Hello Hello, What’s the PLAN for Christmas eve? What’s the plan for NYE? Isn’t that what everyone is asking their friends and close-ones these days? 😉 We are on 21st today, Christmas is four days from now and NYE is about ten days away. By now I am sure each one of us know what we are doing for these two wonderful days, don’t we? At least I know what I am doing for Christmas and NYE… don’t get excited though, I am not gonna share my plans here… LOL 😉

If I would have asked you a month ago, what your plan was for Christmas and NYE, you may have had a plan, but was it a locked down plan? I really doubt that. It is a little hard to plan that far ahead. You may have had narrowed down your options by then but zeroed in on one of them, if you had, you are a planning genius. 😉 For most of us though, planning that well in advance doesn’t come naturally.

Planning in an Agile / Scrum environment is no different than your day to day planning, it is done in pretty much the same way you planned your Christmas and NYE events, or other such big occasions in your life… So, What’s the PLAN for Sprint ‘X’?

Sprint Planning sessions mark the start of a sprint/iteration, are conducted on Day 1 of the sprint and have a definitive outcome – Commitment for Sprint ‘X’.

Traditionally, planning sessions were an all day event (some organizations still go by the old practices of having an all day planning session). It would be divided into two sessions – Sprint Planning I and Sprint Planning II session. In the first session, PO and/or BA/BSA would walk the team through a prioritized list of User Stories (requirements), aka, Product Backlog. They explain what the ask is, how the end product should look like or how business expects it to look like. They would define the acceptance criteria, and address any questions the team may have around the requirements. The team then would quickly size the stories based on their understanding (visit What SIZE are you? and What SCALE to use for sizing? articles for details on sizing process and techniques). In the second session, team would revisit the prioritized and sized backlog, pull in stories into the Sprint Backlog to meet their planned velocity, break the stories down into actionable tasks and would provide estimates on each of these tasks. Now, based on their capacity, they would make the final commitment for how many stories they can get done in Sprint ‘X’. Each of these sessions would generally last for about four hours.

However, when you look at this all day planning process, doesn’t it look like Grooming and planning sessions combined together, done in one day? I can smell some Waterfall, can you?

Too much for the day 1 of a sprint.. TORTUROUS! 

Moreover, all day meetings sound like a lot of sitting and yawning and mental stray-aways and exhausting and boring and draining and getting very less out of it and probable brain freeze by end of the day.

Also, we shouldn’t forget that our average attention spans are now shorter than a gold fish. The average attention has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013. Even a gold fish can stay concentrated on a task for about 9 seconds (ref: statisticbrain.com)

Given all this, who wants to be in an all day boring planning session? NO ONE!

So, what do we do? – In most of the organizations we break up these all day planning sessions into smaller sessions and spread them out through out the sprint, NOT the current sprint though. Allow me to lay down the details for you:

• Grooming Sessions I and II, occur in Sprint ‘X-1’ and they replace the Sprint Planning I and some part of Sprint Planning II.
  • Two sessions – 1 hour each.
• Planning Session occurs on Day 1 of Sprint ‘X’ and it replaces the remainder of Sprint Planning II
  • One session – 1 hour.

Now, this tells me that we can do our all day planning (8 hours worth of work), in just 3 hours if we break it up into more effective sessions and spread them across the sprint. The team gets enough time to absorb and digest all the information and can act more efficiently and effectively in defining and breaking and absorbing the work.

Does that look and sound more agile? It sounds to me like a WIN WIN! 🙂

Agile preaches us to decompose items into smaller, sizable, digestible chunks, so that we can extract more value and juice out of it. And I am extending the same principle to Scrum ceremonies, decompose these big meetings into smaller, shorter, crispier sessions and keep the teams more engaged, active and entertained.

I believe, now we know what the PLAN is. 😉

Happy Reading! 🙂

– Nirbhay Gandhi