Introduction
Starting an effective Scrum implementation for your workflow purposes demands steady and accurate mastery of all its steps or ceremonies.
And by far, the biggest and arguably crucial step to understanding is the Sprint Planning. It lends itself to paving the way for all future development and progress-oriented goals to flow smoothly.
The key to using Sprint Planning isn’t just about understanding it in theory. You will need to know Sprint planning best practice tips to cement it in your workplace.
The points below will outline eight of the best practices for using Sprint Planning effectively. This should give you a good head start that you can use to dive further.
1. Set Up All Goals Well in Advance
Sprint Planning begins well outside the meeting room. In fact, it’s only the proper goals that can be set up that the initial sprint planning meeting can take place.
It makes perfect sense even from a logical standpoint, as there’s always a need for an initial roadmap for every task and project. You want to ensure that the passage of time does not slow down or take away from rolling the project out there.
The entire backbone of your project’s planning depends on the goals you are looking to achieve. Not only to kick start your project but also to keep it running with long term work.
Make sure that your goals are both specific and measurable. For optimum success, it should also pose a level of challenge that can be ironed out with the many iterations of the Sprint Planning processes.
A good way to achieve this is to analyze the impact of success. Not just limited to the current specific round of Sprint but also its far-reaching effects on the product as a whole.
This is a good opportunity for you and your team to pour over the list of requirements. As long as they can be accurately acknowledged and understood, a carefully planned path can be drawn towards their implementation.
2. Hold a Backlog Refinement Meeting
Sprint Planning, by its very basic nature, depends on the core principles of review and refinement. Without it, you run the risk of hampering the entire process. Sprint Planning best practices rely on it as a fundamental means to push the current Sprint iteration along.
Keeping a forward workflow means having to stop every now and then to reflect on the past changes. This is done with regularly scheduled backlog grooming. It’s a process that involves holding a separate meeting with the scrum master and product owner.
These meetings act as a precursor to the primary Sprint planning meeting. It acts as a methodical way to plan and predict the next order of events carefully. It’s a means to start planning for the planning stage and help solidify the position of understanding even further.
For all this to work, a brief backlog is drawn up to help guide the next session. Each item on the agenda of tasks is carefully tabled based on its priority. User stories are formulated so that the development team can execute them. And rough time scheduling and task completing estimates are decided.
During the course of these meetings, the backlog is refined until it resembles a workable form. From here, actionable items can be easily identified and can be put to the task.
3. Be Generous with Task Estimates
When working with a systematic and efficient method like Sprint, it can be enticing to set ambitious time frames for the completion of tasks. But the reality is often that no system has the complete foresight to predict any hitches or delays in the system.
Adhering to the principles of a pre-planned system also entails putting in the right faith into it. Sprint planning best practices the art of offering an envisioned solution to an old problem. But it also emphasizes lifting barriers and limitations wherever possible to encourage collaborative and inventive problem-solving.
Being focused strictly on deadlines or work output while ignoring the impact of prioritizing can be a big oversight. It’s an element of a largely outdated approach to achieving goals, and one that you can do without.
This applies to the completion of tasks as well. Tasks estimation can always depend on the most stringent approaches. This is something that’s best left in the hands of a capable Scrum master. Proper leeway should be given when considering any kind of estimates for a task.
Often, tasks are best left in the state that they naturally reach each stage. It’s unreasonable to expect every tasked to be hammered out as soon as it leaves the meeting room.
4. Focus on the Collaborative Aspect of Your Planning
Collaboration is the cornerstone of any large project. But it applies tenfold when we talk about systems like Sprint. And specifically, with Sprint’s planning stage, it’s all the more valuable to the overall success of the current cycle and each subsequent cycle to follow.
This will come in handy during the planning and refinement stages of your sprint. And it’s unquestionably important because how tasks and steps tend to be linked up together.
Say your workshop ideas about how to handle a particular task. You might just hand it over to the team responsible. But you do not indicate how it will affect the outcomes for the teams that work closely with them.
Sprint dictates that your teams will need to group together and work as the collective force. Be it the development team, the product owner, or the testing team, they will need a hedge to serve under one roof.
Tackling aspects like user stories will become easy to manage as there is a common culture of active participation and open discussion. Team members can openly voice their concerns and deliver unbiased progress updates, along with reasonable and realistic estimates.
The team leader or scrum master needs to recognize the advantages of collaborative work early on. Pushing for soft encouragement towards team collaboration will come in handy during planning steps. This will build up mutual trust and understand after each iteration of Sprint that the team goes through.
5. Keep a Reasonable Amount of Tasks on Queue
When drawing your transition from a backlog to a Sprint, your goal should be to work as effectively within the system as possible. Tackling too many tasks for your sprint only goes against what the Sprint ideology was designed for.
It can be tempting to pile your plate with as many tasks as possible. But neither is this the optimal way of doing things nor will it net you any favorable results. In fact, it acts as a counterproductive measure for everything that Sprint was designed for.
Some of the Sprint planning best practices focus on getting the work organized and in a better deliverable state. Taking on an ambitious amount of work will only serve to add an unneeded burden on the team. Failure to deliver to the tasks will create massive amounts of frustration and disappointment and discourage the team to no end.
That’s why the bigger priority should always be to keep workloads to a manageable degree. Remember, the idea is to work smart and efficient, not hard. Burden and strain will only work against your desired purpose.
Keeping a consolidated list of tasks with advice from all team members is a good starting point. It sets the stage for finishing the tasks and leaving enough room to deal with sudden and unexpected challenges along the way.
When in doubt, the best practice is to follow the complete records of the previous Sprint. If all tasks were comfortably handled in a reasonable amount of time, then this is a good metric to base your next Sprint on.
6. Break Up Larger Tasks for Ease of Management
Sprint Planning is all about dealing with small workable tasks in a cyclic fashion rather than a large aggregated workload. But the reality of the situation is that not every workload is designed to be bite-sized to fit the Sprint framework neatly.
This is when it’s best to take the initiative for yourself to break down your tasks as much as possible. A single large task can be easily segmented out to smaller tasks that can occupy the Sprint or a slice.
This can be done by creating subtasks that tie into the larger task itself. Ask yourself, do you have the capacity to do the work it your task is treated as an incremental series of tasks that can be managed step by step?
In a majority of cases, the answer will be a clear cut, yes. There are plenty of advantages to adopting this kind of approach—the biggest being that your work can be split up amongst the team.
Another is the fact that you and your team will slowly increase the understanding of the task as you progress with its steps. That lets you make changes or make light of potential problems much sooner. It’s a much better option than handling it all at once, so it has bigger chances to go wrong.
7. Supplement Sprint with Data-Driven Breakdowns
The ultimate Sprint Planning best practice is to have a firm understanding of leadership and a collaborative team that exchanges ideas. But that’s not the end of the story. While you can’t shoehorn in anyways to radically change the Sprint process for your benefit, you can supplement it.
One of the best ways to do this is to use data to drive the breakdown of a particular Sprint. It serves as a nice balance between planning initiatives and as a way to gauge the end of Sprint results.
Moreover, Sprint’s use of data is ideal as it can be used to draw attention to certain aspects during the planning meeting. Instead of relying on vague pointers and instinct-based predictions, pure data can be utilized.
Goals can be described in numerical terms for a good frame of reference. The product owner can use market statistics to inform the team about the bigger picture. And of course, data from any previous successes can be used to drive predictions for the current Sprint.
8. Know When to Clear the Backlog
After you have generated a backlog, it will continue to exist all the way up to your Sprint Planning meeting. But before you can turn a backlog into a plan of action, you have to know which items have are ready to make that transition.
This will be an intermediate step that comes after a backlog refinement meeting and the actual Sprint Planning meeting. It entails having to commit tasks items so they can be focused on as part of what needs to be worked on.
Part of what will make tasks reach that state is when you accurately recognize them. The work they involve, their purpose, and what needs to be done to complete them.
Keep in mind that you’re unlikely to reach a stage where every task is fully actualized. But as long as the broader strokes are clear, it can be used to proceed to the next step and enter the meeting.
Conclusion
If you keep the following eight practices in mind, you will be on top of using Sprint Planning effectively for your work purposes. You can easily master Sprint Planning to the best of your abilities and have a smooth stream of workflow with few hitches.
It’s important to remember that you don’t have to commit every practice to action. But if you can understand what these practices achieve, then you can tailor it to your needs. And you can certainly help maximize your task completion and productivity skills if you use a combination of them
