How to do effective sprint planning?

April 24, 2023 | 4 min read
Agile methodology is the key to success in the IT sector. It is a simple process that helps in managing a project by breaking it into many stages. It helps in timely project completion with strategic project planning and implementation. Thus, to follow the agile methodology, sprint planning becomes crucial. In case, you are a non-tech founder, you may be unaware of sprints in agile. Let’s understand this in more detail.

What do you mean by Sprint Planning?

Firstly, a sprint is like a time period in which team members have to complete some amount of work. Thus, you can do proper planning based on the priority of tasks and achieve project completion goals. In case, a particular task has low priority, then you can utilize your time working on the task which has the highest priority. Similarly, planning a sprint involves outlining the desired results and the process of achieving them. You need to plan sprints focusing on your team size, their working capacity and work delivery deadline. Perfect sprint planning will help you to get multiple benefits

As you break a complete project into sprints and estimate the time period to complete one sprint of that project, it will get completed faster and delivered on time. To understand it in more detail, let’s take an example of a basic water reminder mobile app development project. Here you can break this project into 4 sprints. They are research and planning, UI/UX Design, Development and QA. You can plan sprints considering the team’s availability and project deadline. You can further divide Research and planning sprint into tasks like market research, outlining features, budgeting and more.

Apart from this, teams can focus on getting things done without wondering whether or not they’re doing the right thing because of the time-bound schedules. This helps individuals be more productive by lowering their daily stress of managing tasks.

What is involved in Sprint Planning?

Firstly, you need to plan the sprint before the current sprint begins or after solving the backlog of the past sprints, reviewing sprints and conducting a sprint retrospective. You need to conduct sessions for sprint planning. Members involved in these sessions are product manager, scrum master, scrum team and product owner. Furthermore, time management plays a vital role in this. You don’t have to conduct meetings for 2 or 3 hours. A meeting is more productive the shorter it is. The average length for a sprint planning session is 1 hour for a one-week sprint.

Yet, there are techniques to reduce the length and complexity of your sprint plans. It is important for businesses to maintain a manageable backlog and for executives to arrive at meetings prepared. Thus, team members can discuss just those tasks that have not been completed or are unlikely to be finished in the current sprint and save time. You need to consider points like goals, task priority, the team’s capacity of working and its pace when you plan a sprint. For example, the time required for a team to work on a particular sprint is 3 hours and you are estimating it to 2 hours. In this case, the sprint will either fail or have several issues.

What are the strategies for effective Sprint Planning?

The best ways to plan the sprints that help you to achieve your project goals are as follows.

  • Avoid long meetings. Meetings are most effective when they are brief and straightforward, therefore leaders and project managers should prepare in advance to limit the meeting to a minimum.
  • You need to understand the big picture in order to fully contribute to the task in hand. Understanding sprint goals are necessary to complete them successfully. Discuss the goals and how to achieve them with team collaboration.
  • The clear and more well-organized your plan is, the more efficiently the sprint will be completed. Learn to prioritize and determine in what order to handle sprints.
  • As a team manager, you should do all to make it simple for your team to accept and implement the plan. Provide concrete ideas and encourage the team to provide constructive feedback.
  • Use previous team speed as a guide, but be open to adjusting your schedule if teams let you know they’ll need additional time or are having trouble meeting their own. Thus, you can achieve the target and the team will not burn out from working.
  • Determine the root causes of faults and work to eliminate them. Find ways to implement the best technical procedures.

How does Alian Hub help in Sprint Planning? (Conclusion)

Planning sprint requires a lot of analytical foresight, thus it’s crucial to use the right software. There are various tools that can be used to plan sprints available in the market. But, Alian Hub is the cost-effective solution for sprint planning and project management for engineering, HR, IT, Sales and marketing. Alian Hub makes it easy for scrum masters to plan sprints. You can visualize the sprints to the big picture, monitor them, and modify updates to the specific requirements of your team. Road maps, calendars, To-Do lists, and workload all help to achieve sprint goals and meet deadlines. Lastly, real-time chat, voice recording, and file sharing facilitate effective team collaboration.

Frequently asked questions

What are the three parts of sprint planning?
The parts of sprint planning are estimating time, velocity and work in a particular sprint.
What is a sprint planning checklist?
Team capacity, team velocity, backlog tasks, sprint reviews and sprint retrospective are the sprint planning checklist.
Who runs sprint planning in agile?
In agile, a scrum master leads the sprint planning.
How long is a sprint planning session?
The average length for a sprint planning session is 1 hour for a one-week sprint. Thus, for two-week sprints, the sessions will be of 2 hours.
Which software to use for sprint planning?
Alian Hub is cost-effective software that any business can use to plan sprints.