As many of you might already know, or have already experienced, we use a Sprint Planning Checklist in order to handle our sprint planning process and ensure that our responsibilities towards the whole cell are fulfilled/met.
Our current sprint planning checklist at this time can be found here.
Over the last couple of sprints, there’s been a couple of tweaks thanks to the automation bebop cell members have worked on, which are:
- Automated Estimation Sessions
- Automated Sprint Injection Tracking
This has helped reduce some items in the sprint planning checklist. In addition, a monday.com discussion about removing the redundant “working ahead” tasks lead to some further changes and updates to the sprint planning checklist.
In order to provide an idea of the changes, here’s roughly what changed:
- Shorter task titles
- No more “work ahead” tasks
- No more repetitive tasks
- Strict deadline tasks instead of long timeframes
- Different ordering/grouping of tasks
- Ordering by Week
- Ordering by Deadline
Accordingly two different identical boards were created, with different styles of grouping:
- New Sprint Planning Checklist - Week Grouping - publicly viewable link
- New Sprint Planning Checklist - Deadline Grouping - publicly viewable link
It is also important to share a small diff of the task descriptions because some of the task descriptions were merged under the same headline.
-Address the last review comments about tasks s and scopes. Once satisfied and any outstanding issue revealed by the estimation session are resolved, remove the flag on the ticket.
-Check if you are overcommitted, and if so pass on tasks to people with room, or further reduce/split the scope of your tasks as necessary. (extra "overcommitted" check)
-Ping other potential task assignees on the tasks you have assigned or been assigned on (especially arbitrarily), as well as potential reviewers
-Pre-assign all tasks that need to be included in the upcoming sprint at least tentatively (arbitrarily if needed) and - assign CAT-1 priority to them to mark them as required for next sprint. Flag tickets to mark them as tentatively assigned. To flag a ticket, right-click a task from the backlog or sprint view and select "Add flag".The ticket will then appear in orange in the backlog. Or when Editing a ticket, tick the Impediment checkbox
-Finish to create & move tickets to the upcoming sprint. Thursday of week 2 is the ticket creation cutoff, no ticket created after the end of that day can make it in the upcoming sprint, except as described in task insertion.
+Finish to create & move tickets to the upcoming sprint. Thursday of week 2 is the ticket creation cutoff, no ticket created after the end of that day can make it in the upcoming sprint, except as described in task insertion. Pre-assign all tasks that need to be included in the upcoming sprint at least tentatively (arbitrarily if needed) and - assign CAT-1 priority to them to mark them as required for next sprint. - Flag tickets to mark them as tentatively assigned. To flag a ticket, right-click a task from the backlog or sprint view and select "Add flag".The ticket will then appear in orange in the backlog. Or when Editing a ticket, tick the Impediment checkbox
-Review tickets assignations, especially arbitrary ones, for assignations you need to pass on to someone else. It can be due to lack of available time or interest, no justification is required to pass it on. Though until and unless the ticket is reassigned, that person is still responsible for reviewing the ticket in the meantime, and for helping to find a new assignee in time. To ensure that no task is left without a reviewer at that stage, the assignee is only changed once a new assignee is found, or the epic owner has agreed to postpone the task.
-Review the of the tasks you are assigned to (even arbitrarily), to ensure they match the Tickets s standard, asking for changes in the task comments as needed. If changes are needed, set or leave the flag on the ticket, to indicate it needs work.
+Review tickets assignations, especially arbitrary ones, for assignations you need to pass on to someone else. It can be due to lack of available time or interest, no justification is required to pass it on. Though until and unless the ticket is reassigned, that person is still responsible for reviewing the ticket in the meantime, and for helping to find a new assignee in time. To ensure that no task is left without a reviewer at that stage, the assignee is only changed once a new assignee is found, or the epic owner has agreed to postpone the task. Review the of the tasks you are assigned to (even arbitrarily), to ensure they match the Tickets s standard, asking for changes in the task comments as needed. If changes are needed, set or leave the flag on the ticket, to indicate it needs work.
-Set the “Remaining” estimate on each ticket - Review/adjust the "Time Remaining" estimate for every story of yours still in the sprint current. - Check the sprint planning dashboard for any tickets in the "Unestimated" column and set a remaining estimate for them.
-Start creating new tickets for the next sprint, and adding them to that sprint and to the estimation session.
-Update your tasks assignments (including reviews), to take into account the estimates. On the sprint planning dashboard, Check that the "Committed" and "Goal" columns on the sprint planning dashboard match your expectations, and that you have committed all your hours for the upcoming sprint without overcommitting.
-Work ahead on items listed for Monday as much as possible, to leave only the strict minimum for Monday, i.e. items that are still blocked on others at this point.
I’d love to hear what you think about the new boards and to know which of the boards you prefer.
- Week Grouping
- Deadline Grouping
0 voters
I really appreciate it!
Sometimes that can be a good option when a lot of back & forth would be necessary otherwise (just keep it public by posting a recording), but this could also be a discussion between the three of you here, for example.