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As the product team, we’ve found that when we’re planning the next sprint, going through all the stories in detail during the planning meeting doesn't make sense — it simply leads to an ineffective meeting. This is especially true in Scrum teams of 5 or more people who can complete a significant number of stories in one sprint. The reasons for this differ across teams, but the main one is that with big sprint backlogs, people find it hard to keep the purpose and details of each story fresh in their minds. Another reason is that stories are not usually refined enough to mean the same thing to everyone. Such situations can easily lead to a meeting taken up by explaining basic facts about each story to the team. Nobody wants that.
So, how do you turn a meeting like that into a more effective one? How can you make sure everyone’s on the same page? And finally, how do you get agreement on estimates that are sensible?
Encourage preparation
One of the ways to make planning meetings more effective is to encourage people to prepare in advance. Unfortunately, going from desk to desk or sending email reminders with the stories attached is often ineffective because people need a goal, and just reading the list of stories is tedious.
One way to encourage your team to prepare for the planning meeting is to simply create an Asynchronous session (Cloud, Data Center) in Agile Poker for Jira. This process is an asynchronous way of implementing the Planning Poker® technique. Select the stories that are likely to hit the next sprint or need refinement and add all your teammates as participants. The add-on will send out an invitation e-mail. The deadline is your next planning meeting. Each person, in their own time, can estimate selected tasks. If anything is unclear or they have something to add, they can comment on their estimation. And they can do it without being biased by others’ opinions.
Estimate more effectively
When the planning meeting starts, close the session, share the screen, and start going through the issues. For some of them, the final estimate will be obvious because everyone made the same estimate. For others, there will be comments with questions or extra information. They may need manual re-estimation, but the main benefit still holds — you just saved time by cutting out a discussion of generalities and cutting to the chase. When you have finished saving the estimates for the stories, just leave the page.
Focus on what is important
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To make your team’s work output predictable, you must be able to estimate the team’s velocity and the effort needed to complete your user stories. The Planning Poker® methodology lets you not only estimate your stories but also clarify them at the same time. Unfortunately, during planning meetings conducted via video conferencing software, participants can easily lose interest and get distracted when looking at the screen shared by the other side.
Focus on your stories
To successfully play Planning Poker, you only need physical cards. This is easy with co-located teams, but it can be hard to implement in distributed teams. During planning meetings conducted via video conference, it’s hard to achieve an equal balance between multiple locations. Showing cards to the camera is not perfect, and the harder it is to read the estimates, the more detached participants become. Thanks to Agile Poker for Jira’s Interactive session (Cloud, Data Center), everyone can see all the estimates inside Jira, and they’re all equally important and visible. Every time the scrum master selects a story, it’s easily visible on top of the backlog so everyone can read it at their own pace. Situations in which extreme views are overlooked are no longer possible.
Reach a consensus
Now that your entire team is engaged and the quality of their input is high, you can discuss the issues. The scrum master selects stories one by one and asks the team to estimate the effort. For each issue, the team should reach a consensus. If the first round of estimation reveals significant differences, participants with extreme views explain their estimates. Regardless of the location, they present their assumptions or predicted consequences that produced their estimated values. The scrum master starts the built-in timer to limit the discussion time, making the process more effective and saving time for other issues. After making sure the team is on the same page, either the estimation value becomes obvious or the estimating round needs to be repeated.
Plan effectively and accurately
After estimating all the stories that are likely to fit into the next sprint, the team can make a final commitment and start the sprint. Thanks to deep integration with Jira Software, it’s very easy to conduct estimating sessions at the beginning of sprint planning meetings so no additional meetings are required. For small teams, this process doesn’t require preparation, and it fits into a reasonable amount of time. For distributed teams, you ensure that all team members participate equally, making the estimates as accurate as possible.