Sprint planning

This is a guide on what do you need to check to have an effective sprint planning meeting

Why do we need this meeting

Teams need this meeting to be able to deliver features , they need to plan their work together , make sure they are estimating right and above all made a good work breakdown structure and put dependencies into consideration

Objective

A plan for the sprint to demonstrate achieving the sprint goal and  how to deliver the selected backlog items that represents this goal.

Input 

Clear Achievable sprint Goal 

Clear and Defined Prioritized Sprint Backlog 

Ready Stories for the sprint backlog 

Clear State and estimation of the past sprint leftovers 

Output

Clear Plan for the sprint (60% to 70%)

Task Breakdown

Technical Design 

Task Assignment

Dependencies between tasks and team members

Suggested Timeline and milestones

 

Meeting effectiveness checklist

Clear Objective and Agenda of the meeting :

Make sure the product owner starts the meeting with the Sprint Goal and Defined Scope and priorities

Attendees: 

Everyone Scrum Team attended (including the product owner)

Tools effectiveness (specially remote) : 

This is a long meeting and should be highly interactive , tools should be reliable and internet connection for remote members should be stable

If the meeting is a mix between office and remote members , there must be a reliable speaker for everyone to be heard.

 

Visualization :

Show your task management tool on a screen r a screen share 

Make sure to show any documentation related to the meeting

 

Time boxing :

The standard timebox is 4 hours for a two weeks sprint 

Make sure to plan for a break within the meeting

 

Team Engagement :

All team members should be engaged in scope review ,task breakdown and planning as they will execute this plan.

 

Documentation of the results: 

Any scope update should be reflected in the ticket 

Any technical design or graphic design should be attached to the ticket 

Estimations should be reflected in the ticket 

Any notes or comments should be added on the ticket for reference 

Plan and timeline should be represented on a board or on a tool and referenced to the sprint as well.

If you want hands-on coaching on how to apply agile in an effective way , please register in our Applied Agile Coaching Program