Sprint Planning Cheat-Sheet
“If you fail to plan then you are planning to fail, “ said Benjamin Franklin, Founding Father of the United States.
Well, after 5 years of working in an agile set-up, I do not seem to quite agree with Mr.Franklin.
Despite planning two weeks at a time, for the past so many years, failure sometimes was inevitable. Years of planning Sprints, failing to meet the Sprint goals, and learning from mistakes have made me realize that the key is ‘how we plan, what we plan, and how much we plan’
In my team, for most of the issues/problems pointed out during our Retrospectives, the root problem, after asking ourselves the 5 why’s, was ‘Ah, that was a miss in Sprint Planning!’.
Therefore we felt the need to address and correct our Step 1: Sprint Planning.
Based on my past experiences and the innumerable rounds of course correction in Sprint Planning, I have come up with this cheat-sheet that seems to be working for our team.
First off, the PO plays a key role in setting a purpose which gives the team a clear reason and an understanding of the task to accomplish. This reason automatically translates to Sprint Goal and it sets the tone for the rest of the discussions.
The next stage of Story picking is a natural process of identifying all the PBIs that help the team achieve the set Goal or purpose.
Splitting the Sprint Backlog items into smaller, discrete sub-tasks helps in maintaining transparency through the Sprint and gives the team an opportunity to set small milestones. To see a good flow of these sub-tasks across swim lanes gives the team the impetus it needs to keep chugging along with a sense of accomplishment. It is always best to add all the identified Dependencies and Uncertainties in a Story as Subtasks to the board, for the sake of transparency. They also serve as reminders.
By roughly estimating the sub-tasks during sprint planning, the team will be able to assess the workload. This increases the likelihood of the team finishing all they say they will. Second, identifying tasks and estimating them during sprint planning helps team members better coordinate their work.
The discussions that go into creating this plan are quite crucial. It is important to keep these discussions crisp and focussed to not make the Planning sessions exhausting. A good dialog on how to address the dependencies and uncertainties, on how to keep the tasks rolling in parallel, etc is also quite essential for the success of our plan.
Hurray! We have our plan for the next couple of weeks. I want to write the next two sentences in bold. “Do not spend more time trying to make your Plan perfect.” “Inspect and Adapt as you go.”
The development team has the full flexibility to negotiate with the Product Owner either to remove some tasks from the sprint or to add something new as long as the reasons are genuine.
There you go. It is now time to get down to business.
