Sprint planning is an event to assist and make the team understand the needs and how to build them. The team defines the scope and norms during the sprint planning. They agree on the product backlog and commit to its implementation during the sprint.
Sprint planning helps agile teams decide which team members possess the capacity to work on certain tasks and prioritise work. But without having a clear vision of your team’s bandwidth and a way to track tasks, it’s difficult to know if the right amount of work is scheduled at the right time. A sprint planning template can help in this case. It structures the work to manage agile projects and ensures that the team is focused on priority tasks.
What is a sprint planning template?
A sprint planning template is a framework that facilitates agile teams’ planning and execution of sprints. A template lays out things needed to make efficient sprints, including prioritizing tasks, managing the capacity of your teams, and tracking work from initiation to completion.
The sprint planning template should be used throughout the sprint which includes sprint planning and final retrospective. It means that the process of planning is connected to the team’s work and everyone can refer to one record to know what’s available on deck, what’s in progress, and what has been completed.
How to use the sprint planning template?
incorporates an outline and instructions that help you facilitate a meeting. Below are steps to run a sprint planning meeting:
- Energy check- how is every team member feeling?
- Review the product roadmap
- Define the sprint goals
- Define the capacity and scope for the sprint-backlog items
Sprint Planning Template Word
Use this word template to capture the information about the project sprints. Add your project details including start and end dates, the project manager, and the deliverables. Track the progress of the project by feature and sprint, sprint start and end dates, status, and duration. You have a field available for notes on each feature or sprint. This template is printable and easily editable, and it’s best for small teams and projects.
Sprint Planning Template Excel
Use these excel templates to plan your sprints and visualize them. Add responsible parties, tasks, start and end dates, and the status of each feature and task. These templates will enable you to calculate task duration. The Gantt chart in the templates will be adjusted as you add more data to the template, providing a visualization of overall engagement and task progress.
Sprint Planning Template PowerPoint
Use this fully editable PowerPoint sprint planning template to visualize or present your project’s tasks, sprints, and timelines. Enter your sprint information, start and end dates, and overall schedule. Enter more details about each sprint on individual slides to capture all of the relevant information for your presentation.
Sprint Planning key players
It’s important to keep the right people involved in the sprint planning event. Below are the key people that should be included in the sprint planning:
- The scrum master should be the facilitator and the organizer of the sprint planning meeting
- The product owner is one of the important stakeholders in sprint planning, they are the decision maker who requires a solution to their problem. They also determine the success of the sprint.
- Every team member should attend the sprint planning meeting. The team consists of a group of individuals whose skillsets and inputs are required to achieve the sprint goals.
The 3 Best Sprint Planning Tools
To best use the sprint planning process, you must store the sprint data and a backlog of tasks. Agile teams have several software and tools to support the processes. Below are the three best available sprint planning tools and their features of each.
1. monday.com
The Monday sprint planning template enables the tracking of tasks and provides a single point for team members to view the jobs they have been assigned to. The estimated time to complete tasks and which of the tasks are of high importance.
2. Miro
Organize the backlog on the board using shapes, frames, and links. Decide how and where the sprint has to be tracked. Track the progress on the board and keep details in a single place so that a holistic view is available for stakeholders and the team.
3. Wrike
For sprint planning in Wrike’s template, create your own workflow with statuses depending on the steps in the cycle. In the next steps, create a form and organize the work. Then make a dashboard to assign and prioritize work. Lastly, make folders to save previous sprints and generate retrospective reports.
Best Practices for Effective Sprint Planning
- A refined backlog
One of the best and first best practice is the product backlog refinement done by the product owner. It must be done as a priority task before the meeting starts. Doing this will save time and allow us to plan the next sprint properly. The product owner should prioritize the user stories in the product backlog for which the acceptance criteria have been written and updated.
- Having a roadmap and an agenda
When you have a roadmap and an agenda before the meeting starts, you have a direction for the team to work on, stay focused, and optimize their time.
- Aligning backlog and roadmap
It is important to sync and align the top-priority backlog user stories and the product roadmap. A proper sync will optimize the input to the sprint planning meeting.
- Scrum Master organizes the entire meeting
The scrum master is responsible to ensure that the sprint planning meeting is scheduled and the communications are shared with the team. They must also ensure that the team has the required information and supplies with them for the meeting to be conducted smoothly.
Sprint Planning FAQs
How do you make sprint planning fun?
Struggling and disorganized agile teams may result in stressful sprint planning. This may happen when they find it hard to find and accomplish their tasks in a sprint. With work management tools, you can track the work of your sprint so that the details are easy to find, your tasks are accomplished, and your team is on the same page.
How do you do sprint planning in Scrum?
Sprint planning is part of the Scrum framework where teams work on a specific set of tasks during a specified period. Sprint planning enables the preparation and tracking of work during the sprint. The scrum master facilitates the sprint and goes parallel with the sprint retrospective after the completion of the sprint.
What happens during sprint planning?
The first step in sprint planning is that the team conducts a check-in the establishment how every team member is feeling before they start the next sprint. In the next step, the team discusses which tasks must be completed during the sprint and how they should be accomplished. Finally, the team assigns tasks to the team member and wraps up by conducting an energy check.
What is a common sprint planning mistake?
A common sprint planning mistake is not handling carry-over work appropriately. It is possible to have unfinished work when a sprint ends. Teams waste time during the planning for carry-over items in the backlog.