It’s really quite funny. I’ve been coaching and teaching Scrum for nearly 20 years. But sometimes, my knowledge and experience sometimes gets in the way, in that I sometimes forget that the simplest of the ceremonies can often be hard to get…”right”.
One of those is sprint planning.
I recently stumbled across two references that I think are very helpful in executing this simple and important, yet sometimes hard to get right ceremony.
Here’s an article by Mike Cohn - https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/sprint-planning-for-agile-teams-that-have-lots-of-interruptions
And another by Mike - https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/dont-estimate-the-sprint-backlog-using-task-points
And here’s another by Joshua Partogi - https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/upgrade-your-sprint-planning-gain-engagement-your-development-team
The graphic is from Joshua’s article. I really like it!
I’ve also written a quick helper guide around how I’ve found it best to get started in sprint planning. Mostly with new teams. It’s a recipe I’ve successfully been using for well over 10 years and I hope you find some useful hints within.
Here’s the link: https://robert-galen.squarespace.com/s/Scrum-Sprint-Planning-Overview.pdf
Wrapping Up
Sprint planning is one of those ceremonies that embodies quite a lot of agile skills:
Backlog refinement
Estimation (at a story and task level)
Effective story writing
Collaborative workflow
Done and delivery
Getting it “right” can help you and your teams accelerate towards delivering on the promises of Scrum.
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.