Are you a start-up owner or an entrepreneur who aims to utilize their employees and resources optimally? If so, have you considered using sprints in project management? As a business owner, you can use sprints to manage your team by employing an Agile approach to your project management. For this, it’s a good idea to understand the significant role sprints play in enabling your team to complete the projects in a timely manner and within the established budget. In this blog, you’ll explore all about Agile sprints and sprints in project management that can assure your team’s success. Read on to gain a concise understanding of everything you need to know about managing sprints in the organization. But let’s first understand what a sprint is.
A sprint is typically a short period of time in which a project team has to complete a predetermined list of tasks. This term comes from Scrum, which is an Agile approach for project management. Although “sprint” is usually related to software development, most businesses, even organizations in low-tech industries like real estate or construction, can categorize their work into sprints.
But are you wondering why businesses opt for splitting their complex projects into smaller sprints? They do have valid reasons for it. One, it's motivating to get done with a small part of a large, complex project in a time period of 2 to 3 weeks rather than struggling to complete a project with endless tasks that have no clear end date. This results in your team delivering top-quality work in a shorter turnaround time. A typical sprint usually lasts two weeks; however, it may not be applicable in all industries and projects. It’s important to note that more complex projects usually need a longer time period or project lifecycle, meaning they include more sprints.
Originating from the Agile approach, sprint project management provides a structured and flexible method to manage complex projects by dividing them into smaller, more manageable, time-bound intervals termed sprints. This technique enables teams to focus primarily on delivering incremental value, acclimatizing to changes quickly, and continuously enhancing their processes.
Sprint project management is typically a part of the Agile framework and is an iterative approach to handling projects by splitting work into time-boxed intervals known as sprints. The key principles of sprint project management comprise iterative development of project tasks, time-boxing, and flexibility. This enables the team to adapt to dynamic requirements and feedback incorporation faster and assign the right-fit people for each task. What’s more? The key advantages of sprint project management include higher productivity, top-quality products, and improved team collaboration. By dividing projects into smaller, manageable chunks, project teams can give attention to specific goals to improve continuously and deliver value incrementally.
At the beginning of a Sprint, the project team sets up a special meeting called sprint planning. This meeting, or sprint planning kickstarts a particular sprint by outlining the work the team will accomplish during the sprint. The Scrum team leverages the meeting to deliberate the current items, to-dos, and challenges, define the backlog that needs attention, and map out the priorities during the Agile sprint.
Sprint planning is imperative as, without it, your project development team would have no idea of what they need to work on during the Sprint, what is the way to achieve that goal, or which team member is in charge of which particular tasks.
Sprint planning offers the following benefits:
Now, let’s understand what happens in a sprint or what are the stages in it
1. Sprint planning: This is the stage when the project development team and the product owner lay out the next sprint in a comprehensive manner. They begin by selecting the product backlog items that need to be executed throughout a Sprint.
2. The daily standup: This is a daily team meeting of about 15 minutes that occurs at the same time and place every day. The Scrum Master always leads this meeting and tracks the individual and team’s progress, what’s working, and what are the challenges, highlights successes, and discusses the potential roadblocks.
3. The Sprint Review: Once every individual sprint is completed, the development team meets for a Sprint Review meeting. In this meeting, they present the product that they completed successfully to the product owner and other important stakeholders. The product owner makes sure that all the principles from the Sprint backlog are met. Any tasks that are still incomplete go to the product backlog and need to be taken care of by the development team in the upcoming sprint.
Let’s now explore some top best practices for executing in sprint project management
To begin sprint planning, the first step is to gather the team and make them accountable for the project and the assigned tasks. Every resource must feel a part of the development process and must be accountable for the overall success of the project This means that only the developers must not be the only ones holding the project together. Each team member needs to understand the user stories and how they can help the business in meeting its key objectives. When all the team members are involved in the project actively, it helps to build a robust bond between the team and bring those team members to speed who never used Scrum before. An interactive Agile sprint meeting simplifies implementing the story. The right project management tool, such as eResource Scheduler, enables you to design a perfect and interactive sprint plan.
Imagine your team members not having clarity on the most important tasks within a sprint. Obviously, they won’t know what they are supposed to work on as per the plan to be able to move ahead with the project. So, it’s very crucial to spell out the most significant activities that must be completed first and then continue a regular discussion on updates about those tasks during your project’s daily stand-ups. In case you’re unsure about how to identify the most critical tasks, then you could choose out of two popular methods to gain clarity. To implement these methods, you would need to create a list of all the tasks that will be included in the next sprint. Then, for each task, mention the effort required to complete it and the reward or return on investment (ROI) gained from accomplishing it. This is known as the effort/reward matrix, and the key objective here is to identify the most important tasks that will produce the highest return from the least amount of time, effort, or resources that are needed for it.
The agile methodology’s key objective is to enable the team to design better products. However, if the roadmap to do this is not specified, the development team could end up losing their emphasis and focus. Therefore, a well-defined and structured roadmap helps the project team to gauge if they are on the right path. Having said that, it is the product owner or customer’s key responsibility to ensure and keep the end product coherent and consistent. It is important to define the product roadmap and have resolutions for serious questions and issues before the team meets for the sprint planning. It’s important to note that a product roadmap doesn’t have a defined template. But it does remind us of the important long-term goals and vision instead of getting lost in the turmoil of codes and review fixes. A predefined roadmap enables you to realize that Agile sprints help you to check boxes and also bring you a lot closer to the final vision of the software or product.
To get optimal performance and productivity from your team members during a sprint, it's important to distribute a balanced workload as per the capacity. The resources and teams that are overburdened seem to burn out and not churn good quality work. Additionally, if your team has an insufficient amount of allocations, even then, they end up feeling unutilized and bored. Therefore, it’s important to understand the right amount of work or allocations to assign to your team members for best or optimal performance. The best way to gauge your team's capacity is to connect with your team members regularly and track the completion status of tasks. Daily or weekly one-on-one meetings also help encourage your team members to share whatever they have in their minds and gauge their capacity. The right sprint project management tools help make this task very easy. Some top-rated tools, such as eResource Scheduler offer availability reports and Gantt charts for you to easily figure out capacity, workload distribution and avoid over or underutilization of resources.
It is important at the start of a project to figure out any dependencies between tasks. Dependency means when a specific task can’t be started until the other task is completed. Though it’s true that this is one example of a dependency, there are many other types as well. For example, internal or external dependencies. An internal dependency is typically within a team's control, but an external dependency is dependent on factors that the team cannot influence or control. Thus, external dependencies are usually challenging to manage, particularly for projects with a tight deadline. Therefore, when creating the backlog for a sprint, it’s a good idea to remember the dependencies in the next sprint, and either minimize their impact or eliminate them as much as possible. This helps to improve the overall throughput.
Most Scrum teams are usually not clear on how to estimate the time it will take to execute a user story. The reason for this is that they are unsure of when a story can progress to the Done status. It’s always better if you gain this clarity and share it with all the team members as to when a story is considered Done. It’s also recommended to include notes or points like “The story is completed,” or “All acceptance has been reviewed and passed,” etc. An easier way to understand the completion point is to understand that when a story starts to add value to the business, then it can be marked as completed.
Another best practice to remember is to define the key metrics for your project right at the beginning of a sprint. There is no way of identifying if your sprint was a success unless the right metrics have been defined at the right time. It’s important for all the metrics to be specific, measurable, and actionable. For example, you want an increase in the conversion rate for your product on the home page in three weeks, rather than just saying you want to improve your marketing. The important question here is how you can understand which is the best and most important metric that should be tracked. In most organizations that run leveraged sprint project management, almost 47% state that they place importance on the project’s deadline, as that is one of the most popular and common success metrics. If used with profitability and ROI, meeting deadlines can be one of the best success metrics.
Other metrics that are mostly underestimated are Lifetime Value and Customer Retention Rate. Most businesses tend to aim at getting in new customers rather than working on maintaining the existing ones and raising their lifetime spend. Another metric that's usually ignored is staff turnover rate, which means every team member who quits is equal to wasted resources in training and onboarding.
At the final stage, it's important to review the past sprints regularly and analyze the lessons you can learn from the past successes and failures. This analysis helps to integrate the learnings or lessons that could help build your sprints in a better way going forward. How often this should be done varies as per the size of your company and business, but a review and analysis once a quarter is good practice. Another great technique to use for learning from past sprints is known as the "Start, Stop, Continue" method. In this approach, you ask team members about the behaviors or aspects according to them that should be started, discontinued, or carried on in the next sprint. Alternatively, there are many project management tools that generate various reports from past sprints, which can be helpful. Analyzing such reports can lead to clear insights that can inform and enable your future sprint planning.
The most effective way to manage sprints in your organization or projects is by gauging your readiness for all the tasks before the sprint starts. For example, figuring out the priorities of your product backlog and being aware of your team’s capacity before starting a sprint. This way, you’ll be confident and will be able to communicate accurately about your requirements and when you need them so that your team doesn’t struggle. Implementing the right project management tool that can help you to create sprints, do sprint planning, and execute them is the best solution to prioritize and manage the tasks simply and intuitively.
Choosing the top-rated cloud-based project planning software like eResource Scheduler assures optimal resource utilization – a sure shot enhancement between 18 to 30% – and seamless resource scheduling leading to operational efficiencies. This tool helps in precise sprint planning by identifying the ideal resources and how many people you need for the job, creating feasible schedules, and estimating the number of team members needed and the type or skill set. The tool also enables you to view the entire organization’s resource pool in one single view, check availability, individual or team utilization, and a lot more with just a few clicks. It also helps to facilitate smooth and effective communication and seamless collaboration with colleagues in different geographies or departments. With eResource Scheduler, you can also track resource productivity and overall cost and profitability in real time.
eResource Scheduler Cloud is a multi-user tool offering a feature-rich interface. It is easy to use and is available to you at a competitive price. This award-winning project management software comes with built-in time tracking, which makes tracking and measuring sprints in project management a cakewalk for you. The main features of this top-rated tool include high configurability, scalability, drag and drop scheduling, email notifications, visual and detailed reports and dashboards, and a lot more. Multiple calendars and daily monitoring help to manage remote and distributed teams and comprehensive utilization, availability, and time reports enable detailed project, sprint, resource planning and doing effective job profiling, or split and recurrence booking. Don’t wait any longer and check out this best-in-class tool with free trial and incorporate sprints in project management.