Are Your Teams Struggling To Deliver?

Is your team having trouble completing the work it committed to for a sprint? Do you find that you have work carrying over from sprint to sprint? Is meeting Definition of Done a continual struggle? Are team members frustrated and working long hours? Your team may be taking on too much work. But how do you know if this is true?

The scrum guide suggests dividing sprint planning into two topics. Topic one: what can be done this sprint? This is the part where the development team decides which PBIs they will bring into the sprint. Topic two: how will the chosen work get done? This is the part where the development team collaborates on creating the tasks that will be needed to bring each PBI to “Done.” Do your teams run sprint planning this way? Do your teams estimate the tasks in hours? If not, consider suggesting it. Here’s why…

In the moment of sprint planning, it’s easy for team members to lose sight of other things that may take up their time during a sprint. Once we know how many hours the collective tasks will take, we can run a sanity check against those estimates. This sanity check can provide valuable insight to team members about how much capacity they actually have for the sprint. It may also shine a light on some impediments. So how do we do this sanity check? Via capacity planning. 

My friend Dave Prior introduced me to a spreadsheet he recommends for capacity planning. With his permission I modified it and added some automation to it. The idea is that after the team has done all their tasking and estimated each task, each team member fills out this spreadsheet and learns how much time they actually have to dedicate to the team for the sprint. The spreadsheet allows a developer to enter sprint duration (in weeks), typical productive hours per day, and any other commitments a person has. All the time in a sprint for the scrum ceremonies and activities is auto populated based on sprint duration and recommended max times per the scrum guide. Lastly, the spreadsheet accounts for instances where a person is allocated to more than one scrum team. I’ve also added a context-switching calculation in there to account for the time lost between switching focus from team to team. The yellow fields in the spreadsheet are the ones a user can modify. The rest are auto-generated. I offer this spreadsheet for anyone to use, completely free with no strings attached. Help your teams under-promise and over-deliver!