Changes in the process sprint planning process

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Hi @team!

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As you might know, we decided to test some changes in the sprint process, which hopefully should improve how we plan future sprints. These changes will mostly affect @bebop and @falcon.

To give ourselves more time to plan the following sprints, we decided to shift a few key deadlines by one day. Most importantly:

  • Deadline for ticket creation is now EOD Wednesday of the 2nd Week.
  • Estimation session will now close at EOD Thursday of the 2nd Week.

EOD - as in 00:00 UTC of the next day, I hope it’s not confusing.

Essentially, it means that the expectations for how the next sprint has to be planned by a cell are the following:

  • Wednesday W2
    • The tickets for the next sprint are created and preassigned before EOD.
  • Thursday W2
    • On this day everyone should participate in the estimation session and start looking for tickets.
  • Friday W2
    • By Friday W2 all tickets in the following sprint should have story points set.
    • The expectation, that everyone will be able to set estimates on the tickets that are assigned to them, using story points set during the estimation session as guidance. Alternatively, you should use this day to communicate with Reviewer, Epic Owner/Reviewer about the estimates.
    • After setting the estimates you should already have a good idea of whether you’re over or under committed for the next sprint.
    • Sprint Planning Managers (mostly relevant to @paulo @jill @ChrisChV) - this is the day when you should check and communicate on MM about the tickets that are not ready for the next sprint, e.g. missing assignee, reviewer, etc.
  • Monday W3
    • By that moment the expectation is that nearly everyone has a decent plan for the next sprint.
    • This day should be spent doing final adjustments like:
      • Reassigning tickets between over-committed and intercommunicated members.
      • Handling injections and moving around that tickets in case the ones with higher priority were missed.
      • Looking for additional tickets for people who don’t have enough work from Epic Owners, Stretch Goals, Backlog, etc.

We’ve already deployed changes to the SprintCraft, meaning that the above will take effect this sprint. I’m sorry for the short notice and not perfectly smooth transition. Perfect is the enemy of good :sweat_smile:

More changes, like Listaflow sprint planning templates and Handbook updates are coming towards the end of this sprint. I’ll post new updates on this thread.

If you have any questions/suggestions, don’t hesitate to post them under in this thread.

[ Ticket to log time ]

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This is incorrect. As I mentioned here, this schedule will be applied from the next sprint. The deployed config changes are used when SprintCraft recreates scheduled tasks at the end of the sprint.

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I forgot about it, thank you for the correction.

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I’ve prepared a handbook MR to reflect the changes. Although not necessary, I welcome everyone interested to review and provide feedback.

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There has been another change to the sprint process. The new deadline for the epic updates is going to be EOD Wednesday of the second week.

The reason behind it, is that we want the deadline for the ticket creation and epic updates be on the same day. The situation we want to avoid is epic owners remembering about creating tickets while posting an epic update, which without this change, would’ve been on Thursday, i.e. after the deadline for creating tickets.

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There has been some feedback on the original handbook MR. Since the MR had been already merged at the time feedback was posted, a follow up MR has been opened to address the feedback.