieve independence among members of the Development Team and provokes the idea that anyone can purpose of sprint planning meeting throw their card without worrying about the rest. No one should throw their card after the Development team has already revealed the card numbers. The discussion serves to identify problems, opportunities, and solutions.

Instead, they can choose from the following items, as it is assumed that the higher an item on the list is, the more significance it has. Before planning the Sprint, the Product Owner role should have already prioritized the items. The User Stories at the top of the list are the most important.

Sprint planning sessions are much more effective when you utilize your user stories and user story map. Easy Agile User Story Maps enable you to update your story map with backlog items as you go. Each change you make is reflected in Jira, so your team can get going on the sprint immediately. Sprint planning is the first ceremony — it prepares the team for the sprint.

Get started with sprint planning by using these product management templates. Ensure the backlog is DEEP — Detailed appropriately, Estimated, Emergent, and Prioritized — before going into a sprint planning session. Daily standups bring the team together to report on progress and agree upon what will be tackled over the next 24 hours. This is also the chance for the team to address issues or possible bottlenecks that could slow progress. By getting the concerns out in the open early, the team can prevent delays and ensure work continues to be completed.

Phase Three: Allocate Work To The Sprint

We combined our team knowledge to put together an ultimate guide to agile sprint planning with everything you need to run efficient and effective planning meetings. The Product Owner is responsible for collating and organising all backlog items that could be worked on during the sprint and is typically referred to as backlog grooming. They may do this alone or at a pre-meeting before the planning and aim to break tasks down into actionable items. Sprint planning is about gathering the necessary people together to determine the product development goal and work you will do in your upcoming sprint.

If every team member focuses on individual goals during a sprint, some goals may be reached and others may not. A sprint planning meeting helps the group focus on one goal, the same goal. Over a specific time, this type of focus gets one primary job done at a time, leaving less of a sprint backlog.

How To Run An Effective Sprint Planning Meeting + Tips To Plan Technical Debt Work

Scrum is built upon by the collective intelligence of the people using it. Rather than provide people with detailed instructions, the rules of Scrum guide their relationships and interactions. Tasks that are created during planning can also receive a relative estimate of the development time, similar to User Stories. However, many teams, instead of relative values, forecast a specific fixed time for their tasks. User Story tasks may no longer have a relative time, but exact minutes, hours, or days. The development time approach remains the Development Team’s choice.

They prepare the list of product backlogs to choose to work on/prioritise during the sprint and facilitate discussion on the priorities of the sprint. Prior to planning, you should have a clear idea of what you hope to achieve in the sprint. Early steps include product discovery, research, user testing, and other methods to determine the most impactful work. If you’re walking into sprint planning with a new idea you haven’t properly vetted, that is potentially a recipe for disaster. Sometimes you may conduct additional informal meetings and events such as Product Backlog Items Grooming Meeting and various others. These are special meetings that bring the whole team together again to evaluate time and hold discussions about Product Backlog items.

The decisions that are made, the steps taken, and the way Scrum is used should reinforce these values, not diminish or undermine them. The Scrum Team members learn and explore the values as they work with the Scrum events and artifacts. When these values are embodied by the Scrum Team and the people they work with, the empirical Scrum pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation come to life building trust. Various processes, techniques and methods can be employed within the framework. Scrum wraps around existing practices or renders them unnecessary. Scrum makes visible the relative efficacy of current management, environment, and work techniques, so that improvements can be made.

Sprint Planning: Your Gateway To A Successful Sprint

If the team is in another Sprint, they can “play” an approximate number of User Stories, which can be completed by the Development Team during the Sprint. Sometimes the difference may be due to a misunderstanding of a User Story. This misunderstanding may mean that either the Product Owner didn’t explain the User Story well enough or a member of the team didn’t carefully consider the content of the User Story. Another common reason for throwing different cards is the possibility that a member of the Development Team has information that the other participant in the game does not know.

• The other team members can now ask questions and, through such discussion, arrive at a Sprint Goal that will guide the rest of the Sprint Planning session.
• So, for example, the sprint planning meeting for a two-week sprint would be no longer than four hours.
• You should plan for these scenarios to avoid overcommitting to complicated work.
• The Sprint Goal is a commitment for the Developers, but it provides flexibility in terms of the exact work needed to reach the goal.
• These are not the only benefits offered through sprint planning meetings.

Well, now you actually complete the work you planned during the sprint planning session. This happens over a two-week sprint, with daily standups to report on how the work is going. Each day, the team will discuss what was completed in the past 24 hours, any roadblocks they might have hit, and what the team hopes to accomplish over the next 24 hours. “Planning” — does that word get your organizational energies buzzing, or does it send you running in the other direction? No matter your relationship with planning, it’s a major part of the agile process that takes time and practice to get just right. It aligns team members around common goals and sets everyone on the path to success for the upcoming sprint.

It’s the big master list of everything that needs to get done. The key here is that product backlog items represent what the team thinks they need to accomplish. The product backlog is flexible and iterative, and it will evolve as the team learns more about the product, stakeholder feedback, and customer needs. Lastly, you have the development team, which is made of the various people who will complete the work agreed upon during sprint planning.

Make An Agenda For Your Sprint Planning Meeting

You can timebox Sprint Planning sessions, meaning you set a strict time limit on the meeting’s duration, determined by the length of your Sprint. The Scrum framework suggests you reserve eight hours on your calendar if you’re running one-month Sprints. Doing Sprint Planning also reduces the risk of running into issues mid-Sprint as you’ve already created a shared understanding and plan on how to accomplish the Sprint Goal.

Such tactics for using within the Scrum framework vary widely and are described elsewhere. It is important to find a balance between people and organization’s needs. The BVOP™ Director is the most advanced and important role inside Agile products and services-based organizations.

Whether you are formally trained as a project manager or an account manager who has been cast into the role, it’s your job—and privilege—to become a master in the art of managing projects. It’s calculated at the end of a sprint by adding up all of the completed user story point estimations and averaged out over the course of several sprints. Your goal should be to minimize surprises as you set deadlines and allow team members to select which stories to tackle over the course of the upcoming sprint. Before fully committing to a sprint schedule, make sure to address your team’s capacity to complete the proposed workload. Ask team members to confirm any planned vacation time, commitments to other projects, and other possible time restraints. If team members can’t fully commit to the sprint workload, adjust the workload accordingly.

Ensure that each team member remains present till the end of the meeting. Tasks are assigned amongst the team members based on their experience levels and expertise. Worst case scenario, you miss your sprint commitments and lose trust among your team. Best case scenario, you hit all your deadlines and your team still doesn’t trust you. This can often be done through grooming ceremonies, technical spikes, or other pre-work investigations. However, some unknowns are unavoidable until the actual work begins.

Scrum is a lightweight framework that helps people, teams and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems. Responsible and skilled BVOP™ Product Owners balance both business and technical needs using Agile approaches and provide business value for products. The different teams have many variations of estimating the time it takes to develop the Product Backlog Items. The Story Points estimates that the teams make, however, are not always carried out during the Sprint Planning event. Planning Poker is not practiced by all Scrum teams, as this «game» can take a long time, and the team may experience inconvenience and distress over time. Time estimation can also be accomplished through faster group discussions by the Development team.

Reserve A Consistent Time In Advance

This gives the team enough time to cover all the work completed during their last feedback loop. It measures the number of story points that are delivered over a set time. For example, look at the last three sprints and calculate how many story https://globalcloudteam.com/ points were completed. Take that number of sprint deliverables and divide it by three. That gives you an estimate of what can be completed in upcoming sprints. These are not the only benefits offered through sprint planning meetings.

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Center the demo around a realistic user experience and business value . The Scrum Team selects how much work they can do in the coming sprint based on their capacity and should not be influenced by the Product Owner. Scrum master ensures that Scrum processes are followed and communication and productivity obstacles are addressed. If the answer to any of these questions is no, consider whether the work is truly ready for development. In some cases, a “no” may be unavoidable (e.g., a last-minute bug that should be addressed but hasn’t been scoped yet), but this usually isn’t the case.

Realistic Product Roadmap

As described above, a lot goes into leading successful sprint planning meetings. The sprint planning meeting agenda template below is designed to help you keep track of the most important items to achieve that success. Once you’ve prepared for sprint planning, it’s time to run the meeting. We’ve already discussed how to determine capacity based on rollover work, resource availability, and other factors, which are all important to running a successful sprint planning. During sprint planning, the scrum team reviews work from the previous sprint, determines its capacity for the upcoming sprint, and commits to the highest-priority work to fill that capacity. If you are a ScrumMaster on a team that is delivering development work and utilizing agile methodologies, you should be running a sprint planning meeting.

The Scrum Guide documents Scrum as developed, evolved, and sustained for 30-plus years by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber. Other sources provide patterns, processes, and insights that complement the Scrum framework. These may increase productivity, value, creativity, and satisfaction with the results.