Agile Sprint Planning with Orangescrum

Developing a product or a service your customers will love, requires exquisite planning and management of the product and engineering teams. Requirement sign-offs as well as the agreed timelines by the customer are critical success factors.

Once you are set to begin execution, it is important to have the project phases, user stories, sprints, and tasks aligned. Furthermore, ensure that your teams understand what is to be delivered as part of each Sprint without losing sight of the overall deliverables.

The focus should always be that of ONE SPRINT at a time.

“Quick & Dirty” or a “Good Enough on time” deliverable has always been preferred over that elusive delayed yet “perfect” result.

This is where the Agile way of doing things scores the most. It is incremental & iterative. Our clients today are obsessed with quick results. What better way than Sprints to satisfy them!

They always want things delivered yesterday!

Not only that, agile offers us the flexibility of making changes at the right time rather than at an end stage which is detrimental to the project and all involved.

And this where having well-planned Sprints come in handy.

You time-box your Sprints, lay out the tasks involved, have the team ready to execute and monitor results as you make progress.

And if you look at it from an IT Service Provider standpoint, it gives you greater control over your projects, prevents them from being overrun by unwanted scope creeps & delays and lastly from running out of the budget.

In this short article, I will explain how you can plan and manage your sprints in OrangeScrum.

With OrangeScrum’s sprint planning, you can have the full clarity on your sprint plans, milestones, sprint launch dates, backlogs and all the progress in one place.

As we all know Sprint is a set period of time during which specific work has to be completed and made ready for review.

Sprint review and Daily Stand-ups are easier and far less time consuming with Orangescrum!

Let us jump to the specifics now 🙂

How to use OrangeScrum for sprint planning?

• Create a new project from the Quick Links or Quick button +. The project creator will be the project owner or scrum master.

• Add all stakeholders or team members of the project, so that they can access all sprints and share their update and status.

• Use Task Groups/Milestones as the Sprints. Create sprints “Backlogs, In Progress, Review & Testing, Done,” by creating each as a Task Group/Milestones.

Pro Tip: Don’t create any Task Group as Backlog, the default Task Group or Milestone is your Backlog Sprint.

Task Group can be created in several ways;

• In the dashboard –when you hover on ‘+’ add sign – you will get an option to “Create Task Group”.
• Another method is through “+Quick Links”, available in the top menu bar. Click on “Task Group” to create one.
• You can navigate to task list page, change the view to ‘Task Group’ and click on ‘+ Quick Task Group’.

• Schedule timeline for each sprint when it will be completed and add tasks under each sprints with a completion date and assign to respective task owner.

• Once you add all the tasks, your sprint is ready to review! Define the right priority of tasks and start working on the product development.

Pro Tip: Select all tasks and save the project as Project Template so that you can use the same tasks for sprint planning for the similar projects with just one click!

Sprint Update:

Every task owner can work on the assigned task and can update the task status for review and mark them closed after completion. As soon as you mark close of tasks, your sprint progress will be updated accordingly. For any communication or change of plan, you can comment on each task, assign the task to any other resource or get a quick clarification using OrangeScrum’s In-App chat.

Click on the tasks and updated the status, % progress, add comments and assign for review. The testing team or manager or client can review and once it completed you can push the changes to live and update the sprints.

Sprint Progress:

As you progress on working on the scheduled goal, you can check the progress of each sprint at any time. You can share your feedback, ask for updates or re-assign a task to any of your resources.

You can check the progress of each sprint by clicking on the Task Group (sprints) as shown in below.

Now it’s your turn:

A well-planned sprint can help:

• help your team manage and prioritize tasks that need to be done in the coming weeks;
• keep track of how the product is developing; and
• demonstrate to your key stakeholders what you’ve achieved.

If you have not created any Sprints for your projects yet, why waste time? Let’s start your sprint planning, sign in here with OrangeScrum and make most out of agile project management.

We’d love to hear your experience of running sprints in Orangescrum! Share your stories and contribute to the success of like-minded teams globally.

Book here a 30 min. schedule call to learn more about OrangeScrum features or Sign up here to get a 30 days’ FREE trial.