DataLab: Agile Scrum Project Management - Sprint Planning

Now that we have the vision of the project and a roadmap ready, it's time to get down to work and finalize the first sprint. For the course of this project, we recommend you to follow a weekly sprint cycle.

Stand-up meeting

We'll start with a stand-up meeting for the entire class where each team has their own seperate 10 minute stand-up (including the product owner); the other team watches. The points we'll discuss today are:

• What did I work on yesterday?
• What am I working on today?
• What issues are blocking me?

Team Communication workshop

At 9:30 we're going to have a workshop on team communication! Here we'll learn about the do's and don't for effective team communication!

Break time!

Go and have a coffee, remember to ask me for my card because I'll forget otherwise!

Today's Team Objectives

Now that we know where we're at (stand-up) and how to communicate effectively as a team, it's time to transform our knowledge into action! Let's start by working together on the following objectives:

• Present the first sprint to the product owner.
• Finalize the first sprint based on the product owner's feedback.
• Use Jira to allocate tasks to team members and start the first sprint.
• Do a risk assessment using the Confluence risk assessment template.
• Do our first peer-review.

Presenting Sprint Planning to the Product owner

Walk the Product Owner (PO) through your:

• Jira project page;
• roadmap;
• sprint planning.

If the product owner is occupied with the other team, continue with the Linkedin Learning course on risk management below!

Risk Assessment

Risk assessment is a vital part of project management, essentially we manage and plan our projects so we can manage the risk of not succesfully completing our project. That risk can be broken down into all kinds of higher and lower level component and that's where the Linkedin course below is all about! Complete the course below and then use this risk assessment template in Jira to do your risk assessement!

Risk: The beast to tame from Project Management Foundations: Risk by Bob McGannon

Finalizing the sprint planning

When finalizing/creating the sprint planning, we want you to focus on planning the:

• The What
  The product owner describes the objective(or goal) of the sprint and what backlog items contribute to that goal. The scrum team decides what can be done in the coming sprint and what they will do during the sprint to make that happen.
  
• The How
  The development team plans the work necessary to deliver the sprint goal. Ultimately, the resulting sprint plan is a negotiation between the development team and product owner based on value and effort.
  
• The Who
  You cannot do sprint planning without the product owner or the development team. The product owner defines the goal based on the value that they seek. The development team needs to understand how they can or cannot deliver that goal. If either is missing from this event it makes planning the sprint almost impossible.
  
• The Inputs
  A great starting point for the sprint plan is the product backlog as it provides a list of ‘stuff' that could potentially be part of the current sprint. The team should also look at the existing work done in the increment and have a view to capacity.
  
• The Outputs
  The most important outcome for the sprint planning meeting is that the team can describe the goal of the sprint and how it will start working toward that goal. This is made visible in the sprint backlog.
  
• The Assessment
  For your learning experience it's important to work on one or more tasks related to each Intended Learning Outcome S(ILO). This does not entale you doing every part yourself, contributing to a task by review somebody's work or doing part of the work already counts: you can't all tune the same ML model for example. Therefore it's important to attach ILO labels to each issue (each task, user story or bug), like the image below!
  

  

  
  

Peer-review

Open the peer-review Excel file and fill it in accroding to the instructions in the document. You can find it in this block's assignment on Microsoft Teams. Only you can see it and it only counts for your personal grade! However you are expected to bring the action points you generate for your teammembers to the table during the retrospective each week! Therefore, you should complete your peer-review Friday morning; first thing you do, before starting the retrospective!

FIN

That's it, now we just loop every week and follow our scrum methodology!