Sprint Planning is one of the well-known “ceremonies” within the Scrum framework. While at Pragmateam we absolutely see the value in planning, we typically approach Sprint Planning from the perspective of flow. The question we want to answer during sprint planning: How do we use the weekly/fortnightly conversation to continue the momentum of the previous sprint?

Problem we are trying to solve:

Sprint planning sessions often take too long or end up with unclear priorities. Reasons for this may be due to sessions being used to:

Deep-dive - discuss solutions to problems the team didn’t even know it had

Wordsmithery - refine the wording of user stories instead of having the right conversations about the intent of the user stories

Death by tooling - work around perceived restrictions imposed by the tool being used (be it JIRA, Trello or post it notes) rather than having a good discussion about meaning, priority and complexity.

Inputs into Sprint Planning:

A key ingredient of Sprint Planning is the longer term plan, providing the team with a guiding star:

Understanding of longer term objective and milestones, longer lead times

Ensuring the right people are in the room to judge complexity

Provide the team with a sense of priority

Guiding Principles:

We have a few guiding principles which we use to structure the planning sessions:

It’s all about the conversation

Be clear on the priority

Experiment and continuously improve your process

Don’t make it about the tool

Physical attendance over Video over Voice dial in

In practice, my planning sessions often look something like this:

1. Celebrate

The team usually plans in the morning, so we skip the daily stand up. We walk the wall from right to left. Everyone gives an update on what they achieved and moves any remaining items to 'Done' - mostly accompanied by celebratory clapping. Some teams also estimate the work, so we count our story points, and talk about our velocity compared to the previous sprints.

What has been achieved? What hasn’t? What have you learned about your velocity?

2. Reorientate to the longer term plan

Celebrations are important. The next step is to look at the longer term plan to understand how far we have progressed along it with the previous sprint.

Where are we now? Where are we heading? Are we still heading in the right direction? What did we learn that impacts our longer term plan?

3. Define your goals

Sprint goals are a great way to focus the planning session. They help prioritise and say ‘No’ to incoming requests or to discussions that derail us, e.g. “And what about this one?" . It’s usually the Product Owner who shares their 2-3 sprint goals first. Everyone chimes in and clarifies the goals until the team agrees on priority and potentially also stretch goals.