How to Facilitate a Great Sprint Planning Session (Scrum Master skills series)

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Welcome to the Scrum Masters Skills Series! In part 1, I share my notes on how to facilitate a great Sprint Planning session. Enjoy!

INTRO

Facilitate: to make facile, to make easy. That’s your job as facilitator.
Create an experience. Design the experience. Want the team to feel positive? Design a positive experience.
Make it a visual meeting. Try a kanban board with 4 items To Do: what, how, sprint goal, enthusiastically agree. Use a Time Timer.
Read the Scrum Guide. As Scrum Master, you’re expected to know Scrum. The Scrum Guide is your guide.
Set a recurring appointment series–the same time and place every sprint-start. Not a day earlier, not a day later.
Take the full 4 hours (for a 2 week sprint).
Get it done in one day.
Don’t like 4 hours? Do a shorter sprint! It really does take 4 hours to plan 2 weeks of work. Don’t skimp!
Do it as the very first event of your sprint.
Sprint Planning goal: produce a credible plan for how to implement the next most important PBIs in the Product Backlog

All Scrum Team members are present, including the Product Owner. Ask the PO for help to clarify the intent of Product Backlog Items.
Given: A Ready Product Backlog. If you don’t have a Product Backlog in a Ready state, you’re in trouble!
Pull the highest-order items off the Product Backlog.
Try: Do it on a wall, with Post-Its. Your Scrum kanban board can have these columns: Product Backlog, Sprint To Do, Sprint Doing, and Sprint Done.
Try: Use your last-10-sprints average velocity (and best-3-max and best-3-min) in story points to guide you as you forecast What might fit into your Sprint.

Development Team and Scrum Master are present. PO is available to answer subsequent questions about PBIs.
Self organization: Dev Team plans HOW to get the PBIs done.
Try: Decompose each PBI, one at a time, into tasks.
Try: Each task can get done in 1 day. Helps team gauge progress every day during the Daily Scrum.
Try: Use the PBI’s acceptance criteria to guide your task breakdown.
Try: Use your Definition of Done, let it guide your task breakdown.
Try: How will you demonstrate that you got the PBI done? Make sure you have tasks for the elements of the demo.
Try: Focus on the value you’ll deliver to your stakeholders. E.g., if you don’t need documentation, don’t do documentation!
Try: Think about risks and dependencies
Try: Think of it as a mini-project plan, for a 2-week-long project. What are the elements of a “credible plan” for your mini-project? Did you include them all?
Try: Estimate tasks in person-hours. Try: use last sprint’s capacity as forecast for this sprint. Try Use person-by-person availability to forecast this sprint’s capacity in person-hours.
Try: Don’t estimate tasks in person-hours; try every task is 1 day long

Simply state your sprint goal. Write it down. Post it on the wall with your kanban board and burndown chart.

Try: Look each other in the eye. Put your hands in. Really agree with each other that you can do it.
Try: Decider Protocol, Passionometer
Draw a burndown chart, put it on the wall.