 10 ways to make your planning sessions better. Hi there, I'm Geoff Watts and here is a short video to give you some tips on how to make your planning sessions more effective and you never know, maybe even more enjoyable. Tip one, do a little bit of prep. You know what I mean? What used to be called grooming in the old days, but now thankfully is called refinement. A bit of a look ahead, but don't go overboard. That's the biggest trap people fall into. It's so easy to over plan. You need just enough to make sure that this sprint planning session, you know, we're not sitting around twiddling our thumbs thinking, what do we do or waiting for an answer or just throwing darts in the dark at cards to estimate on them because we've just got no idea. Just enough. Remember, every minute you spend preparing for the next planning session is a minute that you're not delivering the higher value items in this sprint. Tip two, make it better than last time. Why would you inspect and adapt the product, but not the planning process? Take some time out to work at how you can make it better and bring something in from that retrospective to make this planning session better than the last one. Tip three, have a goal for the sprint. Now sprint goals have been around forever with Scrum, but they're not used anywhere near as often or as well as they could do. It's so much easier to build energy and focus into a sprint if we have a clear and compelling goal for the overall time box. So many teams turn out to a planning session and just pick the highest priority items off the backlog. And that's not a bad thing, but those teams are missing a massive trick. OK, if we've got a goal, a clear reason or a problem to solve, working with a product owner, we can figure out what that is, why it's important, how we are going to be an integral part in solving that customer's problem or adding this feature. And then we can work out what needs to be done within the time we have available to contribute towards solving that goal. So much more powerful. But see, see if it adds any value, see if it adds any energy, any quality, any enthusiasm. Tip four, make it collaborative. Don't be one of those teams where one person is at the front of the room with the post. It's in the pen or one person is driving Jiro or whatever tool you're using. Get everybody involved, break up into lots of small discussions. Take a story each, plan it out, play it back to the rest of the group. The more people are involved in the planning session, the more energy, the more the time just flies, the more people feel genuinely committed to what's going on. And you'll end up with much higher engagement, much higher creativity, much higher productivity, quality, enjoyment, better solutions. And you never know, people might actually not dread coming to these things. Tip five, tell stories and visualize. I know you've all been taught to write product backlog items. You've probably been taught to write user stories, whether on a card or in a tool. And that's great. OK, we want that documentation. I'm sure it'd be useful to us in the future. But the most important thing is that we can tell these stories, that we can visualize these users' problems, these user needs. So when I get a product owner or a customer or even a developer standing up in a planning session and telling me about the problem that our users have or telling me about the value that we could add to our users' lives if we add this functionality, that makes it so much more powerful. I'm now not just delivering somebody else's requirement. I'm part of solving a real person's real problem. So much more engaging, so much more creative, so much more solution focused. Tip six, work out your capacity as a proportion of your ideal or typical. So I'm not going to go on about estimating. Loads and loads of stuff out there on estimating, estimate however you like. But the most important thing for me is that at the sprint level as a team, we're taking into account how much capacity we have compared to our previous data points, our previous sprints. So let's say, you know, if we take our three or four best sprints and we deliver, let's say, 75 units of a product backlog or eight to 10 user stories, whatever it is. And this sprint, we've got a few holidays. We've, you know, we've got a bit of training. You know, we've got extra support or we're onboarding someone new or whatever, which means that we're not going to be as productive as normal that maybe about 80 percent, then we would commit to about 80 percent of that figure. Just having that conversation is a really important thing for a team to become more and more predictable and more and more comfortable and avoid over committing. Tip seven, focus on the planning, not the plan. All great teams know that all plans are wrong, even sprint plans. All plans are wrong. They're out of date straight away. They're full of assumptions. They're full of ambiguities and things change. Things emerge, new ideas come out, new interpretations come out. So it's not that they don't worry about the plan. It's that they focus a lot more on the planning because all of those great teams also know that having the right conversations with the right people, asking the right questions, de-risking the right assumptions, working out what conversations need to be had afterwards. OK, all of those things make planning much more effective. And ultimately, the plan will become more useful as a result of that. Tip eight, don't fill the sprint. Now, I'm not just talking about the 80 percent that I mentioned in tip six. Here, I'm also talking about the breakdown of the stories into the tasks. OK, the best teams do not plan out everything in the sprint planning session. They know things are going to change, but also they know it's not the only chance they have to break these things down. The point of sprint planning is not to plan out every minute of every day of the whole sprint. It's to get to a point where we are confident that we can pick off a valuable chunk of work and realistically expect to be able to complete that within the time box. All right, we don't need to know everything now. All right, that causes all sorts of dysfunctional behavior as well as just wasting valuable time. Tip nine, find the natural order or bottlenecks for the stories. This is following on from tip eight, because working out the right questions to ask, working out the right level of detail and working out to make sure that we're not just busy all the time and then end up with all the big risks and bottlenecks and things, problems at the end of the sprint that causes the sprint to fail, plan out what needs to happen, what hold ups are likely to be, where the dependencies are and then bring those dependencies forward as early as possible within the sprint to reduce the chances of that sprint failing later on, just like everything in agile. If we're going to fail, we want to fail quickly because then we have more time to do something about it. So if the sprint is going to fail, I'd rather it failed in day two because then I've got more time to react to that as a team. And my final tip, tip 10 is commit as you go, not a big bang commitment at the end of sprint planning. Every time you're considering a story or a feature as a team, think, OK, can we commit to that? If we can, brilliant, put it in the box. Next time, next story. Can we commit to that without jeopardizing our current commitment? If the answer is yes, brilliant, add it into the pot. Next one, can we commit to that without jeopardizing the previous commitment? No. OK, so do we need to break that down? Do we need to go for something smaller? Don't think important, important, important, important. I know what that is, I know what that is, I know what that is, I know what it is. Can we commit to all of these? No, we can probably only commit to half of them. Then we've wasted that time looking at the bottom half. Simples. So follow these top 10 tips and your sprint planning sessions will be much more effective and maybe even enjoyable, but it is just 10, right? There's plenty of ways you can make your sprint planning sessions better out there and you've got a lot more ideas than me. So what's worked for you? Tell me, tell everybody else, add it to the comments. Plan on, people, maybe even more enjoyable.