Planning for Success: The Value of Sprint Planning

Bart has been in ecommerce for over 20 years, and can't imagine a better job to have. He is interested in all things agile, or anything new to learn.

  Agile  

At times, there is a misconception about agile when it comes to the level of planning it contains and recommends. Unlike waterfall or traditional methods—which have a large, up-front planning period—agile has small planning sessions that happen at a regular cadence. Because of this, some stakeholders think that agile doesn’t value planning, or that the project should “just get started.”

That’s actually not the way agile works at all, nor would that really be a path to project success. Agile does value planning, and it suggests creating a plan that’s good enough at the beginning—and then course correct frequently as new information is learned or new requirements are uncovered. The cornerstone of this is the sprint planning ceremony, activity or meeting.

This ceremony, which happens at the beginning of each sprint, iteration or milestone, provides the team with a short list of work to be completed in the upcoming sprint, aligns the goals of the work that is currently in progress with the overall goals of the project, and helps to promote collaboration, prioritization and resource alignment with the work at hand.

While it can seem that there is no long-term plan, it is the responsibility of the product owner, scrum master and team to ensure that the short-term plans are all furthering the ultimate long-term goals of the …

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