Transition to agile: pre-sprint planning

So, I’ve spent my last days sending out calendar holds, mini 1-on-1s, and completing rough documents that begin scope out the vision and “really big” stories for the project. Since we are approaching the holiday season most of the next weeks will be spent planning and setting up a workspace so we are ready for Sprint 1.

The planning call today covered some basics that we’ll need in this project. As previously stated we won’t run this as a traditional software development sprint, but rather apply agile to an innovation product management sprint, with a cross-function team of 4 core members. I’ve created the checklist below that should help you get things running if you’re new to this process.

• Define each work streams and verify an owner of eacH – Ours are defined as technology/design, content development and production, business, and marketing
• Setup pep-talks with the owners, mini 1-on-1s
• Define a commitment goal for the core group – We won’t be looking this group in a rooo for 2 week sprints so we agreed that a commitment for 35-40% of each persons total time will be our sweet spot. (There is no sweet spot in agile. The goal is for the team to be motivated and be able to deliver in short chunks.)
• Set a start date and an end date for the first release – we’ve pick a national event in March where key influencers will be. Goal is to create awareness for the pilot project and have influencers recommend it to our target users.
• Setup baseline configuration – we will be use JIRA
• Import rough (really big)  stories to start building a backlog, pick a few that may be relevant for the first sprint and analyze these to ensure we have what is needed to put them into the first sprint – budgets, specification, business support, etc
• Decide how to size stories – points or hours – being a cross-functional team with non-software expertise we’ve chosen to use hours rather than story points.

I hope this helps give some guidance with the pre-sprint planning process. I’m not brand new to agile, but adopting it as a new innovation tool for managing this project introduces some new challenage and hurdles. Feel free to ask me any questions along the way and follow me to stay updated.

So I’ll leave you with two last points that may help you until the next post:

1. Always just focus on the current sprint – the next two weeks.
2. Create stories that can be completed to help the team perform at their best.

you may want to read the previous post A Transition to Agile