Improve Project Efficiency – Agile Sprint Planning

As a marketer, you know how difficult it is to organize and execute your projects on time. Managing time is a very big challenge.

For some, it can be a mess of trying to sort out what’s coming next, while you stress about deadlines and more. In other words, your team isn’t working as efficiently or effectively as they could be.

Not to mention you know your team is using an outdated process, which is causing everything to slow down and move at a turtle’s pace.

There is a way to change all that!

“Agile sprint planning” will allow you to effectively plan your work so you can streamline your process and meet your deadlines.  You’ll be able to do this and ensure your projects are executed correctly the first time.

This post will walk you through what agile sprint planning is and the theory behind it. Let me also show you how to create your agile sprint planning process with a full project backlog that works for your team.

Efficient marketing processes await you.

Download: Any Marketing Sprint Planning Tool

As you start to learn about agile sprint planning, you’re going to need a place to store all of your sprint information and your project backlog.

This template has the guidelines you need to keep that information organized and up to date at all times. Also, it’s all in one spreadsheet so you won’t have to worry about having multiple copies of one document floating around.

What Is Agile Sprint Planning?

To simplify, agile sprint planning is a framework that helps your marketing team take larger projects and break them into smaller pieces so you can efficiently complete each portion in a set amount of time.

By working in smaller chunks, your team can focus on completing one task at a time as efficiently as possible.

The agile sprint planning process is part of a more extensive agile marketing process.

Significance of Agile Marketing

It helps the team keeping them moving as quickly as possible, working towards and accomplishing smaller tasks. As the work is divided among the team members, efficiency increases.

Plan your processes ahead of time. It helps to outline the goals of your project and what you want to accomplish before the team even begin.

Essentially, this process helps get rid of vague projects that come together. Instead of teams being distracted halfway through a process with a shiny new project, they have to focus and get the one they’re working on done first.

Agile marketing also allows you as a manager to maximize the time your marketing team has in a 40-hour week. Instead of some of your workers becoming overworked or underworked, you can see how much time each of your team members uses in a week and plan accordingly.

Agile Marketing Terms And Roles To Keep In Mind

As you learn more about agile marketing and the sprint planning process, here are some terms and roles to keep in mind.

• Agile Sprint Planning: A process that marketing teams can use to complete projects efficiently and effectively.
• Burndown Chart: A chart that is created during your team’s sprint that shows how much work has been done, how much is in progress, and how much still needs to be completed.
• Definition of Done: The standards of performance the pieces of your project must meet to be considered complete.
• Daily Scrum Meeting: Also called standup meeting. A 15-minute daily meeting between members of a scrum team that reviews work completed the day before, work that will be completed today, and any roadblocks they are running into.
• Project Backlog: A place where all upcoming projects and their tasks and stored away until they are added to a sprint by the scrum master.
• Project Owner: This is the person who is in charge of conceptualizing a project and determining what goals said project needs to meet. They are in charge of coming up with a clear vision to present to the team.
• Scrum: A framework that marketing teams can use to address large complex projects and break them down into smaller pieces to increase productivity and avoid missed deadlines.
• Scrum Master: The person who oversees the entire scrum team and ensures that everyone is productively working. They communicate the capacity and velocity of the scrum team to the project manager to plan effective sprints.
• Scrum Team: A group of five to nine people who are responsible for executing the tasks in a project that have been assigned to them by the scrum master.
• Sprint: A length of time that the scrum team commits to completing a certain amount of work within.
• Sprint Backlog: Tasks and projects that have been moved from the project backlog that a scrum team will commit to completing within a sprint.
• Sprint Cycle: A two- to four-week time frame that a full sprint is completed in.
• Sprint Planning Meeting: A time where the project manager, scrum master, and scrum team get together to assign work for the upcoming sprint.
• Sprint Review/Retro: A time to review what went well in the sprint and what didn’t as well as address why work was or was not completed on time.
• Velocity: How quickly a team can complete work within a sprint.