How to manage technical tasks while sprint planning?
Sojol RaithProject Manager| Timro TechCa, United States
Dear all,
I am a new project manager, and I want your help.
We are doing our sprint planning, and we have written our Epics and User stories. Now, each of these user stories is having multiple technical tasks in it.
During the sprint planning writing, all these technical tasks are extremely time-consuming.
My questions are, how we can optimally handle this without reducing the quality and losing this much time?
Please let me know if any further clarification is needed. Saving Changes...
this is the benefit of look ahead planning in the previous sprint. Assuming your product owner is doing a good job of backlog refinement such that the top work items in the backlog have a high likelihood of remaining there by the time sprint planning comes around, the team (as and when they find time) should explore those top work items and have discussions with the product owner to ensure they understand the business needs and then spend some time working together and reaching out to stakeholders to gather acceptance criteria, discuss how they might tackle the work items (including breaking them into sub-tasks if needed) and (re)sizing the work items.
This will make sprint planning more efficient. With this approach, teams in my last gig were able to wrap up sprint planning within an hour (for a two week sprint).
Agile is about discipline and practice; continuous learning and adaption. each PBI will reveal a different story and story telling skill. Backlog refinement covers a broader spectrum; sprint planning is the ideal time when the Upcoming Sprint Backlog items can be further broken down from UI, Design, Dataflow, etc dimensions. there are no short-cuts to sprint planning as this stage defines the design and development of the Value for the Business. Saving Changes...
During the sprint planning meeting the team needs to do enough to identify which product backlog items can be picked up during this sprint but there's no reason to document every technical task at that stage. As long as the team understand the sprint goal and can forecast accurately what can be delivered they can add technical tasks to the sprint backlog at any time. It may be best to leave that to the individuals who pick up each story rather than take up the time of the whole team during sprint planning. Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
My recommendations is reading Mike Cohn´s "Agile Estimating and Planning" or going to Mike website. You will find answers in there. What you stated is mixing things and you will be in trouble if you do not stay clear in those terms. Saving Changes...
Technical tasks, especially architecture tasks do have a high priprioty. Technical tasks derived from technical PBI's go in parallel as the project evolves. High prioritisation reduces technical debt. Saving Changes...
