Are Your Agile Planning Meetings Boring?

Does your team frequently get together to plan the next sprint or some other cycle of work? In those meetings, do the participants identify meaningful goals to pursue, or do they effectively produce to-do lists?

I see the “to-do list planning” pattern often. People’s main complaint is that their planning meetings are long, but the root cause is that they are too tactical and not strategic enough.

While a planning meeting should produce a list of work items, that list should matter somehow (Scrum calls that a sprint goal). Many teams, however, use sprints as bags to be packed to capacity with assorted stories. During sprints, they work through task lists, not attending to the bigger picture. Working this way limits the intended benefits of their process, such as frequent value delivery and adaptation based on feedback.

If you need to give your planning meetings a makeover, ask yourself this question:

How would you define Agile planning briefly, without using terms such as sprint, velocity, stories, capacity, commitment, or replenishment?

This is my definition: “Agile planning is when we decide together, every little while, what are the best things to do next so we can eventually achieve what we want.”

Thinking about planning this way is a reminder to be strategic. Your choices should roll up to something meaningful. Focusing your meetings on that will justify having the team there and invite the members to engage, collaborate, and care more.

Agile provides specific guidance for choosing the “next best things.” Most of the time, they solve problems, address needs, or fulfill goals for customers. Other things will be meaningful to your team and organization: mitigating an important risk, obtaining meaningful feedback about something important, seizing a business opportunity, or enabling later value delivery.

This perspective explains the frequency of planning. With traditional methods, we planned infrequently because we assumed we could have all the answers up-front and that we could avoid change. With Agile, we make different assumptions, but need to balance frequency with the costs of planning. And so, if you do plan frequently, it should be worth your while.