Agile Planning

High-level Plan to Start Sprinting
Phase Step
1 - First Time

  1. Educate leaders and engineers on the framework of choice

  2. Educate engineers on how to build Stories and size them - the team needs to know how to write a Story so they can add short term items in the team backlog

  3. Identify each team member's role - Product Owner (PO) role will most likely be performed by a leader if the organization is not ready to hire the right talent - I've seen this in multiple orgs small and big where the org is not ready to fully commit or pay for it

  4. Identify list of Product(s), Service(s), Application(s), and/or functions being offered - typically PO does this

  5. Build a team or set of teams with list of Service Ownership

  6. Start a Backlog per team - PO's job based on Product(s) being offered

There's some responsibility for setting up the Tool(s) needed to get going:

  1. Identify where Product Backlog is going to live - educate and implement working with the right stakeholders

  2. Identify where the team is going to keep a Team Backlog - typically Atlassian JIRA is a great tool to start with
2 - Getting Sprint Ready

  1. Facilitate each team and do an initial timeboxed backlog refinement/planning - write each Story with Problem/Issue/Request, Dependency, Acceptance Criteria, Definition of Done, and size each with the team using planning poker

  2. Capacity planning for first sprint with clear start and end date - document holidays, on-call coverage

  3. Educate or refresh the team on what they need to do daily (meetings, updating backlog), what's expected in the weekly backlog refinement meeting, preparing for demo.
3 - Sprint Start

  1. Start the sprint with team commitments
4 - End Sprint

  1. Once team finishes sprint/iteration, the team will demo the work and do a retrospective to reflect on what went well/keep doing, not well/improve/start doing, and stop doing

  2. Release notice - send out a notice on what the team completed including burndown or burnup chart showing progress - include items that were not planned/unplanned that were completed in the sprint. Document Capacity Planned vs Actual, Load Planned vs Actual, and Say-vs-Do Ratio (points delivered divided by points planned equals ___)
5 - Repeat At this point, the team should be repeating sprint planning

Reference: https://www.scrumdesk.com/start/manual-for-scrumdesk-start/sprint-planning/

Sprint Planning Agenda:

 

What a 2 week sprint may look like, this shows one from start to finish, not including weekend:
Wednesday Thursday Friday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Monday Tuesday
Standup (15 mins)
IterationPlanning (1.5 hrs)		 Demo (30 min) Standup Standup BacklogRefinement (1.5 hrs) Standup
Arch Review		 Standup Standup Standup BacklogRefinement

Resource: