24 Dec How Our Marketing Team Used Sprint Planning While Working Remotely

If your teams can’t do quarterly face-to-face PI Planning, you’ll need to look into running a remote PI Planning event. Don’t worry – it’s very do-able and ideal for organizations with distributed teams or flexible work arrangements. Plus, it’s a lot cheaper than flying folks in to do PI Planning every few months. In lieu of being in the same room, the overarching principle is to ensure that the teams who are doing the work are able to be ‘present’ in the planning. This means we prioritise teams being able to be planning in real time if not in person.

Like any meeting, your sprint planning meeting will need an agenda to keep the team focused. It occurs at the end of a sprint, after the review, and is usually an hour in duration. The retrospective includes the development team, scrum master and product owner.

Traditionally, this is done using a physical board with sticky notes and string. After the session is over, the notes and string are recreated in Jira for the whole team. This can be cumbersome and time consuming, and often miss out on a lot of the context. After the sprint has been completed, it’s time to get the team together to demo or showcase their work. Each team member reviews the newly developed features or whatever it was that they worked on during the sprint.

If it’s your first PI Planning event, try the standard agenda, get feedback from your teams, and experiment with different formats next time. Notes from the daily scrum can be added to the product backlog and any recommendations for future sprints can also be put into the product backlog for the next sprint. ProjectManager allows scrum teams to prepare for the coming sprint and learn from it afterward, collecting all that critical data in one place. Scrum ceremonies are important and it’s key to have all involved parties in attendance.

Each of these 4 teams are self-organising, meaning they’re responsible for their own work. They need to make a change to speed things up, make the most of their resources, and minimize budget blowouts. These companies are looking for new ways to organize people into projects and introduce more effective ways of working. Bigger companies can’t keep up with the innovation of smaller, more nimble startups.

We decided to invite five HubSpot marketers who were unfamiliar with our work to provide feedback. This helped us confirm what works, what doesn’t work, and what’s confusing about our concept. It’s key to invite folks from other teams so that they are bought-in early on. At the end of each day, you and your team should complete something tangible that helps you work towards your desired sprint outcome.

What Details Are Prioritized During A Sprint Planning Meeting?

The traditional waterfall approaches fall short because they’re slow and inefficient. They’ll look at the top capabilities from the Solution Backlog, Solution Intent, Vision, and Solution Roadmap. It’s really a lot like PI Planning but at a higher level, across the overall solution and not just the individual ART. Many companies find that 8-12 weeks (which adds up to 4-6 x 2-week iterations) is the right amount of time for an increment.

• They highlight specific customer needs, how the current products address these needs, and potential gaps.
• It also demonstrates the finished work for the entire team, so they can provide feedback and also get feedback from the stakeholders in the project.
• When you’re sprint planning, you need to have access to that product backlog and be able to filter the user stories to prioritize them.
• It’s a good idea to carefully test all the equipment and connections ahead of time to minimise potential problems.
• In this role, you’ll be the facilitator of the sprint — meaning, you’re in charge of setting the agenda, objective, and daily facilitation of each sprint day.
• The scrum team and product owner participate in the product backlog refinement meeting.

Assign the new sprint backlog’s tasks, according to skill sets, capacity, and other relevant criteria. Essentially the Definition of Done are the agreed upon acceptance criteria that the Product Owner will use to accept the product increment at the end of the sprint. Simply stated, the Definition of Ready defines the criteria that a specific user story has to meet before being considered for estimation or inclusion into a sprint.

What Is Accomplished In The First Part Of The Pi Planning Meeting?

We’ve had to adapt our meeting structure and technology stack to create highly engaging and productive team meetings to make progress on our marketing campaigns. Now it’s time to review the backlog, to determine which tasks will be worked on, by who and by when. The team should ask questions, discuss dependencies, and assess skills needed for each backlog before moving tasks into the To-Do column. An article on Scrum ceremonies is not complete unless we also discuss Backlog Refinement, which is an important activity that sets the stage for each sprint. The Product Backlog is an ordered list of tasks that must be completed during the project in its entirety.

I just want to mention that a lot of teams also look into the architectural risks along with the PO to determine priority along with the Business Value delivered from a Business Perspective. It’s my opinion that we need to consider both when stories are being prioritized. One of the key artifacts of Agile / Scrum is the idea of backlogs – both at the Product level as well as at the Sprint level.

If you’re adopting SAFe for the first time, chances are, it’ll start with PI Planning. That’s because it forms the foundation of the Scaled Agile Framework. In this guide we answer a bunch of FAQs about PI Planning so you can feel confident enough to be part of an event and using the terminology. At the end of the Sprint, Team, Scrum Master and Product Owner review the Sprint and plan accordingly for the next one.

Scrum masters and product managers use scrum software to keep track of all these events. At first, the vision may be ambiguous, but as the project evolves, team members start getting a clear picture of the desired system. The role of Product Owner is to frame the strategy, together with Product Backlog and deliver the vision project to those funding the project. A prioritized Project Backlog is then created where Core functionality is assigned the highest priority. Additional features, however, can be left for the incremental product.

Sprint Planning: What Is A Sprint Planning Meeting?

The key objective now is to translate this prioritized list into “Done” product. Review the product backlog and discuss which items belong on the next sprint backlog and why. Adapting the sprint methodology as part of our team’s creative process proved to work extremely well.

This will make sure that everyone involved understands the scope of the work. Though, some will have a separate story refinement meeting or ceremony. By doing this, the actual sprint planning ceremony is shorter and directed only towards user stories that will be tackled in the upcoming sprint.

Scrum Ceremonies: A Beginners Guide To Agile Events

That means you’ll have the product owner, scrum master and the entire scrum team. Usually, daily meetings are held to discuss the progress of the project undertaken and any difficulty faced by any team member of the team while implementing the project. The outcome of the sprint is a deliverable, albeit with some increments.

These ceremonies enable the core principles of Scrum, and teams that want to follow Scrum in its entirety —which is important to achieve success— must ensure that they take them seriously. Resource Why large enterprises need Scaled Agile Framework , not team-level Agile December 2020 Scaled Agile Framework adapts agile practices for enterprises. Whereas agile practices work for a lean team, SAFe allows communication between teams. Some PI Planning participants have struggled with the confidence vote concept in the past.

Newly discovered requirements are added to the Product Backlog in the form of user stories, to be considered for future sprints. What is known of the projects scope, is written down and documented in the form of user stories, with the expectation that discovery will lead to change. The Product Backlog is a living document and is owned by the Product Owner.

The VP or Director provides feedback and chooses the one concept that the team should pursue. Include people from different teams who share common goals with your team. She helped us stay on track and translated our research into holistic marketing insights, like defining the value prop and developing communication frameworks.

In short, it’s your responsibility to spark conversation, keep an eye on the time, make sure everyone has a clear understanding of the sprint’s objective, and more. If your project requires development, it might be helpful to invite a developer to your sprint so this person can check if your ideas are technically feasible. Many teams at HubSpot rely on the sprint process to make decisions that solve for our customers. Up until recently, we had never tried it in our campaign process. Remind the team of the overarching goal for the product, then establish the goal for this sprint. Scrumbeing Agile, no process can be considered perfect and there is always room for improvement.

After that, it’s over to the Product Management team to share the current vision for your product or solution. They’ll talk about any changes that have occurred since the last PI Planning session . And they’ll cover off what’s coming up, including milestones and the next 10 features that are coming up. The purpose of the product backlog refinement is not to fully https://globalcloudteam.com/ resolve issues but more of a chance for the scrum team and product owner to make sure the backlog is accurate. In the beginning of the Sprint, some goals are defined which are then worked upon and carefully reviewed throughout the sprint. If review implies any deviations in the product, then adjustments are made as soon as possible to control further deviation.

Teams add sticky notes that describe features they’ll be working on. A program is where a group of smaller agile teams are grouped together to form a larger group or Sprint planning meeting program. As a result, there’s greater visibility across all the teams, changes are made more frequently, and teams work with each other – not against each other.

Sprint Planning Checklist

Daily Scrum usually lasts for 15 minutes, but can be followed by other meetings for detailed discussions. Sprint works in conjunction with Sprint Backlog, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review and other such events. Estimate the timeframes for each of the tasks assigned and agree on what “done” will look like for each item.

Definition Of Ready Template: What Needs To Be Completed Before Adding A Story To A Sprint

ProjectManager gives scrum teams the tools they need to work better in an agile environment. Every Sprint starts with a Sprint Planning Meeting and lasts for 30 days or less. In the meeting, prioritized items from Product Backlog are discussed amongst the development team, Scrum Master and the Product Owner. Development Team then discusses and presents their views regarding the feasibility of the tasks. Once decided, finalized tasks are then discussed and assigned to Development Team members.

You might set up a main headquarters for hosting the leadership group and nearby teams, and then fly distributed workers into their nearest remote location. That way, everyone still gets an element of face-to-face collaboration. We’ll help destroy the myths and crack the code to running successful and effective SAFe PI Planning sessions. But the basic concepts are the same, as is the need to constantly be reviewing and looking at ways to improve. So, even in the fast-moving world of agile, some things change more slowly than others.

Improving Our Future Sprint Planning Sessions

Scrum ceremonies are meetings that ensure that the scrum master, product owner and development team is in-sync. These ceremonies, or scrum events, are held at key instances in the agile sprint cycle, which we’ll outline below. There are five scrum ceremonies, sprint planning, daily standup, sprint review, sprint retrospective and product backlog grooming. A scrum master facilitates sprint planning meetings between the product manager and the development team.