Teams who are building products or completing projects necessarily rely on each other. Identifying and keeping track of dependencies can be difficult, particularly across multiple teams or external or shared teams. Dependencies management is often something that can be taken for granted as part of a standard operating procedure. In this article, we will look more closely at the process of identifying, troubleshooting and resolving any dependencies that prevent work from being delivered.

A common example is if one piece of working software depends on an external plugin or third party tool. If that plugin fails to operate, then the working software may fail as well. Similarly, large organizations working on multiple pieces of software at once may have habitual or recurring dependencies between different teams in order to operate. This is why agile teams need processes to monitor dependencies so they won’t disrupt development or inhibit flow.

The more complex dependencies become, ironically, the more simple a process you need to manage them at scale. Complexity compounds complexity, so finding an approach whether it is a tool or a framework that works within the context of your teams and your organization is the key to unlocking dependency management in a sustainable way.

Let’s take a closer look at how you may approach managing dependencies within your organization.

Similarly, agile frameworks such as LeSS and SAFe can help with dependencies management in large organizations. Finally, finding ways to visualize the dependencies in an organization is a highly effective way to mitigate the risks of delaying projects.

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Now, close your eyes and imagine the rest. Just kidding, read on...as if your agility depends on it. 😂

Types of dependencies in project management

Before we discuss tools and frameworks, let's outline a few different types of dependencies:

• Direct dependency: This common dependency type is one where one project or feature depends on the delivery of another.
• Transitive dependencies: This is where we have an indirect connection between two projects, usually by way of a connecting project. For example, Feature A depends on Feature B, and Feature B depends on Feature C. Therefore, Feature A indirectly depends on Feature C.
• External dependencies: These dependencies can be out of the remit of your team, group of teams or organization. It helps to be aware of them and it is worth identifying them separately as the addressing of these dependencies may be outside of the scope of the team or group level ceremonies.

Let’s dive in now to some frameworks for a blueprint of how to approach this.

Agile frameworks for organizations to improve dependency management

You're probably familiar with the most common agile frameworks for software development — Kanban and Scrum. These frameworks are mostly suited for individual team organizations. But what about frameworks for cross-functional agile teams in a large organization who need help with dependencies management?

LeSS for dependency management

LeSS is a framework that helps multiple Scrum teams who are working together on a single project to scale. Think of LeSS as Scrum at a large enterprise scale — you still have a single product backlog, a product owner, a Scrum master, and software developers. But the key difference is that there are many teams working towards the same goal and the same definition of done (rather than a single team).

One of the most important tasks for the product owner role in the LeSS framework is making sure that dependency information is provided across teams. In LeSS, product backlog refinement (PBR) is an organized event that makes sure dependency risks are consistently identified. PBR allows multiple teams to plan sprints in parallel and to identify if there are any cross-team dependencies that risk project completion.

SAFe approach to managing dependencies

The SAFe (Scaled Agile framework) provides principles and workflow patterns to guide organizations through their dependencies. SAFe promotes transparency and alignment across large organizations so they can be more nimble in meeting their business objectives. Being able to respond to changes quickly can be hindered by size and scale. Dependencies can often tangle work and trip up teams due to the inability to see and appreciate cross-functional team dependencies.

Just as scrum has ceremonies to keep a single agile team aligned, an essential ceremony to keep multiple teams aligned and communicating with each other according to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is Program Increment / Planning Interval Planning - better known as PI Planning. During PI Planning, teams create their dependencies and through cross-functional collaboration can adjust their plans to manage these dependencies.

Unlike startups, who are small and can typically make organizational changes quickly, large organizations often become too big to make rapid changes. One common cause of this is the inability to manage dependency resolution because dependencies are less visible for cross-functional teams.

Just as Scrum has ceremonies to keep a single agile team aligned, an essential ceremony to keep multiple teams in the Scaled Agile Framework communicating with each other is Program Increment (PI) Planning. It’s a way to keep even the largest organizations nimble.

One key output of PI Planning is the program (dependency) board or ART planning board (SAFe 6.0).

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PI Planning for large organizations

PI Planning is a periodic ceremony that happens throughout the year. Teams within an organization gather to compile their thoughts on product features and the product roadmap, and to discover any dependencies that exist between them.

One key feature of PI Planning is an ART planning board (program board). ART planning boards help give Agile Release Trains (ART) — a group of agile teams working together on a common goal — a visual representation of what the teams have planned to complete from their PI Planning.

Visualize your dependencies

Easy Agile Programs for Jira is a complete tool for dependencies management at a program level. By utilizing visualizations and by providing transparency across projects, teams can confidently scale without the risk of unforeseen dependencies and disruptions. It does this by providing three views:

• Program roadmap: an overview of all of the scheduled increments or iterations for a program or group of teams
• Program Board (ART Planning Board): an at-a-glance visualization of all of the teams within a program, including all of their cross-team dependencies
• Team planning board: where teams break down committed features for the upcoming increment, create dependencies with other teams, estimate and schedule their work.

Visualise dependencies with Easy Agile Programs: Filter the Program Board by at risk, healthy or blocked dependencies for effective conversations.

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Unlock your organization's common dependencies

Managing dependencies comes first from being able to see what you need to manage and then to be able to focus where is needed. As a highly visual and filterable tool, Easy Agile Programs can support in many ways:

• Highly visual dependencies: The color of the dependency lines reflects their health status. A red dependency represents a conflict, yellow indicates at risk, green signifies a healthy state and black indicates external dependencies outside the current view, such as work in the backlog or in an other Program Increments. The colours support product managers, release train engineers or scrum masters to know where to focus. To avoid bottlenecks, you need to address the red dependencies and the yellow where possible.
• Team alignment to each other and business outcomes: Adding in third level hierarchy issues to capture and communicate higher level business initiative or priorities helps teams to understand the context of the bigger picture and why they are delivering what is scheduled. Making sure that all of your ART or group of teams work is represented and visible on a board that is always up to date helps keep teams aligned.
• Focus mode: Alignment needs to be maintained beyond planning. With a number of filters applicable to the program board to focus on teams, epic or issue status, dependency health or initiative, it is easy to focus the work - and conversations - on what is most important.

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DevOps vs. agile—what’s the difference? These two methodologies have a lot in common, but there are also many key differences that we’ll discuss in this post. You might say they compliment each other. We wouldn't go so as far as to say they’re like peanut butter and jelly, but when used together, they certainly make for a nice combination.

In basic terms, it comes down to this: Agile solves the gap that can exist between end users and developers, whereas DevOps solves the gap that can exist between developers and operations.

Sound simple enough? Well, there’s a lot more to it than that. Let’s dig a little deeper into the definition of both agile and DevOps, what these methodologies have in common, what makes them different, and how they can work together.

Defining agile

The agile methodology was first popularized in software development, but in recent years, agile practices as well as the guiding principles of agile have expanded into a range of different industries that want to prioritize continuous improvement and growth.

The agile approach to project management is much different than the traditional approach to project management. Traditional project management follows a waterfall model. Each project element must be completed before moving on to the next in a strict sequential order, and the flow of work remains the same from project to project.

Agile focuses on flexibility, adaptability, collaboration between team members, and delivering consistent value to stakeholders through continuous customer feedback and rapid releases. Each iteration offers fresh insights into what is and isn’t working and what could be improved upon. It’s a multidimensional approach that eliminates the bottlenecks so characteristic of traditional project management.

Agile teams can implement agile in a variety of different ways, including Scrum, kanban, lean, and more. A key benefit of agile software development is the ability to bridge the gap between customers or users and development teams.

Learn more about agile, dig into the Agile Manifesto, and read our article: Agile 101: A Beginner's Guide to Agile Methodology.

Defining DevOps

DevOps is a software development method that empowers teams to build, test, and release software quickly and consistently with the integration of agile practices and principles, including enhanced automation and improved communication and collaboration between development and operations teams.

DevOps focuses on aligning development and IT operations to better manage end-to-end engineering processes. In the past, development teams would write applications and then pass them along to an operations team that would then deploy and manage the software. The problem with this approach is the operations team is given no insight into how the application was developed.

DevOps practices bridge the gap between developers who develop and write the software and operations who run the software.

➡️ Learn more about other popular software development methodologies.

DevOps vs. agile: What do they have in common?

Both agile and DevOps aim to aid the software development process, but where did they come from, and what commonalities do they share?

In this “which came first, the chicken or egg?” scenario, we do actually know which came first. 🐓🥚 Agile, which gained popularity in the early 2000s, provided development teams with an approach to solving complex problems. While agile solved many problems, there was one disconnect that remained — the operations teams deploying the software were sidelined and remained in a silo, missing out on the benefits of agile.

Enter DevOps, which applies agile principles to improve the gap that often exists between development and operations teams. It offers operations teams visibility into the development process so that they can better understand how and why a product was made. This clarity aids the development process since both sets of teams can work alongside one another while developing and deploying.

The result is development practices that run smoothly from one team to the next, a heightened consideration of the user, and continuous delivery to both customers and stakeholders.

So, in many ways, DevOps is an extension of the original agile methodology. DevOps teams  zero in on a key aspect of the development process to bring development and operations together. Many of the same agile principles are applied, such as continuous deployment, improved collaboration, iteration, and automation, and implementing feedback at every turn.

Key differences between DevOps vs. agile

While agile and DevOps have a lot in common, there are a few key differences to be aware of. The differences mainly stem from the different types of teams utilizing agile principles. These different teams have different needs, work at a different pace, and are guided by separate feedback systems.

AgileDevOpsAgile is a broad methodology that focuses on solving complex problems and bridging the gap between development teams and product/project management through improved communication and collaboration, continuous iterative development, stakeholder feedback, and frequent releases. DevOps takes agile one step further, focusing on bridging the gap between development and operations teams to better manage end-to-end engineering processes. Agile can be applied to any industry that wants to emphasize continuous improvement, collaboration, and communication. DevOps is mostly used within software development.There are many different frameworks that can be utilized to implement agile, including Scrum, kanban, lean, and XP (eXtreme Programming).DevOps is an agile framework that exists because of agile.Agile focuses on iterative development and working in small batches.DevOps emphasizes constant testing and delivery automation. Agile development is typically managed through sprints: 2-4 weeks time in which a set amount of work is completed and submitted to stakeholders for feedback.The goal of DevOps is to deliver code to production as frequently as possible, either every day or every few hours. Feedback comes from stakeholders, customers, and users.Feedback comes from the internal team. Agile uses the Shift Left testing approach (testing early and often to get the code right the first time, reducing the time it takes to get the product to market).DevOps uses both Shift Left and Shift Right testing to get the code right the first time and to understand and optimize the software’s functionality and usability in real-world situations, enabling wider test coverage.

Bridging every gap in the development process

Let’s bring it all back to the simple definition we began with. Although there are many complexities, similarities, and differences between DevOps vs. agile, in basic terms, it comes down to this:

Agile, which came before DevOps, is a broad methodology that primarily focuses on bridging the gap between the customer/user and development teams. DevOps, which came second, utilizes agile practices to fill the void that remains between development teams and operations teams.

Easy Agile is dedicated to helping all types of teams work better using various agile methodologies. We design agile apps for Jira with simple, collaborative, and flexible functionality. From team agility with Easy Agile TeamRhythm, to scaled agility with Easy Agile Programs, our apps can help your agile teams work better together, and deliver for your customers.

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It might seem trivial at first, to come together as a team, mocking up what seem like fake dating profiles for your most important customers. However, this exercise sets the foundation for other agile practices down the track, and its perceived benefits are often undervalued.

Teams that have a shared understanding and alignment around who is actually using the solution they are delivering are more likely to succed.

Agile practices have called for the development of cross-functional team members, which means this knowledge of who the customer is, is no longer the sole responsibility of a (traditional) Sales and Marketing team.

Definition: What is a Customer Persona?

Let’s dive straight in.

Customer Personas are fictional generalisations of your most valuable customers. They help teams understand their customers by bringing together demographic information like age, gender, location, and income, alongside psychographic information like interests, frustrations and personal/professional motivations.

Building customer personas helps teams to address the following questions:

• Who are our customers?
• What are their common behavioural patterns?
• What are their shared pain points (professional and personal)?
• What are their universal goals/objectives?
• What general demographic and psychographic information may influence their decisions?
• What drives them to make purchasing decisions?
• Is the customer the buyer / decision maker?

Why are Customer Personas Important in Agile Software Development?

I think by now, you’re starting to see that building customer personas provide value to the team, but just in case you’re not quite on the customer-persona train, here are a few really important reasons:

Customer Personas help identify customer specific needs and wants:

This understanding ensures that Product Managers, Designers, Developers etc. are delivering solutions that actually address real user challenges.

Personas provide a “face” to the user story:

This helps the team have a shared understanding of who their customers are and creates buy-in and empathy.

Targeted/Segmented MarComs:

Understanding your customers needs, challenges and behavioural influencers, allows you to better understand what content will appeal to them best, by segmenting your customers by persona type and tailoring your marketing communications to each specific group.

Before We Start: Customer Persona Overview

Let’s look at an overview of what “goes into” building customer personas and some discovery questions to help get you started.

As you can see, a lot more thought goes into creating customer personas than simply guessing and gut feeling. So how do we go about defining all of the elemets listed above, and more specifically, what questions are we hoping to answer about our customers along the way?

Let’s take a look at some discovery questions:

Location: where do people from this persona live?

Age: what is the average age/age range of this persona?

Gender: are people representative of this persona predominantly male or female?

Relationship Status: Single? Married? Children?

Interests: what are the general interests of people in this persona?

Language: what is the primary language used by people in this persona?

Favourite Websites: where do people in this persona go to learn new information?

Education: what level of education do they have?

Job Title: what is/are typical job titles for people in this persona?

Responsibilities: what does a typical work day look like for people in this persona?

Frustrations: biggest challenges for people in this persona?

Motivations: what motivates people in this persona to be successful?

Personal/Professional Goals: what do they wish to achieve?

Getting Started: Building Customer Personas

It’s time to start creating our personas, and we’re going to break the process down into 2 steps;

• Broadly define your personas
• Look towards analytics and layer results

1. Broadly Define Your Personas

It’s not crazy to think that most companies will have some broad idea of who at least some of their customer personas are. This knowledge is accumulated over time and is based on customer feedback, support requests, conversations/interviews and initial market research.

This knowledge is not to be underestimated and is a great starting point before looking towards analytics to flesh these personas out into more specific detail.

Keep in mind that a single team member will not be able to paint a holistic picture of who the customers are. The qualitative methods of gathering information we listed above will call upon the knowledge of Customer Service, Sales, Marketing, Product Managers, Researchers etc. This is very much a team exercise.

Example: Online Stationary Retailer

If we took an example of an online stationery retailer, it would be simple to identify two broad potential customer personas:

End Consumer — customers purchasing for themselves online

Wholesale Accounts — wholesale buyers purchasing on behalf of businesses that will stock the stationery in their own retail stores (online or flagship)

We can see from the ‘personas’ listed above that we have a vague idea about their roles in the purchasing cycle, but that’s about the extent of it. We need to build on these personas to humanise them, and get a better understanding of their holistic relationship with our product.

2. Look Towards Analytics and Layer Results

Now that we’ve established at least a few customer personas, it’s time to flesh them out with qualitative and quantitative data.

So where can we find/gather this information?

• Google Analytics Audience Reports
• Facebook Insights
• Social Media Listening Tools e.g. Hootsuite, Tweetdeck etc.
• Customer Surveys & Polls
• Industry/Market Reports
• Customer Interviews/Support & Feature Requests (note: you should have a streamlined way of capturing and sharing this information with your team)
• In-Product Analytics

After looking through all of this information, trying to answer some of the discovery questions we mentioned earlier, you’ll need to look for commonality between datasets. Think of it this way:

The customer personas you and your team were able to broadly define are attached to funnels. Once you and your team find commonality in data sets, feed this information down the funnel of the customer persona it relates to (perhaps this is a completely new customer persona that you and your team didn’t know that you had).

By the end of the exercise, you and your team should have a pretty good idea of who your customers are, and how to best service them, communicate with them, build solutions for them etc.

Once these personas have been developed, they should live somewhere where the whole team can see them.

Don’t be afraid to sit at your desk and think “What would Sam the System Administrator think about this new feature? Would she use it? How would she communicate its benefits to her team? What are some of the problems Sam may encounter on first use?” etc.

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Need help getting started with Easy Agile Personas? Check out our documentation, or get in touch with one of the Easy Agile Partners.

Whether you’re a marketer, a salesperson, a product manager, or even a developer, your work comes back to one thing: the customer.

When you understand who they are, what they want, how they talk, and how they get things done, you can make better products and promote them in the right way to the right people.

One of the most powerful ways to understand your customer better is to create buyer personas. That’s why we’ve put together a comprehensive guide that includes everything you need to know to create, refine, and use your buyer personas.

What are buyer personas?

Buyer personas lay out the typical characteristics of someone who is likely to buy your products - usually on a single page.

Personas aren’t profiles of real people. You shouldn’t use real names, photos, or personal information on your buyer personas. But they should reflect the general behavior and goals of your real customers

You might create a buyer persona for your ideal customer, or several types of ideal customers that regularly buy your product or service. For example, at Easy Agile, we have personas for the most common roles/titles of our ideal customers, like:

• Release Train Engineer
• Product Manager
• Product Owner
• Scrum Master
• Developer

You might also create anti-personas for the types of customers you don’t want to attract.

What are some other names for buyer personas?

You might know “buyer personas” by a different name, depending on your industry, department, or how you plan to use the persona. For example:

• User persona (if your product is software and your user is also the buyer)
• Audience persona
• Customer persona
• Buyer avatar
• Customer avatar
• Ideal audience avatar
• Buyer profile

While there are some slight differences between some of these names and how they're used in marketing or product management, they are often used interchangeably with "buyer persona".

What are buyer personas used for?

Buyer personas can be used in just about any role or department.

The main purpose of buyer personas is to gain a deeper understanding of your customers. This will help you:

• Improve targeting and reach
• Increase conversions
• Increase ROI and profitability
• Communicate more effectively
• Identify pain points
• Create products that solve problems
• Improve the user experience
• Improve customer loyalty
• Offer the best value to your best customers
• Help the customers who need your product or service the most

Why create buyer personas?

It’s clear that buyer personas are useful for a lot of different things. But let’s take a closer look at the top 6 benefits.

1. Increase revenue

One case study found ROI increased by 124% by using personas as part of a marketing strategy. Another case study found that personas have the potential to significantly increase time spent on a website and could boost marketing revenue by 171%. This makes sense when you consider that the insights from personas can allow you to use your marketing budget to better target and convert customers.

2. Make good decisions fast

Whether you’re a marketer, salesperson, or product manager, you won’t always have time to run a proper analysis, get consensus from your team, or survey your audience before you make a decision. Fortunately, with a clear picture of your audience always at your fingertips, you can make snap decisions with confidence. Buyer personas allow you to anticipate how a feature or change will impact the buyer (and therefore your conversions, retention, and bottomline) by seeing things from their perspective (goals, objectives, fears, and motivations).

3. Understand how people buy

Buyer personas can help you map out the customer journey, showing how your audience goes from the first point of contact with your brand to purchasing your product. Personas can reveal what issues matter to them, what content they’d like to consume, what platforms they prefer to consume it on, and what products they’re most likely to invest in first. When you understand how people prefer to buy from you, you can make this more streamlined by:

• Creating different funnels for different personas
• Showing people the right thing at the right time
• Tackling objections with your content
• Focusing on the most effective channels for your audience

4. Talk directly to your ideal audience

With clearly defined buyer personas, your team will have the data needed to target ads directly to your ideal audience. Not only that, but they’ll be able to use ad creative that talks to your audience pain points and uses language that they can understand. In turn, this should lead to more clicks, more conversions, and more customers that are the ideal fit for your product.

5. Be more consistent

Buyer personas can help your whole team get on the same page about who your customers are and how to target them. This can help you deliver more consistent messaging and support for customers, which will help build customers’ trust, confidence, and loyalty.

6. Stay focused on the customer

One of the top benefits of using buyer personas is that they help keep your team focused on what’s important: the customer. With so much data available these days, it can be easy to get lost in the numbers. And it’s just as easy to go down rabbit holes, chasing features you want to work on without fully considering what’s best for the customer. With customer personas, it’s much easier to remember that real people buy your product - and that your job is to deliver value to them above all else.

How to research your buyer personas

Don’t assume you know everything there is to know about your audience - real data should inform your buyer personas. Here are some ways you can research your buyer personas:

Survey customers

Customer surveys are one of the most powerful ways to gather data. You can create online surveys through tools like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms, then send these to your existing customers or prospects. Use these surveys to ask questions about audience demographics, habits, goals, challenges, fears, objections, platforms, technology, and preferences. This data will directly inform each section of your buyer persona, so make sure you ask questions that are most relevant to understanding your buyer and how they might find, purchase, or use your product.

Interview key customers

One-on-one customer interviews or focus groups are another powerful way to learn about your audience. Unlike an online survey, this format is more flexible. You could start with some questions to help start a discussion, and then dig further based on the answers that come up. It does, however, require more of a time commitment from you and your customers, so be sure to offer a fair incentive.

Review your database

If you already have a list of current or previous customers stored in your database, they can be a really valuable source of information. Look through the list and see what trends and categories emerge. For example, you might find buyers from small, medium, and large companies. Or you might find that most of your customers fit into one of 3-4 departments or roles, like marketing, sales, and project management. Once you can categorize your customer list, you’ll be able to see how different customer types use your product, consume your content, and other useful insights.

Check your analytics

Analytics can be a goldmine for researching your customers. You likely have access to analytics from your product, any social media pages, and your Google analytics. This data can reveal demographic information, typical usage patterns, preferred devices, preferred social media channels for different audience groups, what they search for, and more.

Do social listening

Social listening means monitoring your social media channels to see what your audience is saying. You might uncover valuable feedback, pain points, objections, and topics that your audience is interested in. You could also find this information by looking at competitors’ channels, searching for industry keywords, and even looking at online forums. Sometimes the best way to get to know your audience is when they’re asking for help or recommendations from their peers.

Talk to your team

Finally, ask your team members to share their audience insights. Especially those that regularly talk to customers, like salespeople and customer support. They’re probably familiar with the types of people who buy your product, their biggest challenges, and the questions they need answers to.

A simple buyer persona template

You don’t have to start your buyer personas from scratch. Most buyer personas follow roughly the same format, so find a buyer persona template that fits your needs and goals and start with that. Use the data you’ve collected from your research to fill out a profile for each of your ideal customers.

Let’s go through the above sections on your buyer persona template.

Title and name

The persona title helps you identify the buyer group you’re referring to. Depending on your product, this might be their industry, demographic, job title, aspiration, or something else that helps differentiate them from your other buyer groups.

But sometimes a title isn’t enough. Naming your buyer persona and giving them a photo helps to humanize your buyers. It can help you remember that while the profile is fictional, real people buy and use your products.

Bio

A short bio can help to tell your buyer’s story, summarizing their personality, fears, challenges, and their main goals. While you’ll have all these details listed elsewhere on the buyer persona, putting it in story form can also help to humanize your buyer and make this information more meaningful and memorable.

Personality

The personality section is usually based on one of the popular personality tests, like Myer Briggs, DISC, or Enneagram. This can be helpful to understand tendencies like introversion vs extraversion, decision making styles, and how much information your buyer is likely to need when choosing or using your product.

Motivations and goals

Under motivations, list the things that help move your buyers onto the next step in the buying process. You might include things like fears and goals, but also external triggers like ideas and anything that might help them trust your brand or product.

Your buyers’ goals or objectives might include their bigger vision for their career or life, but also the smaller goals that they want to accomplish by interacting with your brand or buying your product.

Challenges

Challenges should summarize any problems your buyer is experiencing that relate to your product - or the reason they might buy your product. You could also touch on fears and pain points, or create a separate section for these.

Tools and technology

Tools and technology are especially useful if your buyer needs specific skills or integrations to effectively use your product. Or it might just reveal how they prefer to communicate - whether via social media, email, or phone.

You can, of course, add other sections to your buyer persona. It all depends on how much information you need to get a clear understanding of your customer, target them, and have meaningful conversations with them. At the same time, keeping your persona short (a single page is ideal) and straight to the point will make it easier for your team to use.

How many buyer personas should you create?

Most organizations will need around 3-4 personas to cover most of their audience groups. But the right number of buyer personas will depend on how diverse your audience is.

The main point here is that your buyer personas shouldn’t cover every possible buyer - only your ideal prospects. Consider the 80/20 rule - it’s likely that 20% of your customers are responsible for 80% of your sales, so don’t be afraid to prioritize the 20%. Including personas that aren’t ideal customers will take the focus away from those that are.

Tip: If you’re struggling to categorize your audience into groups and narrow down your buyer personas, try a card sorting exercise. Create mini profiles for all your audience types on separate cards and then eliminate the audiences that aren’t profitable or ideal customers. Then group the remaining profiles together based on similar demographics, challenges, and goals. When you can’t easily combine any more cards to make groups, stop the exercise. These are your buyer personas.

Start using your buyer personas

Buyer personas are incredibly versatile - any part of your business that interacts with customers or impacts them can benefit from using buyer personas. So, don’t leave them sitting in a folder somewhere… start incorporating them into your teams’ processes right away.

Now that you know just about everything there is to know about buyer personas… now’s the time to create yours and (most importantly) incorporate them into your processes so that you can reach more of your best customers and build a better product for them.

Get a headstart with Easy Agile Personas for Jira

If you use Jira, you can add your buyer personas inside the platform by following this step-by-step guide. Sign up with Easy Agile Personas for Jira and link your personas to issues in your backlog and story map.

In the meantime, we’ve got more articles you might want to check out, like:

And tag us on Twitter @EasyAgile if you’d like to share how your teams create buyer personas and build them into your processes!

If one thing is certain in product development (or in life), it’s that time is always passing, and there are always tasks to be completed. There’s no more straightforward way to calculate both of these critical metrics than a simple burndown chart.

Burndown charts help agile teams visualize time vs. task completion, which means the amount of work left compared to the amount of time planned in the development of a product or a specific sprint.

In this post, we’ll explain what burndown charts are, the benefits of using them, and how they are used by development teams. We’ll also explain the difference between burndown vs. burnup charts, product burndown charts vs. sprint burndown charts, and share helpful tools for integrating critical metrics in Jira. Now let’s slide down that y-axis!

What is a burndown chart?

A burndown chart is a visualization of how much work is left to do and how much time there is to complete it. Visible to everyone, this graphical representation predicts how much work the team plans to complete within the allotted time. Burndown charts are also used to measure how quickly an agile team is moving through and completing customer user stories. They are excellent for keeping the team aware of any scope creep.

Let’s look at what each part of the graph represents. The amount of work remaining is shown on the vertical axis. The time that has passed since starting the project or sprint is displayed on the horizontal axis. So, the x-axis is the timeline of the project or iteration, and the y-axis is the work that needs to be completed.

The total amount of work to be done on the project is at the top of the y-axis on the left, and the endpoint on the far right of the x-axis represents the final day of the project or specific iteration. The start and endpoints are connected by the ideal work line, a straight line that shows what the team hopes to accomplish within a predetermined time frame. Another line, the actual work line, shows the amount of work that remains and how quickly the team is actually performing.

Actual work line vs. ideal work line

A burndown chart shows both the actual work line and the ideal work line. Both lines begin at the start point at the top of the y-axis. As the project or iteration goes on, the actual work line will oscillate around the ideal work line, depending on how the team is progressing.

If the team stays on schedule, the actual work line won’t deviate much from the ideal work line and remain decently straight. If the team hits a lot of time-sucking roadblocks during the project or sprint, the actual work line will be more of a wild squiggle, and it may not reach the x-axis endpoint before time is up.

The benefits of using burndown charts

Burndown charts are helpful in a few key ways. These charts:

• Provide a visual representation of the progression of work completed over time.
• Keep product owners informed of development progress for a product or specific sprint.
• Keep the whole development team on the same page about how far along a product is.
• Are regularly updated as work is completed and as time passes to show product progress in real-time.
• Provide advance notice if a product is not progressing fast enough.
• Capture clear metrics that can be reviewed during retrospectives.

Burndown chart vs. burnup chart

A burndown chart tracks how much work remains by starting at the tip of the y-axis and tracking downward toward where the endpoint meets the x-axis as time goes on and work is completed.

A burnup chart does the opposite. The start point is at the bottom corner of the graph to the left most of the x-axis. A burnup chart’s ideal work line and actual work line track upward as work is completed and time passes. Toward the top of the y-axis is another horizontal line representing the scope of the project, such as the number of story points needed to complete. If the scope becomes larger, say if story points or sprint backlog items are added, the scope line rises to account for the elevated goal.

If the scope of a sprint or project changes due to unexpected developments or stakeholder insight, which is bound to happen over the course of development, these changes are represented by the scope line. This can make burnup charts a slightly more adaptable tool.

Both burndown and burnup charts track a team’s velocity, workflow, and progress. A burnup chart’s scope line takes into account the evolving nature of software development and how the goalposts can move over the course of a project, which makes them ideal for tracking a project as a whole. While they are both effective tools, a burndown chart could be better utilized during a sprint because the number of tasks in a sprint is less likely to change.

Product burndown vs. sprint burndown chart

There are two different kinds of burndown charts. A product burndown chart shows how much work remains for the entire project, whereas a sprint burndown chart shows how much work remains in a specific iteration.

A product burndown chart collects a larger amount of data. It represents everything that needs to be completed on a product during the specific time requirement agreed upon at the beginning of the project.

A sprint burndown chart helps Scrum masters visualize how fast the agile team gets the work done and how much work is left to do during a sprint. It shows the Scrum team’s progress by displaying how much work actually remains instead of time spent. Over the course of a sprint, the chart will slope downward across the completed story points.

If the burndown line on a sprint burndown chart is not tracking downwards by the time you reach the middle of the sprint, it’s a sign that the sprint is not going well, and it’s up to the Scrum master to get the team back on track.

Working on your next product plan? Learn about common agile planning mistakes and how your team can avoid these common pitfalls.

Burndown charts in Jira

Broken Build’s Agile Reports and Gadgets include burndown and burnup charts for both Scrum and Kanban.

The application is designed for Jira, so you can integrate reporting in real-time. Having access to immediate metrics helps teams spot bottlenecks and dependencies, so they can be addressed sooner rather than later. The application lets you export charts and customizable reports to share with team members and stakeholders or to review during retrospectives.

How Easy Agile can help your team

We’re passionate about helping agile teams work more efficiently and effectively while always putting the needs of the customer first. We create products specifically designed for Jira users, including Easy Agile TeamRhythm, Programs, Personas, and Roadmaps.

Try Easy Agile TeamRhythm to build simple and collaborative story maps in Jira. Our tool will help you transform your product backlogs into an impactful visual representation of the customer journey. It’s the highest-rated story mapping app for Jira, trusted by over 120,000 users at companies like Amazon, Twitter, Starbucks, Rolex, and Adobe.

A user story map is a collaborative practice that guides an agile team in the creation of their product backlog.

The story map captures the journey a customer takes with the product including activities and tasks they undertake.

Creating the story map as a team ensures team members are on the same page from the start of development through to ongoing delivery of new releases.

In this post we’ll explore the aspects of a successful story map.

Backbone

A backbone provides structure. The backbone of the user story map captures the high level activities a user will accomplish while using the product.

If we take a simple example, buying and watching a movie on an Apple TV, we may have the following activities:

• select movie
• purchase movie
• watch movie
• review / recommend movie

For a user to watch a movie on the Apple TV they would have to complete three of these activities. And there may be other follow up activities such as writing a review or recommending the movie to a friend which we want to encourage.

Chronological Order

Once we’ve got the activities of the backbone identified we will order them in the chronological order of how a user will interact with the product. Following on with the Apple TV example we will make sure the order is correct:

It is common to rearrange existing activities or add new activities as the discussion unfolds. This is a key benefit of the collaborative approach to building the product backlog as we have the shared wisdom of an entire team involved in the discussion.

Stories

Below each activity on the backbone we create user stories which flesh out the customer journey. For example, below the ‘select movie’ activity we may see stories for:

• free text search
• browse by genre
• browse by recent addition
• browse by most popular
• browse by most popular by genre
• browse by recent addition by genre

These stories are ordered by value to the user. Value may be identified through conversations with users, analytics on usage patterns, or another form of insight appropriate for your product.

Sequence

Once the team has the backbone and stories ordered it is time to sequence the work. What do we want to deliver in our MVP, our 1.0, 2.0, etc.

We split the story map horizontally to show what is in and out of each release.

We can then begin delivery, and as we deliver releases we can track our progress against the story map. Product Managers will often start a sprint planning session by reviewing the story map to ensure that all team members are still on the same page.

User story maps turn a flat backlog into a vivid representation of the customers journey.

A few final tips:

Keep the story map up to date as work progresses so stakeholders can visualise progress in real time;

Use the story map to communicate the roadmap with customers and share the product vision.

User story mapping is an essential practice for every agile team. They are an excellent technique for ensuring the team understands their customers, can clearly articulate the solution and stays focused on delivery.

At Easy Agile we’re converts to the practice of story mapping. In fact we’re so passionate about user story mapping that we created a JIRA add-on that assists teams with conducting sessions. Try Easy Agile TeamRhythm today.

Product development without an agile workflow would be like building a house without a blueprint or defined roles on the construction team. No one knows what to do or who does what. 🤔

The result: time and energy wasted building a single house that would most likely reveal its darkest flaws over the years.

So, here’s what you need to know: Process increases efficiency. It also increases efficacy, customer satisfaction, and a better experience for the team members who take a part in the process.

Follow this how-to guide to building and implementing an agile workflow in Jira. In this article, we’ll cover what an agile workflow is and define the steps for its creation and its principles in depth.

The notion of workflow

The execution of a team's work is dictated by one or more processes. In other words, a process is a way the team gets to the finish line with deliverables. And if you're developing products with an agile framework, an agile workflow is a way to structure that process.

Generally, a workflow is made out of:

• Activities, tasks, and steps
• Roles
• Work products
• A few other things to help improve team collaboration and work execution

With such a structure, it gets easier:

• To repeat the process
• For team members to work with each other
• To scale the process and the work itself

It seems like a workflow is so well-organized that teamwork would flow smoothly just because it exists. Well, that's not the case. In the next section, you'll learn that there's not a workflow for any team or project. Instead, there are one or more workflows that work for your team or your project.

Why there's no one-size-fits-all workflow

The size and maturity of teams have an impact on their workflows. Also, the type of project and both company culture and team culture influence the configuration of workflows. Bottom line: Your agile workflow will depend on many factors, and it’ll likely be unique.

You might, however, find online suggestions of workflows that prove to work with other companies. So, if you prefer, you might use those as a starting point for the definition of your own workflow. It might be the case that excluding some steps does the trick for you. On the other hand, you might define your own workflow from scratch.

Jira is a very versatile solution for workflow management that supports many different agile workflows.

With Jira, you may customize workflows to different company cultures or team cultures. In this context, culture means the way team members work with each other. In the same vein, a workflow expresses the dynamics of a team in one or more projects.

Now, if we're talking about Jira workflows, you should know what one of those contains.

What's a Jira workflow exactly?

A Jira workflow is an agile workflow built on top of and implemented with the help of Jira. It's a digital board that allows checking the statuses of work items. It may also send notifications when those items change status. You can also use your Jira board for Scrum meetings such as daily standups and sprint retrospectives.

You absolutely need to keep the statuses of ALL work items accurate. That means updating the status of each work item whenever and as soon as it changes.

Only an up-to-date agile workflow — and Jira board — fulfills its purpose and delivers benefit. It's an awesome tool for team members, Product Owners, and Scrum Masters to track work progress at all times.

Let's move on to our guide now. You'll find out, one tip at a time, how to become an agile workflow rockstar with the help of Jira.

Your guide for agile workflow in Jira

Start your engines! You're heading on a fabulous learning journey about the creation and management of agile workflows in Jira. Here are our best tips to make this process happen:

1. Start now

Don't postpone getting your hands dirty with workflow definition.

Even if you start simple, just get started. Don't delude yourself into thinking that you'll succeed at agile if you start big. In fact, that could work against you and your project.

2. Don't overwork

Don't spend weeks structuring, restructuring, and then restructuring your workflow some more.

Overworked workflows are hard to understand and much harder to implement and comply with. That would harm the basic principles of agile methodology.

With an overloaded workflow, you'd end with team members not knowing what to do and when to do it. Consequently, at the end of the sprint — or iteration — and project, no deliverables would be ready to roll out.

3. Don't forget about workflow stakeholders

You should account for roles that will somehow use the workflow you're defining. Whereas some will use it daily to get work done, others will use it only for some kind of management analysis.

You should understand with them what their workflow needs are. It'll take time, so you must be patient.

4. Understand the concept of ‘issue’ in Jira

In project management, an issue describes a problem for which there's no solution yet. Those issues come from risks to the project's development process and ultimate success. For instance, adding a functionality to the project scope — the issue — could come from the possibility of requirement changes — the risk.

However, in Jira, an issue doesn't necessarily represent a problem. Rather, it represents a piece of work that teams must complete. For instance, a Jira issue can be a task or a helpdesk ticket.

With software development, a Jira issue may symbolize more specific concepts such as:

• Product features and functionality that the development team must implement
• Bugs that must be solved

5. Know the pieces of the puzzle

In Jira, a workflow has four types of components:

1. Status. This indicates the position of an issue in the workflow. It can be an open — or unresolved — status or a closed — or resolved — status.
2. Transition. This defines how an issue changes status, and it can be either uni or bidirectional. You can create more or fewer constraints depending on how statuses change. You can even define that only certain people or certain roles can change an issue from one specific status to another.
3. Assignee. This is the person responsible for an issue.
4. Resolution. This describes why an issue went from open to closed statuses. Additionally, it should only stick to an issue while it’s resolved.

In software teams or projects, it's common to find statuses such as:

• "To Do" for issues yet to start
• "In Progress" for issues that the team already started to tackle
• "Code Review" for completed coding tasks that need a review
• "Quality Assurance" for completed issues that require testing by a team of testers
• "Done" for completed, reviewed, and tested work

When a code review is successful, the work is done. In this example, the code review's success is a transition from the status "Code Review" to the status "Done." And the resolution would be the reason why the code review failed.

Finally, you can set up transitions with:

• Conditions. They prevent an inadequate role from changing the status of an issue.
• Validators. These ensure a transition only occurs under certain circumstances. If not, the transition doesn't happen.
• Post functions. They describe actions on issues besides changing their status, and you can automate them. For instance, remove the resolution from a resolved issue before changing its status back to unresolved. Another example would be to remove the assignee from that issue.
• Properties. These are characteristics of transitions. For example, one characteristic could be to only show resolutions relevant to the type of issue.

6. Define ‘done’

Every team is unique. It’s made up of different people, different habits, and different experiences with technology and methods. Different ways of getting work done. This means you need to define what “work done” means to your team or your project.

For instance, you need to answer the following questions for your team or project:

• What status should a product or a feature have when it’s approved to launch or release?
• What should your team members do to get each work product to that status?
• Who should make decisions — such as approvals — along the way, which decisions, and at which points?
• Who declares work as done?

7. Customize Jira default workflow

Remember that you could use Jira to customize workflows to different ways of working as a team? Here’s how to do it:

Step #1: Define your workflow's statuses and transitions in Jira workflow designer.

You may go with Jira default Scrum or Kanban workflow — Jira classic templates — or make some changes to it. Alternatively, you may choose the Jira simplified Scrum workflow, which is adequate for reasonably basic requirements.

The simplified version of the Scrum workflow contains:

• Three statuses: "To Do", "In Progress", and "Done"
• Two transitions: from "To Do" to "In Progress" and from "In Progress" to "Done"
• Four columns to organize issues distributed across boards: "Backlog," "Selected for Development," "In Progress," and "Done"

Step #2: Build your workflow by adding components to the simplified Scrum workflow.

To track issue progress in agile development, you might add statuses such as "Code Review" and "Quality Assurance." And, you might add a validator to the transition from "Code Review" to "Done" to force that you need a successful code review to mark “Done.”

In addition, you might include approval stages in the workflow such as "Awaiting QA." These stages are prior to those in which an issue is closed or changes to a closed status.

Step #3: Nail the visual presentation of the diagram.

Once you finish tailoring the workflow to your team or project, make sure that the diagram is visually readable. That's essential when sharing the diagram with stakeholders for feedback. You should collect feedback from at least one representative of each kind of stakeholder.

An interesting feature of Jira is the workflow lets you give visual highlight of issues. This lets you see where the issue is in the workflow according to its status. Just open the issue and click on the "View Workflow" button next to the issue's status.

8. Rely on Jira reports for progress tracking

Jira provides two useful reports for tracking the team's work progress on a sprint:

• The Burndown Chart, which shows:
• The amount of work left to do in a sprint
• The work that team members are executing at the moment
• The distribution of work throughout the sprint
• Whether issues fit into the sprint and the effort estimation was adequate
  
• The Sprint Report, which includes:
• The Burndown Chart
• A list of open and closed issues for that sprint
• Extra work added to the sprint

As with any other report, Jira reports allow you to reason about success and failure. In this case, it's the success and failure of each sprint in terms of:

• Effort estimation
• Team performance
• Process irregularities
• Sprint planning

Most importantly, you can use Jira reports for the continuous improvement of those aspects and preventing problems such as:

• Too much work for a sprint
• Rushing work
• Sudden changes in priorities

A Jira workflow comes in handy when detecting outliers in the development process such as:

• A large number of open issues
• Frequent issue reopening
• A high number of unplanned issues added to the sprint

Being able to detect these problems is extremely valuable in that it helps avoid a massive sprint failure.

9. Share information

People at your company who aren't members of your team might need information from your workflow. So, take that into consideration when defining your team or project's workflow.

Those people might need to know about:

• The amount of completed work
• The product backlog dimension when compared to team performance
• The number of open and closed issues or the number of issues in a specific status
• The average issue completion time
• The average number of issues that take too long or experience bottlenecks, which means not moving forward at specific statuses such as "Quality Assurance"

10. Keep it simple

⚠️It can be tempting to create issue statuses while moving issues through the workflow, but don't do it! Each additional status adds more transitions and all their customized characteristics.

❌If your workflow already allows you to assess the sprint and feed your stakeholders with valuable information, that's just perfect. You don't need to add more issue statuses to it.

✔️Add extra issue statuses only when you have no other option. For instance, when different teams need to track work in different stages of development, you might need different statuses.

11. Limit work in progress

You may determine a specific limit to the number of issues in a specific status. When doing so, you should make sure all the team has enough work at each workflow status.

Plus, you should ensure that the limits you introduce into the workflow don't exceed the team's capacity. If you don't, the team will need to prioritize and you may not want that to happen.

Team performance should increase if you set the right work-in-progress limits. 🤗

12. Prepare to scale up

Agile teams should be small. Nevertheless, an agile workflow should cope with an increase in the number of people working with it. This means no one should notice if an increase takes place.

Here are some golden rules for scaling agile workflows:

• Agree on agile practices for workflow definition and minimize customization when multiple teams working on their own projects must collaborate.
• Different teams working on the same project should use the same workflow, or things could get messy.
• Teams should compromise when defining a common workflow. However, that's when teams build workflows based on multiple past successful experiences.

What else can you do?

Whenever you hear about workflows, it’s a sign that the work’s execution is being structured. It's also a sign of a long way ahead, but the outcome will be awesome if you:

• Follow the 12 rules above
• Choose a flexible issue tracker in terms of workflow customization, such as Jira
• Complement the issue tracker with the right apps

Don't force your team or project to comply with a tool. 😨 Rather, do the exact opposite! Choose the tool that allows you to build and implement the right workflow for your context.

That will increase throughput and workflow compliance levels, which is exactly what you want when creating a workflow.

Keep your agile approach strong — streamline, discuss, and iterate. These are the keywords for building and implementing an agile workflow, so don't forget them for a single second! As a result, you'll avoid:

• Complicating the workflow when it's not absolutely necessary
• Disregarding the pains of stakeholders and team members have when using or viewing the workflow
• Having an outdated workflow that's no longer adequate for both the company culture and the team culture

Kick your agile workflow up a notch

Easy Agile TeamRhythm helps you build and implement a Scrum workflow in Jira. Optimize your agile workflow by:

• Visualizing what the team will deliver and when by arranging user stories into sprint swimlanes
• Prioritizing user stories in each sprint by ordering them inside the respective sprint swimlane
• Reviewing sprint statistics at a glance to ensure that the team's capacity isn't exceeded
• Registering effort estimation in user stories.

Story points in agile is a microcosm of agile development itself — working together as a team to estimate scope develops an atmosphere of collaboration, shared understanding, and continuous improvement. Agile story points can also provide clarity in a user story map by providing insights into how much effort you're planning to allocate to developing each part of your customer's journey through your product.

Story points are effort estimators. They’re an alternative to traditional estimation techniques that measure the expected effort of a project in days, weeks, or months. With agile story points, instead of asking, "How long will this project take?" we use relative estimates about the effort it might take to complete each item in the backlog. For example, an item that is assigned two story points is expected to be twice the effort as an item estimated as one point.

So, why should agile teams use story points? Let's see how story point estimation, sprint retrospectives, and velocity metrics all build consensus and allow team members a clear vision into the prioritization of your product backlog.

Story point estimation for the whole team 🙌

In sprint planning, product and engineering teams work in tandem to gain a shared understanding of the effort required to complete backlog items. During planning, the team agrees to a story point estimate for each user story in the sprint.

Point estimation is a practice in collaboration and consensus-building among team members. The team as a whole participates in determining the point value for each item in the sprint. By discussing each other's perspective on the estimates:

• Product owners better understand developers’ reasoning for their estimates.
• Developers gain empathy for the product owner's need to assess tradeoffs and make prioritization decisions from sprint to sprint.
• QA testers have an opportunity to weigh in on the complexity and risk of the work being estimated and the amount of work needed to create and run tests.

One common methodology for employing agile story points is to assign values to backlog items using the Fibonacci sequence — 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21...you get it. Mike Cohn provides a succinct reason for this approach — numbers that are too close to each other are difficult to differentiate. This sequence of points provides a much better jumping-off point for your team to discuss the relative effort of backlog items than a liner point system (i.e., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5...you still get it).

By planning with agile story points, you avoid the temptation to place artificial deadlines on sprint items. It's also easier to reach a consensus on the relative scope of items compared to attempting to place a timeframe on each item. You'll spend less time planning and more time working on your sprint!

Estimates are...estimates

Guess what? Your estimates don't need to be perfect! The process of agile estimation is difficult but provides software development teams an opportunity to feel comfortable with story point estimates being just accurate enough to continuously develop. Over time, you will learn from each other and will improve at creating better estimates.

Unpredictability exists in every project. By using rough estimates that are relative to each other, you avoid the trap of overplanning and allow developers to get to work. Story point estimates allow teams to build smooth planning cadences and move seamlessly from one sprint to the next.

Sprint velocity and other key metrics 📈

Agile story points enable another valuable tool for teams to continuously improve their estimation process — metrics. Several metrics can be used in the context of story points and estimation, but we'll focus on two of the most popular ones — burndown and velocity.

Sprint burndown

In any sprint iteration, the team commits to the amount of work that they believe they can complete in that timeframe. A burndown chart visualizes how the team is progressing relative to its commitment over the course of the sprint.

The y-axis is the number of points in the sprint, and the x-axis displays time in the sprint. There are two lines in the chart. The ideal work remaining line connects the start date of the sprint to its end date (it crosses the x-axis to indicate all of the sprint's work is done). The actual work remaining line shows what still needs to be done. The overall idea is for this line to track the ideal line as closely as possible, meaning your estimates are sound and you are completing the sprint's work at a nice pace.

When reviewing this chart, you’ll find common problems facing agile teams. Here are some examples:

• Over- or under-committing to an amount of work
• Adding points to the sprint after it's already started
• Erratic movement in the actual work remaining line
• Overcommitments that force user stories into the next sprint

Burndown is closely related to velocity, which measures your team's pace of work.

Sprint velocity

A development team's velocity is the amount of work that is completed in each sprint. It can be used as a measure of how long it will take the team to work through its backlog. Because agile story points are as a relative estimation, teams can use them as a baseline to understand how their velocity evolves.

Here, we see a representation of a team's velocity over the course of several sprints.

Sprint retrospectives are an opportunity to discuss any issues made apparent by the sprint's burndown or the team's velocity. It's a time to reflect as a team, review your metrics, and figure out if there are opportunities to refine your process and improve together.

Here are some questions to ask during this process:

• Should we adjust our expectations of getting through the backlog?
• Do we need to tweak our estimation process?
• Should we consider adding a team member?
• Are we over- or under-committing to the amount of work in our sprints?

While these metrics provide insight into your estimation process and your team's pace of getting through your backlog, putting your items into a user story map provides another layer of context on your overall prioritization decisions.

User story mapping with agile story points

Story points are not only important in the context of sprints. Placing them in user story maps produces a visual of strategic product prioritization.

User story mapping in a nutshell 🥜

A user story map takes the items in your flat backlog and places them in the context of your user journey through your product. It's a view of all of the actions your customers take from sign-up to log-out and every major action they take in-between. Instead of having a straight list of items (backlog), the user story map organizes them by your customer's workflow.

For a more comprehensive view of this method, read our ultimate guide to user story maps.

Unflatten your Jira backlog with user story maps

With Easy Agile User Story Maps for Jira, you can see the number of agile story points assigned to each stage of your users' story map. Seeing point estimations in your customer’s journey provides product teams and stakeholders a user-focused view of prioritization.

This can help answer questions such as:

• Are we investing too much effort into one part of the journey?
• Should we smooth out the allocation of points across the journey or focus on one key problem area?
• Will the next release provide enough added value to our customers at a certain stage in their product journey?

It also provides another chance for your team to collaborate! By reviewing your story map together, you're sure to come up with more insights and iterate on your prioritization decisions.

Agile story points, combined with user story mapping, is an effective way to bring teams together to create an agreed-upon view of prioritization across a customer’s journey.

A common misunderstanding with agile software development methodologies is that they don't follow a formal process. Each team just does their own thing with little or no planning, and somehow it all works out. Well, we hate to burst your bubble, but software development doesn't work like that, agile or not. 🤯

Just like with traditional waterfall projects, agile projects follow an agile software development life cycle (SDLC). From a process perspective, the primary difference is a linear approach with waterfall and an iterative approach with agile. We'll get into this a little more later.

First, let's walk through how an agile SDLC aligns with agile principles. Then we’ll talk about the agile SDLC in both Scrum and Kanban environments.

How the agile software development life cycle supports agile principles

The Agile Manifesto states four basic values that drive improvement in software development processes. They are:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan.

Those are great values! Now raise your hand if you remember the next sentence. Anyone?? Let us refresh your memory: "That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more."

Too often, new agile software development teams are so excited to start "doing agile" they forget to fully comprehend the entire contents of the Agile Manifesto. We get it — it's hard to remember all 68 words when you're excited. 🤓

So let's take a look at that again: The items on the right have value. That doesn't sound like you should eliminate all documentation, processes, and tools. You actually need some of those things to function efficiently as a team. At the very least, you’ll need to negotiate some type of contract if you're building software for an external stakeholder and you want to get paid.

We'd love to be able to tell you exactly how many processes and how much documentation and planning you'll need, but we can't. Part of being agile is figuring things out as you go along based on your team environment and customer needs. As your agile team matures, you'll begin to inspect and adapt the processes, tools, and project documentation your team needs to work efficiently and effectively.

Now let’s look at a couple of agile software development life cycle models.

The Scrum SDLC model

Remember earlier we talked about waterfall being linear and agile being iterative? Scrum is the perfect agile framework to highlight the difference.

The traditional waterfall model of product development requires several steps before you arrive at a final product. Waterfall projects meet the Definition of Done only after the entire project is complete and in the hands of the user or stakeholder. It's linear — a straight path from start to finish.

The agile method of Scrum, on the other hand, is iterative and adaptive. Scrum teams break the deliverables into smaller pieces with shorter time frames called sprints. The intent is to deliver slices of working software with each iteration throughout the entire product development process.

Rather than a single sprint, as shown above, a full Scrum life cycle looks more like this:

For each iteration, the team plans, develops, reviews, and deploys updates to the product functionality. As stakeholders perform acceptance testing and see the working product, they may ask for new priorities or requirements. That feedback is added to the product backlog to be prioritized with other features and work by the product owner. Then, the process starts again.

Since software is always evolving, this process repeats until the product has either matured to a maintenance level or has reached the end of its useful life and is retired.

Particularly for Scrum, planning is a huge part of the SDLC. Sprint planning brings the team together to prioritize work based on the sprint goal defined by the Product Owner. The daily standup gives the team a chance to coordinate their activities for the day. The sprint review allows the Product Owner and other stakeholders to inspect and discuss deliverables produced during the sprint. And, finally, the sprint retrospective creates the opportunity for the team to reflect on the process, team dynamics, and potential improvements for future.

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Backlog refinement is also a type of planning recommended to be completed prior to a sprint planning session or at the end of a sprint. During refinement, teams can discuss the feasibility of specific functionalities or ideas for development methods to meet the acceptance criteria. They can also plan around resource availability. For example, they might consider creating extra unit tests to reduce the efforts of a tester who will be on vacation part of the next sprint.

The difference between planning in Scrum and waterfall is how much work you plan and when. Waterfall plans the entire project at the beginning. Scrum planning happens all through the development of the product, from the beginning to the end.

The Kanban agile methodology

A Kanban framework has a little different agile process. Work items aren't necessarily related to or dependent on each other. Individual team members can work asynchronously to push new code to production as soon as it's ready. Yet, Kanban is still iterative in that work items are prioritized in a backlog, and then they are developed, reviewed, and pushed to production.

New backlog items are added to the board based on the end-user feedback. The prioritization of work items is regularly reviewed and adjusted, aligning perfectly with the agile value of responding to change.

A big difference with Kanban is that instead of committing to work based on story points and team velocity, each column in the Kanban board can only hold a limited number of work items (WIP limits). This helps teams stay focused, identify bottlenecks in their process, learn where automation might be helpful, and generally understand where their process is working and where it needs a little help.

With Kanban, there is more focus on the continuous flow of work through each stage. The WIP limits help teams identify specific stages that are impeding the workflow so they can figure out the cause, fix it, and ultimately become more efficient. .

Each Kanban team can choose the columns on their board to suit their needs. The goal of Kanban is to improve the speed of work progressing through the board. Close monitoring and measuring work item movement is critical to Kanban teams.

Working with the agile software development life cycle

Whether you're working in a mature company or a startup team, there's value in an appropriate amount of documentation, tools, and process in agile software development methods. In fact, establishing an agile software development life cycle will help your team operate efficiently.

TIP! Looking for more team alignment? Try Easy Agile Programs

Remember to refer back to the Agile Manifesto and The 12 Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto if you get stuck. These values and principles don't apply only to what you're building but also to how your team works. The key concept behind agile frameworks is to inspect and adapt — including both the software and how you’re functioning as a team.

Use as much process and documentation as you need, but no more. Look at what you have today and identify key items you don’t think the team can function without. Then add or eliminate steps as you discover the best way for your team to work in an agile framework.

At Easy Agile, we're here to help you get the most out of your agile practices and to help you grow into a high-performance, agile team. 💪 If you want to learn more, check out our other blog articles on agile topics.

If you need help with Atlassian's Jira tool, we've got some great apps for you to try. Our Easy Agile Programs for Jira app can help your planning activities through alignment at scale and visualising dependencies.

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How do you feel when someone mentions “planning”? Do you look forward to the opportunity or does the thought of making a plan send you running for the hills?

Sprint planning is a crucial part of the agile sprint cycle. It helps you and your team align around common goals, and sets you up for a successful sprint. Even if planning isn’t one of your strengths, the good news is that you can practice and get better over time with the help of some good advice.

We’ve combined our best sprint planning tips into an ultimate guide to agile sprint planning, with everything you need to run efficient and effective planning meetings.

What is agile sprint planning?

Agile sprint planning is a key ceremony in the agile sprint cycle. It signifies and prepares the team for the start of the sprint. Without this planning, there is a very real risk that the team would lack focus and fail to align on what is most important.

Effective agile sprint planning has three key parts; a sprint goal, an understanding of team capacity, and a prioritized set of backlog items. Each element depends on the other for success.

The idea is to align your team around a goal for the next sprint by agreeing on a set of backlog items that are achievable within the sprint and contribute to reaching the sprint goal. Gaining focus and clarity on what you plan to achieve will help your team to work better together and to deliver on objectives.

It is best to start with an agreed sprint goal. You can then prioritize work on the specific set of backlog items that your team has the capacity to complete, and that will contribute to making your sprint goal a reality.

How sprint planning fits within the Scrum process

We’re big fans of the Scrum process, and it’s hugely popular with many software development teams. While agile sprint planning can take many forms within the different agile methodologies, for the purposes of this guide, we’ll focus on agile sprint planning within the Scrum framework.

If your team doesn’t follow Scrum don’t worry — you’ll still find value in our preparation tips, meeting guide, mistakes to avoid, and sprint planning resources.

💡 Learn more: What's the Difference Between Kanban vs. Scrum?

Scrum roles: The people

There are three main roles within a Scrum team.

1. Product Owner
2. Scrum Master
3. Development team

The Product Owner puts in the work upfront. They help prioritize the product backlog items and decide which should move to the sprint backlog. These important decisions guide the goals of the sprint and determine the tasks the team will tackle over the next sprint.

The Scrum Master acts as a guide, they lead meetings that help ensure that the Scrum framework is followed throughout the sprint to keep the team on track. The Scrum Master helps the team get the most out of the entire Scrum process and each individual Scrum ceremony.

The development team is made up of the various people who will complete the work agreed upon during sprint planning.

There are others that you might refer to during sprint planning, such as stakeholders, users, and customers. While these aren’t technically Scrum roles, they play a critical role in product development. Stakeholders should be brought into the process early and often, and customers should always be top-of-mind when making any development decisions. Some teams find User Personas to be a valuable way of keeping user value in focus.

Artifacts: What gets done

Artifacts are the things to get done — different breakdowns of what the team hopes to accomplish:

1. Product backlog
2. Sprint backlog
3. Increments

Product backlog items are the tasks the team believes they need to accomplish in order to complete a product or specific improvement of a product. It is the big master list of everything that the team thinks they need to accomplish. The product backlog is flexible and iterative, and it will evolve as the team learns more about the product, stakeholder feedback, and customer needs.

The sprint backlog is more focused than the product backlog. The product owner moves the most important backlog items from the product backlog to the sprint backlog at the beginning of each sprint based on current issues, priorities, and customer needs. The team aims to complete all of the sprint backlog items over the course of the sprint.

An increment is a concrete stepping stone toward reaching the Product Goal. An increment must be verified as usable in order to provide value, which means that any work completed cannot be considered part of an increment unless it meets the Definition of Done (an agreement among the team of what “done” means). This is a formal description of the state of the increment when it meets the quality standards required of a product. Once the work completed satisfies the agreed Definition of Done, you gain an increment.

Scrum ceremonies: Where Sprint Planning fits

There are a number of ceremonies in Scrum that occur each sprint. This is where sprint planning fits within the Scrum process.

1. Sprint planning
2. Daily scrum (or standup)
3. Sprint review
4. Sprint retrospective

💡 Learn more: Agile Ceremonies: Your Guide to the Four Stages

Sprint planning is the first Scrum ceremony — it prepares the team for the sprint. The planning session sets everything into motion, aligning the team on what’s most important for this sprint. This is when decisions are made and key backlog items are moved from the product backlog to the sprint backlog.

The second ceremony repeats every day of the sprint. Daily standups bring the team together to discuss progress and blockers that might be getting in the way. By getting the concerns out in the open early, the team can avoid the frustration of delays and ensure work continues to flow.

The final two ceremonies happen at the end of the sprint. For the sprint review, the team comes together to determine the success of the sprint based on the “Done” work completed. It’s also a chance to bring in stakeholders to gather feedback on what's been accomplished so far. The sprint review ensures customer insights are always top-of-mind, stakeholders continually see progress, and guarantees the product never strays too far from what the stakeholders are looking for.

The sprint retrospective gathers critical insights from team members about how the sprint went. What went well, what didn’t go so well, and what could be improved upon for next time? These valuable insights are what makes Scrum agile — the team is always thinking critically about the process and looking for ways to improve the work and how they work together.

We’ll talk about these ceremonies in more detail below when we discuss what happens after the sprint planning meeting.

The benefits of agile sprint planning

Agile sprint planning is a powerful meeting that should not be overlooked or underestimated. It is an opportunity to:

• Bring the whole team together and align around common goals
• Set context by starting the sprint with clear priorities
• Identify potential roadblocks before they occur
• Bring stakeholder feedback into the planning process
• Learn from previous sprints by considering sprint review and retrospective insights
• Consider team capacity and adjust accordingly to ensure that goals are achievable and that the team isn’t overcommitted in the upcoming sprint
• Account and plan for dependencies that may impact the flow of work.

How to prepare for a sprint planning meeting

We know we said that a sprint begins with sprint planning, but there are actually a few important steps you must take in order to prepare for the planning session. Unfortunately, you do need to do a little planning for the planning meeting.

Backlog refinement

Backlog grooming or refinement keeps your backlog healthy, up-to-date, and ready for sprint planning. A refined backlog will help ensure your team’s planning time is used efficiently and effectively since you won't have to waste time adding details to the backlog that could have been completed in advance before everyone came together.

The product manager should groom the backlog a few days before the sprint planning meeting to make sure it’s ready.

Tips for maintaining a healthy backlog:

• Ensure stories are in order of priority
• Prioritize items that bring the customer the most value
• Add detail to the highest-priority backlog items
• Split any user stories that are too big
• Delete any user stories that aren’t relevant anymore
• Create new user stories based on new or clearer needs
• Add items based on new stakeholder feedback
• Make adjustments based on bug fixes
• Assign more accurate estimates

💡 Learn more: Essential Checklist for Effective Backlog Refinement (and What To Avoid)

Be consistent

A consistent meeting time that’s scheduled well in advance will ensure that the entire Scrum team keeps the time slot open. Book your sprint planning meeting on the same day and at the same time every sprint so that no one forgets or double books.

Sprint planning is not a meeting to be shuffled around, delayed, or ignored — sprint planning meetings are essential to the success of every sprint. Ask your team about a specific, recurring time to meet, and ensure it works for everyone.

How to run a sprint planning meeting

While the agile method is flexible and collaborative, it isn’t chaotic; everything needs to begin with a plan.

1. Stick to a set sprint planning meeting duration

As with any kind of meeting, the team can be easily sidetracked without a timebox. After all, talking about the work that needs to be completed is often easier than actually completing it. It’s the Scrum Master’s job to keep the team on track and make sure the time limit isn’t exceeded.

Go into the sprint planning meeting well-prepared; a clear agenda and a well-refined backlog mean your team can get straight to planning.

Set a realistic timebox for the meeting and stick to it. We recommend that you avoid scheduling more than 2-3 hours for a sprint planning meeting, but as you become more skilled in sprint planning, you’ll better understand the length of time that works for you and your team.

2. Use estimates to make realistic decisions

You want your team to be as productive as possible, but overloading them can actually hinder productivity and focus. Unreasonable expectations are demotivating and overcommitted team members are more likely to make mistakes.

You need to understand the effort and time it will take to complete the goals you set out to accomplish for each sprint. Agile estimation techniques and story points provide a better understanding of team capacity, individual capacity, and what a reasonable workload looks like. Reasonable and realistic goals will help your team stay motivated and support a consistent flow of work.

3. Define clear goals and outcomes

What does the team aim to accomplish between now and the end of the sprint? Set clearly defined goals and outcomes that everyone understands. Do your goals align with what you learned from past sprints? Do they align with customer needs? Does everyone agree on what the next sprint will (roughly) look like?

Don’t assume that everyone is on the same page. Ask questions and encourage your team to speak up if anything is unclear. It’s better to clear up discrepancies or misunderstandings now rather than once the work begins.

Post your sprint goal somewhere that is easily accessible so that the team can refer back to it throughout the sprint.

💡 Learn more: How to Make the Most of Your Sprint Goals

4. Decide what it means to be ‘done’

What does “done” mean for any given backlog item, increment, product issue, or product as a whole? The team and your stakeholders need to agree on what done looks like in order to set realistic goals that meet the expectations of everyone involved.

As you set goals and choose which backlog items to complete for the next sprint, be clear about what it means to meet and complete the goals you want to accomplish.

5. Align sprint goals with product goals

Sprint goals should always align with your broader product goals. Your sprint may take a specific direction depending on current product issues, bug fixes, or customer concerns, but it’s important to keep an eye on the big picture.

Choose backlog items with care — make sure they relate to the larger product goal and that each works in sync to move development forward. Overlooking product goals in sprint planning could mean that each sprint looks more like a random selection of to-do lists that don’t connect back to customer needs, relate to product goals, or help you reach important increments. The result will feel like a lack of progress, which risks disengaging the team and other important stakeholders, like your users.

What happens next?

Now that the planning is done, you’re ready to implement your plan and complete the work. But that doesn’t mean that team members go off and work in isolation.

Daily scrum (or stand-up)

The daily scrum or stand-up is an opportunity for a collaborative agile team to maintain progress. It should be a quick check-in at the start of each day.

The team will discuss what has been done in the past 24 hours, any roadblocks they might have hit, and what the team hopes to accomplish the next day.

This critical check-in helps the team stay on the same page, helps to ensure the continued flow of work, and keeps the team on track to achieve sprint goals.

Sprint review

A sprint review meeting takes place at the end of a sprint. It's a chance for the team to review all of the “Done” issues for that period. The sprint review determines whether or not the goal for the sprint was achieved.

It’s a chance to demonstrate shippable working product increments to the team, and also an opportunity to bring in stakeholder feedback. This feedback gives you valuable insights to assess if you’re on the right track, or need to make changes in the next sprint. The sprint review is also excellent preparation for the next backlog grooming and sprint planning session.

💡 Learn more: Introduction to Sprint Reviews

Sprint retrospective

While the sprint review looks at what was accomplished and how to move forward, the retrospective examines your processes and how the team is working together.

What did you learn during the previous sprint? While retrospectives can take many forms, the goal is to discover what worked well, what didn't go so well, and what could be improved upon next time. Your team will use the insights gathered in the retrospective to improve how you work together and deliver value to customers in the future.

💡 Learn more: 5 Steps to Holding Effective Sprint Retrospectives

Agile sprint planning mistakes

It’s easy to fall into bad habits, especially as deadlines and product launch dates approach. Avoid these common agile planning mistakes to ensure your team is always making the most of the agile methodology and the Scrum process.

Unrealistic expectations

Choosing unattainable goals sets your whole team up for failure. Failing to meet your sprint goals sprint after sprint is damaging for team motivation and morale.

Use estimates to set reasonable goals as best you can. Consider team capacity, factoring in your past knowledge of how long tasks take to complete, how the team works, and potential roadblocks that could arise along the way.

Lack of context

Your team will benefit from an understanding of how the issues they’re working on fit into the bigger picture.

Depending on the tool you’re using to plan and manage your work, it can be difficult to see the contextual detail needed to plan and work with clarity. The more items you have, the more difficult and overwhelming it will be to organize and prioritize. Use tools that allow you to add context, depth, and customer insights with clean functionality to adapt your plan to the needs of your team and stakeholders.

Neglecting your backlog

We mentioned this point when we talked about what you need to do to prepare for sprint planning. It’s worth mentioning again because it’s a common mistake.

When you go into a sprint planning meeting without a well-managed backlog, you lack the clarity you need to plan effectively. Your time is valuable, and so is the time of your team, so it should be treated with care and used effectively.

A well-managed backlog is DEEP:

• Detailed appropriately
• Estimated
• Emergent
• Prioritized

💡 Learn more: The 4 Characteristics of a Good Product Backlog

Not allowing the plan to adapt

When you plan your sprint, you’ll do everything you can to prioritize the most important tasks for the length of the sprint. It’s important to try to stick to the plan as best you can, but you also need to adapt as you acquire new information.

Be ready to make changes on the fly should you hit roadblocks or acquire new information about customer needs, concerns, or product issues.

Failing to understand stakeholders

You need to understand the goals and priorities of stakeholders to be successful. Just because you’re happy with what you’ve accomplished doesn't mean your stakeholders will too.

Ensure your stakeholders are brought into your process early and often and help them understand how you work to provide them value. Gather feedback from stakeholders regularly to ensure your goals are aligned. A good time for this is during the sprint review. Just make sure those insights are transferred over to your next planning meeting.

Not choosing tools with a customer-centric approach

Successful product development delivers what the customer needs and wants. To build for your customers, it helps to use tools for planning and work management that makes it easy to keep them top-of-mind. Incorporating user story maps and customer personas into your planning helps you and your team prioritize the work that will deliver the most value first.

💡 Learn more: 10 tips for more effective user personas

Failing to incorporate retrospective insights into planning

Retrospectives are the best thing you can do to help your team work better together. During a retrospective, you're asking your team to be open and honest about how things went over the course of the sprint so that you can learn from each other.

Failing to learn from those insights means that the collective time spent in the retrospective has been wasted, and the feedback that your team has shared is devalued.

Incorporating the learnings you gain from a retrospective into your next planning session and into the next sprint, will support your team to improve every time, helping them gain work satisfaction and deliver better outcomes.

Virtual vs. in-person sprint planning

The advantages of remote work also bring challenges for collaborative planning. No matter the way your team chooses to meet, whether virtually, in person, or a combination of both, it’s important that you choose tools that meet the needs of your team.

Tips for virtual sprint planning:

• Be really prepared - communicate plans clearly ahead of time, so that everyone has clear expectations.
• Use a video conferencing tool that allows for breakout sessions
• Set up the interactive online resources you plan to use and include links in the meeting request.
• Online discussions don’t start as naturally as they would in person, so share discussion topics ahead of time, and consider preparing some ice-breakers.
• Ensure that you’ve accounted for time differences for teams that span time zones.
• Tech issues arise no matter how much advanced planning and testing you do. Always expect the unexpected.

Tips for in-person sprint planning:

• Book a meeting room with plenty of space for your team, and consider separate spaces for breakout sessions.
• Ensure that your meeting room will accommodate a shared view of your sprint plan - do you need a wall for sticky notes, or a screen to share a digital tool?
• If some of your team members work remotely, it’s difficult to involve them in the same way, so consider how this might work for your team. They won’t be able to read a whiteboard or sticky notes as easily, so a digital solution may be best.
• If you choose to plan your sprint ‘on the wall’, be sure to nominate someone to transcribe your plan into your work management tool at the end of the planning meeting.

No matter where your planning takes place, always remember to prepare your backlog ahead of time so that you can have focused and informed discussions during sprint planning.

Additional agile resources

We’re continually adding to our content library, which is filled with resources, how-to guides, product updates, and more.

📚 Add these to your list:

• Easy Agile Podcast Ep.20: The importance of the Team Retrospective
• Easy Agile Podcast Ep.18 Top qualities of an agile leader and team
• Easy Agile Podcast Ep.16 Enabling high performing agile teams with Adaptavist
• Being agile vs doing agile
• The Ultimate Guide to User Story Mapping
• The Ultimate Guide to Buyer Personas
• The Ultimate Guide to PI Planning [2022 SAFe Edition]

Using Easy Agile to improve sprint planning

Make your sprint planning smooth and effective with Easy Agile TeamRhythm. Transform your flat product backlog into a dynamic, flexible, and visual representation of the work to be done. Seamlessly integrated with Jira, with TeamRhythm you can:

• View your Jira stories, tasks, and bugs in context, aligned beneath their epics on the story map
• Drag and drop Jira issues from the backlog into a sprint
• Create new issues right on the story map
• Estimate issues on the story map, and gauge capacity with story point totals in each sprint swimlane
• Publish the sprint goal on each sprint swimlane, so it’s always top of mind
• Use filters to focus on the stories and issues that are most important now
• Group epics by a third level of hierarchy, to easily see how the work in focus contributes to the bigger picture

Easy Agile TeamRhythm also supports team retrospectives, with flexible and intuitive retrospectives boards created for every sprint. You can add retrospective items right from the sprint swimlane, so you don’t forget any important points. And you can turn retrospective action items into Jira issues that can be scheduled for future sprints, so you’re always getting better at what you do, and delivering for your customers.

Thanks for reading our ultimate agile sprint planning guide! If you have any questions about this guide, our other content, or our products, reach out to our team at any time. We love hearing from you.

We’ll continue to update this guide as we gain more agile planning insights, techniques, tools, and best practices.

Businesses of the future need to make smart decisions with agility, and today’s customers expect a value-driven approach that considers their needs every step of the way. The agile methodology offers businesses of all sizes a new way of working that focuses on adaptability, collaboration, and continuous improvement. More and more businesses are looking to make an agile transformation, but no organizational change is ever easy.

Learn more about the benefits of transitioning to an agile methodology, the challenges involved in making the switch, and what makes a successful agile transformation.

An intro to the agile methodology

The agile process is very different from traditional project management, which commonly utilizes a rigid waterfall approach. Project goals and guidelines are laid out at the beginning of a project based on the information a project manager currently has. The team sticks to the plan until the project is complete, finishing one task after the next in sequential order, like a waterfall.

Agile, on the other hand, allows for flexibility and adaptability so that any plan can grow and evolve as you acquire new information. The agile methodology first gained traction in the software development industry because it provided a dynamic approach for solving complex and ever-changing problems.

Today, the principles of agile have spread across all sorts of industries and businesses of all sizes. As the world changes at a faster pace than ever before, businesses need solutions that can adapt. Making an agile transformation improves business agility with systems and processes that ensure continuous improvement.

Another key aspect of agile is it always seeks new information. As opposed to waiting until the final project or product is complete, stakeholders and customers can give feedback every step of the way. This allows teams to make decisions based on customer needs, and it ensures customer value is continually delivered.

Some of the many benefits of agile include:

• Eliminating wasteful procedures
• Breaking free from workplace silos
• Encouraging collaboration and participation
• Involving stakeholders and customers throughout the process
• Identifying and accounting for roadblocks before they occur
• Accurately managing each team member’s workload (capacity)
• Understanding the customer’s perspective
• Using better decision-making practices
• Adapting to new information
• Continually improving internal processes

➡️ Learn more in our Agile Beginner's Guide.

Agile transformation challenges

While the benefits of agile are abundantly clear, any large organizational change is difficult to achieve. Understand what challenges you will face throughout an agile transformation so that you can best prepare leadership, team members, and stakeholders.

It takes time and patience to learn agile principles

Establishing an agile organization doesn’t happen overnight. Understand that your transformation journey will take time, dedication, and patience. It’s a monumental change that you can’t rush or push onto team members without proper education, training, and support.

Plan the rollout in stages so that there’s as little disruption to business as possible. Take the time to teach agile principles to each section of the organization. Agile and all of its practices can be tough to wrap your head around for those who are unfamiliar with it. No matter how big or small your organization is, it’s crucial that everyone understands what changes are being made, the benefits, and what steps need to be taken to adopt an agile mindset.

Change can cause reluctance and push back

People are often reluctant to change, and in some cases, change can cause fear, stress, and anxiety.

Agile requires buy-in from everyone, but with such a deep and large-scale change, many people within your organization may be reluctant to make the switch. It’s natural for people to be wary of change even though change is all around us every day. Everyone experiences different levels of excitement, hesitation, and animosity when it comes to change, so ensure you give people space to adapt to your new way of doing things.

If you are getting push back, speak to people or have team leaders schedule one-on-one chats to address concerns. Understand that change is very difficult for people to work through, and dealing with change can sometimes be similar to the grief process. The stages of the change curve involve shock and denial, anger, bargaining and blame, and confusion, all before finally arriving at acceptance.

Give your organization time to adjust while underlining the benefits of agile, how it will improve the way they work, and how leadership and business owners will support the team. The success of your agile transformation relies on everyone embracing agile adoption, no matter their role.

Cross-organizational responsibility

With an agile process, everyone is responsible for ensuring things run smoothly and targets are met. There may be team leaders, but everyone is a key piece of the puzzle. This may not be what teams in your organization are used to, as often there’s a top-down, hierarchical approach to leadership in traditional management. Higher-ups may feel they're losing power while other team members will need to be more involved than they used to be.

Under agile, traditional organizational structures evolve into a much more collaborative process. It’s not just one person in charge who’s on the line if something is stalled or doesn’t work out. Everyone in the entire organization is an integral part of the agile process. Everyone needs to be accountable for learning agile principles, participating in the transition, and offering feedback. Active participation from all business roles needs to continue in order to fully access the benefits of agile.

Agile is difficult to scale across large enterprises

Implementing an agile framework across a small business or startup is much simpler to do. For starters, the fewer people you have to train, the less it will cost and the faster the agile transformation can happen. Smaller teams are better able to adapt and work with one another to adjust to changes. Startups are also naturally more agile and often consist of younger team members who are more ready and willing to adapt.

The larger the company or enterprise, the more difficult it is to implement any change, let alone a complete business overhaul and mindset adjustment. It will take a lot longer, and there’s way more that can go wrong, but that doesn’t mean these efforts aren’t worth it. It’s even more important in large enterprises not to lose sight of your customer needs, and there are plenty of opportunities to optimize your systems.

The good news is there are systems designed to help enterprises adopt agile practices. SAFe, the Scaled Agile Framework, was designed to help scale lean and agile practices across larger organizations.

➡️ Easy Agile is a proud Scaled Agile Platform Partner. Easy Agile Programs for Jira will streamline your process and empower your team to implement the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).

Need to educate stakeholders and get them on board

Stakeholders are an essential part of the agile process. In an agile transformation, your stakeholders and customers are used to the status quo. They may be completely unfamiliar with agile, and it’s up to you to get them up to speed and convince them of the benefits and the increased customer satisfaction agile will provide.

Ensure you schedule time into your transition to answer any questions stakeholders may have. In order for agile teams to be successful, you need to involve stakeholders and customers who will provide you with invaluable feedback. This feedback will improve your processes, ensure you produce a top-notch product (or project), and make sure value is continually delivered.

Work better with agile

Agile practices are no longer reserved for product development. They are widely adopted and utilized across businesses of all shapes and sizes because business owners and managers understand the power of agile.

Despite the challenges, an agile transformation is well worth the investment. It will take time and cost you money upfront to make the change, but as 2020-2021 proved, businesses survive best when their systems are flexible and adaptable. Applied correctly, agile helps your team internalize this mindset and practice it in daily work.

Easy Agile builds Jira plugins that prioritize the customer in every step of the development process, making the lives of Scrum Masters, product owners, agile coaches, leadership teams, and devops that much easier.

We design agile apps for Jira with simple, collaborative, and flexible functionality. From team agility with Easy Agile TeamRhythm, to scaled agility with Easy Agile Programs, our apps can help your agile teams work better together, and deliver for your customers.

In an agile environment, there's no successful sprint or project without a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ agile team. They have all it takes to achieve big goals within short time frames. How? Everyone in the team knows its power and how to use it. 🧙The end result is achieving big goals without burning out.

An agile team's structure is step one to succeeding at agile development. Take the example of fire brigades. Would a fire brigade put out fires if they didn't have the right members, lieutenant, or captain? The answer is short: nope. The team structure is quintessential.

Therefore, in an agile development process, each member should know what each role involves in the team. Today, we'll go over the roles in an agile team and a few characteristics of great agile teams. But first, we should talk a bit about what an agile team is.

What’s an agile team?

In each development cycle — or sprint — of an agile project, each agile team iterates the product according to customer feedback. That increases the speed of product development 🏃 and the efficiency of that process. And in each iteration, the team releases or launches either a new or improved product functionality.

Agile teams have similar characteristics. They should be:

• Small — 5-6 members
• Focused on hitting the target on time
• Coordinated in terms of task execution
• Conscious of the contribution from each role
• Flexible to allow members to be proactive and excel themselves
• Tolerant of changing customer needs

However, the structure of agile teams depends on the agile framework. For instance, you can have a Scrum team or a Kanban team. And whereas the Scrum-based roles are well-defined, Kanban-based teams are not.

At this point, we should discuss the structure of an agile team. Head over to the next section. 👇

The skeleton of an agile team

An agile team is composed of 3️⃣ main roles. Both teams' and companies' continuous improvement needs to have the right people playing the right role. Let's go over those roles one by one.

Product Owner

The Product Owner is the player with the deepest knowledge of the product. They eat, drink, and breathe the product.

They're the supreme advocates of the product. So, when something isn't right with the product, they should know that quickly. Plus, they know exactly how the product contributes to the company's vision and goals. 🎯

Their communication skills 🎙️ must be top-notch as most of their job requires:

• Triggering the team to engage with and undertake important product developments
• Intervening to adjust that process if and when necessary
• Changing plans if absolutely necessary
• Responding to variable customer needs

In a sprint, the goal is an increment of complete work. At the end of the day, the Product Owner defines and communicates the goals and quality expectations. 📣

The top priority of Product Owners is the customer and customer needs. In that sense, a Product Owner interfaces between the customer and the rest of the team. They also get customer feedback.

The Product Owner also creates and manages the product backlog. Additionally, they review deliverables before product release or launch. 🧐

Bear in mind: The Product Owner aims at maximizing product value. And the only way to achieve that is through teamwork.

Sometimes, in tiny companies, the Product Owner may be the CEO.

Some agile events are especially important for a Product Owner:

• Sprint planning. This agile ceremony’s goal is to prepare the iteration. It’s the right time and place for the Product Owner to present the product backlog to the Team Members and answer their questions.
• Sprint review. That’s the meeting to showcase work done throughout the iteration. The Product Owner gathers feedback from external stakeholders and internal staff and answers their questions. After the review, the Product Owner might adjust the product backlog and release complete product functionality.

Scrum Master

Whereas the Product Owner is product-focused, the Scrum Master is process-focused. They're concerned with:

• Ensuring that the team follows the best agile practices for the context they're working in
• Inspecting the work progress of Team Members daily to make sure they meet the deadlines
• Giving constructive feedback to Team Members on how they're performing
• Safeguarding the time of Team Members so they can dedicate themselves to what delivers the most value
• Getting customer feedback from the Product Owner
• Making sure that the Product Owner is clear about the goal and quality expectations
• Guiding the team throughout the sprint, clarifying any doubts about tasks and their execution
• Motivating Team Members
• Remove any blockage to a Team Members' success

The Scrum Master is also the one who manages the Scrum board. This board should be up-to-date and detailed at all times.

Managers with an extensive resume of successful product development projects are good candidates for Scrum Master. They know from experience where execution can go wrong and what to do to prevent or amend that. They're also great at assessing progress. 📈

Here's how the Scrum Master takes part in agile events:

• Sprint planning. The Scrum Master facilitates this ceremony and participates in effort or story point estimations.
• Daily stand-up. During this meeting, the Scrum Master focuses on clearing all the barriers in the way of the Team Member’s success. And if the development process should change, the Scrum Master will make sure that happens.
• Sprint review. The Scrum Master prepares this event in terms of logistics. When external stakeholders attend the meeting, it must go smoothly.
• Sprint retrospective. During this ceremony, Team Members should discuss what went wrong during the iteration. The Scrum Master should encourage a spirit of sharing and transparency, not only about technical and procedural aspects but also relational issues.

Team Member

These are the ultimate doers. ⛑️ Depending on the type of product, they may be developers, UX designers, and many other kinds of professionals.

Of course, depending on their skills, their role within the team varies. Nevertheless, they're the ones accountable for implementing amazing deliverables on time.

They're usually autonomous and creative, regardless of working together as a group, supporting each other. Actually, Team Members complement each other in terms of skills and experience. ☯️

It's not uncommon to find Team Members discussing ideas on how to work faster and easier. It can be a new tool or a new technique, for instance. And a single Team Member can belong to multiple teams.

Now, what else can we tell you about ideal Team Members?

• They trust and support each other much more. At the same time, they capitalize on each other's strengths and collaborate extensively. In the end, you should notice that the work flows smoothly.
• They learn and mentor one another. One day, a Team Member might teach another, and the day after, they might learn from the member they taught. This is continuous mentoring.
• With a shared skillset, Team Members are better equipped to support each other. They're also better prepared to switch technical specialties if needed.
• Team Members question success and come up with alternative ways of pushing continuous improvement all the time. It's in their 🧬, which means that they can't help it. And that's a great trait, as it's key to continuously growing products.
• Last, Team Members push themselves to deliver the absolute best outcome from an iteration.

Note: Project stakeholders are usually not part of the agile team itself, yet they're part of the overall equation. They might be members of the C suite, marketers, or anyone requesting or reviewing work from the team.

Here are team members' roles during the following agile events:

• Sprint planning. Team Members discuss the product backlog with the Product Owner to decide on the work that they will complete during the iteration.
• Daily stand-up. Every day, Team Members briefly describe the status of their work and what they’ll do next. If they have any blockages, they should ask for help.
• Sprint review. Team Members showcase complete work.
• Sprint retrospective. During this event, Team Members should talk about problems they faced along the iteration. Those can be technical problems, problems with the way they worked or interpersonal problems.

Majestic agile teams

Winning any team challenge would be a nightmare without a carefully thought out structure. Everyone's role in an agile team should be crystal clear. That's the basis for everybody to feel that they're contributing to the goal in a valuable way.

There are no individuals in the daily life of a great agile team. They aim for group success, not individual achievements. An agile team is a group of professionals who work together to achieve sprint goals. Long story short: no teamwork, no agile team.

Want to set your agile team up for success? Check out Easy Agile Programs or Easy Agile User Story Maps.

Agile software development uses iteration to improve agile practices. More than that, development teams use agile principles to enhance self-organization. Improving the Scrum framework leads to improvements in rapid deliverables and product outcomes through iteration.

But taking on agile when you're not familiar with this approach can be challenging. Team members need a bridging tool. A bridging tool like virtual team building activities supports new learning activities. New learning promotes new ways of thinking that promote continuous improvement. Enter, Agile games!

Learn how these games can support team-building and promote problem-solving for better software development processes, and which agile games to look for.

What are agile games?

Agile games are online games that entire teams can play. These games were created for team-building activities. They help nurture effective teams by getting everyone to work towards a common goal. When agile teams put their heads together, communicate effectively, and take on new learning, everyone wins — including product owners.

Team building games drive innovation by encouraging a new perspective through team-building exercises. Agile games are fun, but they are also practical. This practical approach enables team members to adopt new behaviors.

When they play agile games, teams implement better working methodologies in software development. Agile games support team building through new learning activities and iteration.

Ultimately, agile games augment the good communication and self-organization of DevOps teams. The outcome of playing agile games is that your team members more rapidly assimilate agile software.

As agile teams improve their problem-solving skills, they reap multiple benefits that might have fallen along the wayside if they didn't use an agile methodology or these agile games.

Types of agile games

There are multiple agile games that you can use to familiarize new teams with agile software. Tastycupcakes developed many of these simple games as ice breakers, which encourage introverts to participate more fully in Scrum practices. These games also help build multitasking skills in high-pressure DevOps environments, which any agile coach will be happy to use.

Now that you have some groundwork to help you understand the thinking behind agile games, you’re probably keen to find out what types of games you can play to build teamwork.

Here are a few agile games to whet your appetite. This list of games goes from the shortest to the longest playing times, each with its own objective.

1. Chocolate Bar Game

Playing TimePlayers RequiredFormatObjectives5 mins4+Virtual & in-personTeam building activity for customer feedback and iteration

The Chocolate Bar Game is ideal for new teams who are unfamiliar with agile practices. Teamwork improves as the members play this game and learn more about iteration. Entire teams can also play this game to understand how to integrate customer feedback into their retrospectives.

You can either play the game in person or play an online game with remote teams.

The Chocolate Bar game works as a Scrum simulation. The goal is to create a chocolate bar as if you were taking instructions from the product owner. Development teams choose their product manager who can also be the product owner. The rest of the agile team are the customers.

The product owner acts as a facilitator, instructing team members to create a chocolate bar that appeals to the target market. This chocolate bar must be delicious and can be made from either dark chocolate, milk chocolate, or white chocolate.

Additionally, the team can select a range of fillings to improve their product. Toppings and other unique features also come into play as teams can include organic or gluten-free features that cater to a niche market.

After each iteration, the project manager provides the team with customer feedback. Customers can give the software development team (or chocolate bar creation team) a thumbs up for their creation if they approve of the chocolate made by the agile team. Customers can also give team members a thumbs down if they don’t like the initial stages of their chocolate bar creation.

Teamwork involves recording customers' responses for changes before the next iteration, which involves the chocolate bar fillings. The team members will continue building their chocolate bar, adding or subtracting fillings and toppings until most customers are happy with their creation.

As you can see, playing the Chocolate Bar Game involves repetitive iteration based on customer feedback, which is the objective of this agile game.

2. How to Hug

Playing TimePlayers RequiredFormatObjective5 mins (or less)3+Virtual onlyAgile team collaboration

How to Hug is a simple game for improving team collaboration, especially on a remote team. How to Hug is a great icebreaker when introducing new team members.

The Scrum team can access this agile team-building activity online. The entire team uploads their photos for display on the How to Hug virtual circle. The whole team can then vote to place their image at the circle's center.

Once the agile team has a central image, the rest of the members move their images to touch the Scrum Master's image at the circle's center.

Everyone has a chance to place their image at the center of the circle, and the team repeats the process. Although a simple game, this is one of those virtual team-building activities that involve lots of laughs.

Team members learn about each other during this virtual hugging session with collaboration and team bonding helping to create a great team.

3. Ball Point Game

Playing TimePlayers RequiredFormatObjective15 mins, split into 3-min sessions4+In-person & virtualAgile production process

The objective in playing Ball Point is for the Scrum team to navigate agile projects better. By understanding the agile production process, the team appreciates the importance of self-organization. Self-organization is the cornerstone for creating Scrum processes that work so that the entire team can engage in effective iteration.

Entire teams can play this game physically or online, using game icons on the virtual whiteboard.

The common goal is for the team to move a ball or several balls around the table. Team members must all touch the ball or balls once. After one team member touches the ball, the next person must do the same. The Scrum team earns a point if they successfully manage to move the ball around the table.

Each sprint lasts for three minutes, and the whole team must participate in five sprints to see who wins the Ball Point game. During the first sprint, the team discusses their strategy and takes notes to anticipate how many points they will score in the first minute.

The second minute involves moving the ball around the table. The Scrum team records their points and new learning in the third minute.

As the game progresses, teamwork intensifies as members add more balls in the following sprint rounds. As the team passes balls simultaneously, the game becomes more complex. More thinking is required in the iteration process as team members attempt to increase their scores. After each round, the teams engage in a brief retrospective to see what tactics they can use to score more points in the next sprint. Simple but effective!

4. Marshmallow Tower

Playing TimePlayer RequiredFormatObjectives20 mins4+In-person onlyIteration & collaboration

This is an in-person team building activity, and the team will need a few supplies:

• Dry spaghetti
• One yard of tape
• One yard of string
• Marshmallows

Team members must engage in this learning activity in groups of four people. The Scrum master hands out 20 pieces of spaghetti to each team, along with the other provisions.

The objective here is to build the highest marshmallow tower with these items. The marshmallow tower must be freestanding, and team members must place all the marshmallows at the top of the structure. Some agile games use one marshmallow, while others match the marshmallow numbers with the spaghetti sticks.

Inevitably, the tower collapses as the team places the marshmallow on top. But the goal is to simulate the Scrum retrospective through several iterations. The whole team must quickly regroup through good communication and collaboration to improve each successive round.

The concept sounds simple, but its execution is deceptively tricky. Teams need to collaborate quickly, and you’re sure to see plenty of towers collapse at the last second as teams scramble to place the marshmallow on top of their structures.

But, repeat the challenge several times, and you’ll see teams refine their approaches to collaboration and iterate on their earlier creations.

5. LEGO Flow Game

Playing TimePlayers RequiredFormatObjectives60-90 mins3-9In-person onlyScrum simulation, iteration, collaboration, workflow

The LEGO Flow game focuses on a Scrum simulation. Agile teams build a virtual LEGO Advent Calendar to detail work items in an efficient workflow. Each section of the workflow involves specific role players.

The common goal is to build the items, find the following advent calendar number (analysis) and then identify a set of LEGO pieces that must align with the supply source (suppliers).

The Scrum team builds (builders) the LEGO item as they progress through the game. Team members must engage in constant iteration to determine whether the build is correct and acceptable to the market representatives or product owner (acceptors).

Agile coaches will love using this game as it is an excellent tool to introduce new teams to Agile. LEGO Flow offers new teams the opportunity to engage in new learning activities through a simulated Scrum exercise.

LEGO Flow is an agile game that requires three rounds, each with its own objective. These objectives include batch and phase-driven processes together with time-boxed and flow-based processes.

After each of the three rounds, teamwork involves sprint retrospectives to understand what went well and what challenges the team encountered. The objective is to analyze the pros and cons of each sprint approach, demonstrating the benefits of teamwork. The game ends with the building of an overall Cumulative Flow Diagram.

This diagram allows the whole team to view its strategies and decisions, consider where they went wrong in each round of this agile game, and enhance their workflow.

If time allows, the Scrum master can question team members about what policy changes they would make for future sprints.

Agile games and team building activities

The whole team can transform their work-life with virtual team-building activities over Zoom. Having some fun while learning definitely beats using a physical whiteboard and sticky notes to introduce new teams to the Scrum framework.

Easy Agile apps are yet another innovative way to ease your new team into the Agile family. Dive into the world of Easy Agile Scrum Workflow for Jira that you can combine with LEGO Flow.

Agile estimation techniques are amazingly simple yet can sometimes be made more complex than necessary for software development teams. Having experienced the wrath of missing a deadline on previous assignments and fearing 20-hour workdays in the last weeks of a big project, it's no wonder agile team members approach estimation cautiously. How many times has your estimation come back to bite you? 😱

Designed to create a sustainable development pace and provide more realistic deadline expectations for stakeholders, agile estimation techniques use relative sizing rather than predicting real-time estimates.

Popular estimating methods in an agile development environment include story points, dot voting, a bucket system, affinity mapping, and t-shirt sizing. T-shirt sizing is a common agile estimation technique that can be very effective for long-term planning or helping your team get used to relative estimating.

We'll give you a quick review of these agile estimation techniques, but then, we'll dive into t-shirt sizing and the different ways you can use this technique.

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A quick review of some popular agile estimation techniques

If you're reading this article, you're probably already familiar with story points typically used for sprint planning, so we won't spend time rehashing these. However, if story pointing isn't a familiar agile estimation technique, here's an article defining story points and another about specific times when story points might work best on your team.

The other agile estimation techniques we'll review first are more appropriate for road mapping or release planning than sprint planning. Let's run through a quick overview of affinity mapping, bucket systems, and dot voting.

Affinity mapping

In product development, “affinity” refers to similar backlog items, either in terms of types of code, areas of the product, or effort. For affinity mapping within agile estimation, we're talking about grouping work items of similar size. Go figure.

To perform an affinity mapping exercise, the facilitator puts the backlog items on individual sticky notes and attach them to a wall. On another wall, identify one side as "Smaller" and the other side as "Larger." Then, ask the Scrum team to silently move the items from the backlog wall to the sizing wall where they fit based on the item's perceived size, or how long the team will likely take to complete it.

The key to this technique is to move quickly, don't overthink it, and don't discuss it. Once all the items are placed on the wall, team members can discuss which items are potentially sized incorrectly. After a brief discussion, the team can choose whether to move the items.

After everyone is satisfied with the placement, the Product Owner can imagine vertical lines on the wall dividing the backlog into sections and easily assign a t-shirt size to each item and place it on a roadmap.

Bucket systems

A bucket system is similar to affinity mapping, except it expects you to get a little more specific. It uses the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 13, 20, 30, 50, 100, and 200 as relative sizes, and team members put all the backlog items in one of the buckets. Again, this is done silently, but the team is free to discuss any items they feel have been placed in the wrong bucket at the end.

Dot voting

Another way agile development teams can estimate is dot voting. Yeah, it's really about putting dot stickers on note cards or sticky notes. But, this is an interesting technique that brings in concepts other than relative size.

During dot voting, team members receive five dots. Those dots relate to what each team member thinks is the most critical work in the backlog. The importance could come from a technical reason like reworking a database to scale before the next busy season or business value like the most requested new functionality from customer feedback.

Backlog items are then added to the roadmap based on value (the number of dots) and then can be sized for effort using another technique.

As you can see, these agile estimation techniques are especially useful if you have a large backlog that makes you feel like you're herding cats every time you try to organize it. Typically, these estimating processes are used at the beginning of a project, significant feature build, or annual or semi-annual roadmap planning.

Now let's take that deep dive into t-shirt sizing.

T-Shirt sizing for product backlog items

Ahhhh, the t-shirt size. XS, S, M, L, XL — how can that be intimidating? It's so simple and yet so flexible. Mostly used for roadmap and release planning, t-shirt sizing is nothing more than a guesstimate at effort based on the information available at the time of the estimate. That's why it's so basic. It's a guesstimate, and that's ok. 👌

You might be wondering why t-shirt sizing is essential if it's such a ballpark figure and relative estimation. It's helpful for long term planning. Yep, you heard it right. Agile teams plan. If you take a quick look at the Agile Manifesto, the fourth value of agile development teams is:

“Responding to change over following a plan.”

A team can't respond to change if they were never following a plan from the start. Long-term agile planning lets you know if you're setting realistic expectations with stakeholders for the next 6 to 12 months. Or if the company's needs change or existing resources won't suffice and you need to spin up an additional team. T-shirt estimates also help determine how many iterations need to be included in each release to deliver the most value to end-users.

Agile estimation starts as a t-shirt size for planning future releases, then is broken down into story points for sprint planning, and can even be broken down further into hours for sprint execution. Regardless, the main point is this: The closer the work gets to a developer's keyboard, the smaller and easier it is to estimate accurately. The t-shirt size is furthest away from execution, so the estimation isn’t expected to be perfect.

T-Shirt sizing is fast

If you've ever inherited a backlog of hundreds of work items and then received the question "How long will it take to finish all that?" you're not alone. Your first attempt to avoid answering that impossible question might be a good backlog cleansing. Let's say you delete any work item over six months old. I mean, hey, if it's been in the product backlog that long, maybe it's not really that important.

But if you've joined a team just getting started with agile methodologies, you'll probably be stuck with a large backlog and product executives expecting an old-fashioned estimate.

T-shirt sizing comes in handy here. Because it's understood that you're delivering gut-level estimations, your team can power through a super-sized backlog in no time. To ensure team members aren't over-thinking each item during t-shirt sizing exercises, restrict decision-making to 30 seconds per item.

The result is a somewhat organized backlog with relative estimates. The product owner and stakeholders can use that information to decide what to move forward within the short term.

How does t-shirt sizing work?

There are a couple of different ways you can tackle t-shirt sizing depending on your backlog size. For a small number of items, planning poker works great — just ask your Scrum Master to swap out the Fibonacci sequence number cards for t-shirt size letters.

This technique also works well if you need to estimate a subset of a more extensive backlog.

You'll probably want to use a process similar to affinity mapping and bucket systems for large backlogs. Everyone works independently to assign sizing and then discusses conflicts at the end. This technique allows even small teams to get through a large backlog relatively quickly.

Finally, some new agile teams might want to start their estimating journey using t-shirt sizes for user stories and sprint planning. Mike Cohn, one of the founders of Scrum Alliance and an authority on agile processes, suggests that if teams go with that approach, they assign a story point value to each t-shirt size. This technique helps teams get comfortable with story points within the safety net of t-shirt size estimating.

Practice makes perfect with agile estimation techniques

Regardless of the type of agile project you're working on or the estimation process you choose, the more you practice, the quicker your team will become master estimators. 👑 We recommend trying a couple of different methods to see which one feels most comfortable for your team.

One last thing, remember that story point estimates are best for sprint planning. Affinity mapping, bucket systems, dot planning, and T-shirt sizing are better for roadmap and release planning.

If you need help moving your planning off the wall and into Jira, you should try

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Don't forget to check out our other blog articles to help your team on their agile journey.

Brainstorming as a group can generate a ton of ideas, but what do you do with all of those ideas after you’ve come up with them? How do you organize an entire team’s ideas? How do you narrow down the best solution? And how do you document the ideation session so you don’t lose any data? Never fear — affinity mapping is here. 🗺

Affinity mapping is an agile technique that helps teams reach a consensus after a brainstorming session, usability testing, or user research survey. It’s most helpful when you have a large amount of data to sort and when you need to distill all of that data into specific solutions the whole team agrees on.

Continue reading to learn more about affinity mapping, including when to use the maps, the benefits of affinity maps, and how to run an affinity mapping session.

What is affinity mapping?

Affinity mapping is an agile technique used to solve problems by distilling many ideas into the best solution or path forward. The exercise is designed to quickly get teams on the same page about a problem that needs to be solved.

Typically, affinity mapping occurs after a large group brainstorming exercise during which many team members and sometimes clients or stakeholders have given their input.

All of the team's ideas are added to sticky notes, which are organized somewhere for everyone to see. The team groups similar solutions until natural relationships form. Everyone involved in the session is able to see various paths forward, which can be discussed and narrowed down to the best solution.

Try affinity mapping whenever:

• A problem needs to be solved as a group
• The team has struggled to reach a consensus
• There’s an issue or problem that’s too complex or tough to grasp
• You need to reach one solution that everyone on the team will buy into
• Large amounts of data need to be sorted
• Data or survey results need to be analyzed
• A project or product is in a state of chaos

The activity sparks initial discussion on problems that are best solved by many minds coming together and agreeing on a course of action. Affinity diagramming is typically used in user experience design, UX research, and design thinking industries, but the practice can be implemented by any team that wants to distill information.

The benefits of affinity mapping

Affinity mapping provides a number of benefits for teams that need to solve a problem, sort large amounts of data, or reach a mutual consensus.

Affinity mapping helps teams:

• Prioritize what’s most important
• Unlock ideas that hadn’t been considered before
• Discover the “real” problem
• Work together to solve a problem (team building)
• Empathize with users or customers on common pain points
• Utilize multiple minds
• Reach a consensus together
• Make decisions without using up too much of anyone’s time
• Establish a safe environment to flesh out touchy or conflict-fueled discussions
• Facilitate equal participation, even from those who speak up less
• Involve stakeholders and clients in the discussion and agile process

The step-by-step process for affinity mapping

You can use affinity diagrams for a variety of reasons. They are commonly used to sort a large number of ideas after a brainstorming session or to make sense of data after usability testing, user interviews, or other user research.

Brainstorm ideas or collect data

The first step (or preemptive step) to affinity mapping is collecting your data points. If you are trying to solve a problem or make sense of a project, this will involve running a brainstorming session as a group. Make sure everyone starts solo when brainstorming to ensure no one is influenced by other people’s ideas before they’ve come up with their own.

It can help to frame whatever problem you are trying to solve into a “how might we” statement. For example, “how might we get younger audiences to use our product” or “how might we double last year’s sales goals.”

If you’re working with research findings for your session, you instead need to transcribe all of the qualitative data so that it can be organized and sorted during the mapping session.

Post the ideas or data for everyone to see

Take all of the ideas everyone came up with and put them on individual index cards, or use a separate sticky to represent each point on a whiteboard or wall. It’s important the surface you choose is visible to everyone.

Begin grouping data

As you add each point to the main wall, sort them into related groups. Organize the clusters naturally, combining or separating clusters as branching ideas form.

Don’t discard any duplicate thoughts, as these will help you visualize how popular an idea is. Continue to add to the board until every sticky note or card has a reasonable place on the visible wall.

Use a “parking lot” for ideas you can't sort

Create an area along the side of your wall called a “parking lot” for any ideas that don’t fit into a cluster. As you continue to build and sort the board of ideas, you may find reasonable spots for them.

Assess and name each category

Assess your clusters. Are there any clusters too similar to one another that could be joined together to create a larger group? Are there any clusters with too many branching ideas that should be separated into smaller groups?

Once you’ve completed your sorting and thematic analysis, it’s time to name each category. Don’t take too much time on this part. The category name just needs to generally describe the ideas inside the cluster. If you need to, vote on the best name to ensure too much time isn’t spent debating.

Vote and make decisions

If you’re analyzing a collection of data, you can now document the findings. What categories have the most data points? What connections do you see between clusters? What observations can you make from common themes?

Before dismantling the map, ensure you document everything with photographs so you can go back to the affinity map at any time to gather more insights.

If you’ve arranged ideas from a brainstorming session, it’s time to discuss the possible solutions and vote on the best option. Placing each solution category on an impact effort matrix helps the team visualize where their effort would be best spent. You can also work through different forms of voting, such as dot voting or the hundred dollar test.

Affinity mapping for remote teams

Many of the teams and businesses we work with are remote, which means getting into one room to collaborate around a bunch of Post-its isn’t an option. Luckily, there are plenty of online tools that make affinity mapping possible for remote teams.

You can create an affinity diagram template and follow nearly all of the same steps for affinity mapping by using online collaborative design thinking tools like Mural.

Affinity mapping brings teams together for a collaborative experience. It’s a simple process that ends with a consensus around the best solution or path forward. It’s especially helpful for complex problems, bottlenecks, or times when the team needs to get on the same page.

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We’re here to talk about agile, and we don’t mean your abilities on a sports field or in a yoga studio. If you’re new to agile as a methodology, there’s a lot to learn, but the basics are simple. Agile 101 begins with understanding that agile can be applied to anything. You can use agile practices to improve your personal task management, optimize workplace efficiency, or align software teams around product development.

No matter the application, the concepts remain the same: Agile creates a continuous improvement mindset that values flexibility, adaptability, collaboration, and efficiency.

In this post, we’ll cover agile 101 basics, the benefits of agile, popular agile methodologies, and common mistakes to avoid.

Agile 101: How it compares to traditional project management

The concept of Agile has evolved, but it really took off and became popularized in software development. In recent years, the methods and guiding principles of Agile have expanded into a variety of industries that want to emphasize continuous improvement and growth.

How does agile compare to traditional project management? In short: It doesn’t. Agile is just the opposite. One of our favorite ways to compare the agile approach to classical project management is to think of them as jazz vs. classical music.

In classical music, a conductor brings a previously composed and organized piece of music to an orchestra. Then, they dictate what happens and when. This is very much the same as traditional project management, where the project manager brings a plan they have conceived on their own to their team and then proceeds to tell the team how to carry it out. The project manager lays out the steps and expects the team to follow them to the letter (or note). 🎼

Jazz, on the other hand, is collaborative. Each band member feeds off of the other, creating music in a flexible and iterative process — just like the agile process. The band, like an agile team, experiments together and freely creates music in the moment. Each iteration is a little bit different, and hopefully better, than the one that preceded it. 🎷

Project management doesn’t allow for this kind of flexibility. It relies on following a strict sequential order. Each project element must be completed before moving on to the next. Just like a waterfall, the flow of work remains the same from project to project.

Agile is non-linear. It focuses on flexibility, collaboration between team members, and delivering consistent value to stakeholders. With each iteration comes new, actionable insights into what’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to change. It’s a multidimensional way of working that removes the bottlenecks inherent in traditional project management.

Agile 101: The benefits of agile

There are many benefits to agile practices for software development projects, as well as many other industries. The general concepts of agile can be applied to all sorts of situations, and its versatility means it will evolve with the needs of your team.

Think of it as a methodology you can apply to any of your business processes for increased collaboration, optimized efficiency, and continuous improvement.

Agile helps teams and businesses:

• Work at optimal efficiency by eliminating waste
• Make more effective decisions
• Adjust as new information comes in or is discovered
• Continually meet stakeholder deliverable deadlines
• Focus on adding value for stakeholders and customers
• Understand the customer journey
• Build superior products
• Understand capacity to ensure no one over or under commits to work
• Identify roadblocks before they occur
• Spot bottlenecks that could delay work
• Collaborate and work better together
• Adapt with technological, economic, and cultural changes
• Prepare for the unexpected
• Establish processes tailored to your needs
• Improve morale and happiness
• Develop a continuous improvement mindset

Agile 101: Popular methodologies

Now that you have a better understanding of agile 101 basics and the benefits of agile, let’s discuss some of the most popular agile methodologies.

Scrum

Scrum is extremely popular in agile software development. It’s a fairly complicated process for those who are unfamiliar with it, but the basics revolve around recurring sprints that each focus on completing a set amount of work.

A Scrum is one sprint lasting 2-4 weeks. At the beginning of the sprint, the product owner decides which task will move from the main list (product backlog) to the sprint to-do list (sprint backlog). The development team, led by a Scrum Master who understands the Scrum process, works to complete the sprint backlog in the allocated time.

The Scrum team meets for daily Scrums or stand-ups that ensure everyone is on the page about possible roadblocks and what work is to be completed next. This process repeats until a product is complete or stakeholders are fully satisfied. At the end of the sprint, a retrospective is held to help the team understand what went well and what they can improve upon.

Kanban

Kanban is a fairly simple agile process that is often partially utilized within other agile methods, such as Scrum. It’s a task management tool designed to optimize efficiency by visualizing all of the required work and limiting works in progress. A Kanban workflow visually organizes tasks on Kanban boards so that work items can move forward smoothly, even as changes and adjustments are made along the way.

In its simplest form, a Kanban board is three columns (To-Do, Doing, and Done) that allow work to freely flow from one phase to the next. Trello is an example of an online Kanban board.

Kanban boards should be placed in an area of the office that’s visible to the entire team. For virtual teams, this may look like an online resource that everyone can access. This helps everyone from the top down get on the same page about action items. If anyone is wondering what’s the most important task of the day, they simply need to check the Kanban board.

Lean

Lean, along with the five lean principles, originally created by Toyota, is a guiding mindset that helps teams work more productively, efficiently, and effectively. It can be applied to various agile and software development methodologies.

Lean software development is all about improving efficiency by eliminating waste, such as reducing tasks and activities that don’t add value. It provides a clear way to scale agile practices across large or growing organizations.

Extreme programming

Extreme programming (XP) is an agile approach centered around improving software quality and responsiveness while evolving with customer requirements. The ultimate goal of extreme programming is producing high-quality results throughout every aspect of the work, not just the final product.

XP decision-making is based on five values: communication, simplicity, feedback, courage, and respect. XP’s specifics won’t apply to all situations, but the general framework can provide value to any team.

Agile 101: Best practices and mistakes to avoid

To get you started, here are our list of best practices and common agile mistakes.

Basic agile 101 best practices:

✅ See failures as a learning opportunity.

✅ Embrace change and improve your adaptability skills.

✅ Improve efficiency by eliminating tasks and activities that don’t provide value.

✅ Continually improve upon your processes.

✅ Allow plans to live, breathe, and adapt.

✅ Use retrospectives to listen, learn, and improve.

✅ Prioritize the customer journey, and make decisions based on customer needs.

✅ Utilize agile tools and resources.

Common agile mistakes:

❌ Not adapting as new information is revealed or obtained.

❌ Not being on the same page as stakeholders.

❌ Not trusting the team to ideate and develop without supervision.

❌ Sitting down for sprint planning without enough information.

❌ Not incorporating retrospective insights in the following planning session.

❌ Skipping a retrospective due to lack of time or resources.

❌ Too much testing, or not knowing when the project is actually “done.”

❌ Choosing tools that don’t take a customer-centric approach.

Agile made easy

Whether you apply agile principles to an agile task management system like a personal Kanban board or use agile to develop working software, the essence is the same. In basic terms, agile is about continuous improvement. It’s a methodology, mindset, and way of viewing the world. Agile is flexible, adaptive, collaborative, and value-driven.

Easy Agile helps teams work better with agile. We design agile apps for Jira with simple, collaborative, and flexible functionality. From team agility with Easy Agile TeamRhythm, to scaled agility with Easy Agile Programs, our apps can help your agile teams work better together, and deliver for your customers.

Book a 1:1 demo to learn more about our suite of Jira tools, or contact our team if you have additional questions. We offer a free, 30-day trial, so you can try out our products before making a commitment.

If you’re like most companies, you probably already have user personas that you use in your software development teams.

Or customer personas that you use in your marketing and sales teams. Personas are used for understanding the user, creating user stories, prioritizing issues, and creating targeted marketing collateral.

But most teams still aren’t using personas to their fullest extent. So, we’ve put together our top 10 tips to help you get maximum value from your personas 👇

1. Know how you’ll use them

Before you create your personas, it’s a good idea to get clear on why they’re so important and how you’re going to use them. Otherwise, some team members (not you, of course) might be tempted to skim through the process so they can get back to the real work.

User personas aren’t just a sales or marketing thing - everyone should know who the customer is so they can do a better job of serving them.

Your personas will give you key demographic and psychographic information, how users behave, and what their pain points/goals/objectives are. Plus other factors that influence how they use your product, whether they’re ready to buy (or not), and what will make them sign up (and stick around).

👀 Oh and if you’re part of a cross-functional, agile team, you’ll get even more value from your user personas. Your dev team can use them to identify what customers need and want (so they can prioritize and deliver these solutions). Plus, agile user personas create a face for your user stories so your team can more easily understand who your customers are and empathize with them.

It’s much easier to create something for Johnny Biggles who is a 38yo farmer in East Ireland than it is to create something for an undefined user with equally undefined needs.

Read more in our previous blog about why you need customer personas in agile software development.

2. User, not buyer focused

Your marketing team might’ve created customer personas in the past to talk about user roles (aka job titles) or market segments (aka buyer demographics)… but these aren’t necessarily the same tools as user personas.

And in fact, they probably shouldn’t be “owned” by your marketing team, but by your product owner - although it’s ideal if your whole team can collaborate on them.

Your personas are made-up profiles that describe current and future users of your product (who aren’t necessarily the buyers or decision makers).

Your user personas should have names (that feel like they fit the person), ages (not an age range), and locations (not a general area).

You should have a persona for each category of users that you’d want to uniquely experience the product. In other words, each of your user personas should have specific preferences, goals, and expectations.

3. Do your research

If you haven’t already, do some research on your audience and market using stakeholder interviews, surveys, industry reports, and analytics tools so you know who your users are.

Ask questions to determine demographics, geographics, psychographics, and behaviours. You should start to see patterns emerge which will help you create 3-5 personas that represent the majority of your users.

4. Use a template

Don’t be tempted to get all creative with your user personas.

In this previous blog, we share an example user persona template if you want some inspiration. ✨

5. Keep it relevant

Once you get started with writing your user personas, you might find yourself filling up pages and pages of information, especially if you discover lots of interesting things about your users. But try to rein yourself in a bit and keep your personas to 1 page or less so they’re quick and easy to read.

Focus on attributes that are relevant to understanding how your users interact with your product, and not necessarily every aspect of their daily lives.

That’s why you’ll rarely see things like “Betty likes to eat porridge for breakfast” and “John enjoys long sunset walks at the beach”. Although these could be relevant insights for your product - no judgement!

If in doubt, remember the purpose of your user personas: they should help you back up your decisions with a legitimate, specific need and scenario.

You should have just enough relevant information to be able to answer “what would [user persona name] do?”

6. Keep it real

Your user personas are made up, but they should still feel like real people. Here are some tips to keep them real:

• Cut out any stereotypes and jargon
• Don’t overdo the demography details
• Focus on details that are most relevant to using your product
• Don’t use images that look like stock images
• Base the info on what you know about real people
• Try to resist telling a story that fits the products and features YOU want to build and instead focus on real goals and challenges

7. Focus on your best customers

You can’t target everyone, so don’t try to. So, limit yourself to writing anywhere from 3-5 user personas. These personas should represent your best customers and key user groups.

They won’t include everyone and they shouldn’t. That’s because if you have too many user personas, your team will find it much harder to prioritize user stories and target their marketing efforts 🎯

Less is more (effective).

8. Incorporate them into your processes

Many organizations invest time in creating user personas only to have them collect virtual cobwebs in a Google Drive somewhere 🕸️But user personas work best when used regularly and incorporated into daily/weekly processes.

For example, your marketing team might pick a persona to focus their content efforts on for the week. Your sales team might glance at the objections listed on each of your key personas to help guide calls with potential customers.

Or your agile team might bring out the user personas to help with user story mapping so they can write more realistic user stories 👌

9. Give access to your whole team

User personas are useful for all your team members - from marketing and sales to design and development. So, make sure everyone knows they exist and where to find them.

If your team is partly remote/distributed, make sure your personas are accessible in the cloud. Or better yet...

10. Link them to your project management tool

If you’re using a project management tool like Jira, you should take a look at Easy Agile Personas for Jira. This tool allows you to capture your user persona details in the same place as your user stories, backlog, and tasks.

Which means your team enjoys:

• Better alignment on who the users are and what they need
• Extra context for each task
• The ability to prioritize the backlog and deliver on what’s most valuable to users
• A tailored view of the current issues and stories linked to each of your user personas
• All the info they need, all in one place

Bonus tip: let your user personas evolve

Just like Pokemon, your personas need to level up and evolve, too 🔥 That way, you’ll be better equipped for battle… or to deliver a well-loved product and marketing that hits the mark every time. Either way 🤷

But times change, technology changes, and so do your users. That means your user personas need to change, too. So, if you’ve already got some customer/user personas, take this chance to review them, update them, and make sure they’re being used effectively by your team. And if your team uses Jira, make sure you sign up for a free trial of Easy Agile Personas to add them to your Jira board.

Got questions about user personas or just wanna hang out with us? We’d love to hear from you over on Twitter or LinkedIn.

PI planning is a powerful event that helps teams align around goals, business objectives, and customer needs. Traditionally, this quarterly gathering brought together large teams of more than 100 people, including software developers and stakeholders, to complete essential planning.

However, in our new world of work, virtual PI planning has become necessary. This shift presents its own set of challenges, such as implementing virtual tools, overcoming time zone differences, and coordinating employees who are accustomed to working on their own schedules. Not to mention the occasional tech glitches that may arise.

In this blog, we will explore the information technology industry as an example and delve into how they can benefit from PI planning. Discover the critical benefits of PI planning and provide strategies for successfully conducting hybrid PI planning. Whether you're a newcomer or an experienced master in agile practices, there's always room for improvement in optimizing your systems.

What is PI planning?

PI planning, or Big Room Planning planning, is typically a two-day event that brings together all of the teams on an agile release train, including product owners, facilitators, developers, and outside stakeholders. It’s traditionally a face-to-face planning session that, for some teams, puts more than 100 people in the same room to align on goals, business objectives, and an overall direction moving forward.

It’s part of a scaled agile framework that implements agile practices for enterprises. Agile teams use repeated workflows for informed planning, efficient execution, and continual delivery of stakeholder value.

Although PI planning events often take place in person, the increased number of remote teams has forced businesses to find hybrid solutions for this large-scale event.

Equip your remote, distributed or co-located teams for success with a digital tool for PI Planning.

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The benefits PI planning

Whether PI planning occurs in-person, online, or hybrid, this two-day gathering provides a number of critical benefits. It’s an integral part of SAFe that keeps businesses aligned on common goals and objectives, and it sets various teams on a strong path for upcoming sprints.

The PI planning event can bring numerous benefits. Here's 5 potential advantages for the information technology (IT) industry:

• Collaborative Environment: The PI Planning event provides a space where IT professionals from various teams and departments can come together to collaborate, brainstorm, and share ideas in a face-to-face setting.
• Cross-Functional Communication: IT often involves multiple departments (development, operations, support, etc.). The PI Planning event facilitates better communication and alignment between these departments, leading to more cohesive strategies.
• Focused Decision-Making: A dedicated event allows for focused discussions and decisions, reducing distractions that might arise in regular office settings.
• Rapid Problem Resolution: Complex IT challenges can be addressed more efficiently when all relevant stakeholders are physically present to discuss issues and propose solutions.
• Knowledge Sharing: Experts from different IT domains can share their expertise, leading to increased learning and skill development across the organization.

8 PI planning strategies

In order to ensure a successful PI Planning event you need to have some strategies in place to help teams effectively collaborate and align their efforts, whether they are co-located or working remotely. Here are some strategies to consider:

1. Set the date and agenda early

It is imperative to schedule the session well in advance, allowing team members to allocate the necessary time and prioritize their participation amidst their busy schedules. It is of utmost importance to encourage widespread participation in this planning session.

Providing a comprehensive agenda for the event is crucial for ensuring effective collaboration and alignment within teams. The agenda serves as a roadmap, guiding participants through the planning session and helping them prioritize their contributions.

By setting a clear agenda, teams can establish a shared understanding of the objectives, topics, and activities to be covered during the PI Planning session.

2. Set Clear Objectives

Before the PI Planning event, establish clear objectives and goals that you want to achieve. Communicate these objectives to all participants so that everyone is aligned and understands what needs to be accomplished during the event. This will help keep the focus on the desired outcomes and ensure a successful planning session.

3. Choose stellar tools that aid collaboration

Utilise visual tools to encourage active participation and facilitate visual representation of ideas and plans. Choosing the right tools can make a significant difference in enhancing productivity and promoting effective teamwork. The chosen tools should aid in organizing and structuring information, making it easier for team members to comprehend the work and dependencies, allowing the teams to collaborate in real time. It is essential to choose visual collaboration tools that are user-friendly, intuitive, and accessible to all team members.

Virtual whiteboards, such as Miro, are also a huge asset, as well as tools designed for PI Planning. If your team uses Jira, we recommend Easy Agile Programs. It’s a complete solution designed for distributed, remote, or face-to-face PI Planning.

4. Go in with a refined backlog

Do as much advance planning as you can so you can make the most of this planning event. Ensure the backlog is thoroughly refined and ready to go so no time is wasted during PI planning.

It’s a big commitment for so many people available at once, and it uses up a lot of working hours. Plus, your stakeholders are setting aside time for this meeting. A refined backlog that’s organized with appropriate details will keep everything running as smoothly as possible.

5. Don’t have people waiting around

Do all you can to ensure there’s a clear schedule that doesn’t leave anyone hanging around. That last thing you want is to waste people’s time. Ensure people know “where” they need to be and when. Triple-check that the appropriate people are assigned to virtual meetings, breakouts, and tasks. Advance planning and transparency will help ensure no one is left waiting or underutilized.

6. Utilize team breakouts

It’s unrealistic to have 100+ people working together in the same room or virtual space for two days straight. Can you imagine? 🤯

Breakout meetings composed of smaller groups are essential to a productive and effective planning event. Once again, it all comes down to advance planning. Your game plan doesn’t need to be completely rigid, but you do need a clear schedule, and leaders need to effectively organize breakout groups in whatever way makes the most sense for your team and desired planning outcomes.

TIP: Your tools can come in handy here, set up dedicated team planning boards to help facilitate conversations and capture the work. Below is an example of a Team Planning Board in Easy Agile Programs. What you are seeing is an example of how a team can create issues on their board and create any dependencies they might have in their team and between teams.

7. Expect the unexpected and roll with the punches (aka tech issues)

As with any large-scale meeting, nothing is going to run perfectly. You are bound to run into hiccups and tech issues. Rolling with the punches is the best you can do.

Test technology in advance — schedule time when your main speakers can do a test call with you. Go over requirements, and have them silence notifications and devices in advance.

Make sure everyone has the information they need to operate their tools and tech effectively, and as the leader of the event or a breakout session, have tech contingencies in place. What happens if your conferencing tool stops working? Do you have a backup? What if their Wi-Fi slows or goes down? Can they switch to a hotspot or can someone else take over?

8. Hold a retrospective so you can improve the next time around

Retrospectives ensure your processes continually improve. They provide an opportunity for feedback that will help make the next big planning meeting better.

Make sure you collect feedback and hear people out after the session. Ask people what they thought went well, what didn’t go so well, and what could be improved for next time. Use this information to improve the process for your next big room planning meeting.

Explore Easy Agile TeamRhythm

By following these strategies, you can facilitate effective collaboration and alignment within your teams during the PI Planning event.

PI planning with Easy Agile

No matter the size of your team, effective planning begins with using the right tools. Easy Agile builds products specifically designed for Jira users to help agile teams plan efficiently and effectively.

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Easy Agile Programs for Jira is ideal for helping remote or distributed teams effectively manage programs with streamlined visibility to deliver alignment at scale. Set PI objectives, visualize dependencies, and align the entire team with a simple-to-use and virtually accessible tool.

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There are many good reasons why so many scrum and agile teams are adopting story points.

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1. Fast estimation

User story points allow you to quickly estimate the work involved in each item on your backlog, and how much work you can get done in a sprint or release.

2. Build consensus and collaboration

If one team member estimates 5 story points, but another estimates 12, it's an opportunity for the team to discuss what work is involved.

One person may have a more efficient way of doing things, or the other person may have a better understanding of the steps involved in doing the work. This discussion will help them share ideas, create a common understanding, build consensus, and create a more accurate estimation.

Compare this to estimating time. If you ask each team member to estimate the amount of time involved in a task, you’ll get 5+ different answers. Timing depends on experience and understanding. But most team members will agree on the effort required to complete a story, which means you can reach a consensus and move on with your story mapping or sprint planning much more quickly.

3. No artificial deadlines

Estimating time instead of story points forces you to come up with an artificial deadline, which can create unnecessary pressure (and probably won't be all that accurate).

Story points more accurately and practically reflect reality. In most cases, there is no set deadline - only ensuring tasks are done efficiently and in the right order of prioritization.

4. Better planning and forecasting

Story points can help you plan better in advance. For example, if you know that Johnny is going on holiday for a week, you can adjust your sprint so that your team doesn't over-commit. Or you can find another way to increase your capacity, like bringing on another team member or reducing scope.

5. Zoom in on the details

Story points force your team to think through the work involved in an upcoming sprint, and consider what's realistic. It's a time for your details-oriented team members to shine - and time for your big-picture thinkers to understand what needs to happen to bring their plans to life.

6. Get commitment

When your team knows they can achieve what's planned and they’re confident in their velocity, it's easier to get them to commit to the work and follow through confidently.

7. Be more adaptable

If the team size changes (maybe you add a new member or someone moves to another role), you have a built-in system to update your velocity (i.e. how many stories you can complete in a sprint) and adapt your workload accordingly.

8. Be just accurate enough

Story points help you estimate what your team can get done in a given amount of time. This kind of accuracy means smoother releases that go to plan - and is especially valuable when you have multiple teams with multiple dependencies.

But at the same time, story pointing makes it clear that your work is only an estimation, and you're not committing to getting X done in Y amount of hours. You won't know how long something will take until you do it - there are nearly always unexpected things that pop up.

Other methods might give you more precise timing, but it’s not practical to spend 30 minutes discussing the work that goes into every single story on your backlog. It’s much more practical to assign an “accurate enough” number, plan your sprint, and get to work.

9. Better capacity planning

You might not be able to fit all your top priorities into a release, especially if they’re complex, risky, or time-consuming. But story points can help you easily identify one or two smaller stories to fill your capacity every sprint or release.

Using story points also encourages you to find ways to increase your team’s capacity (rather than working longer hours). If you can mitigate risk, find ways to reduce effort, and bring the right people in the room to make complex tasks more simple… you’ll be able to get through more stories, more quickly.

10. Measure and improve performance

Story points can help you measure and improve performance by asking your team questions like:

• Did you complete all the work assigned during the sprint?
• Is your velocity going up or down over time, as you get better at agile?
• Was your story points estimate accurate?
• If not, how could you optimize your team's performance and ensure you work or plan better together?

Does everything in your backlog need user story points?

Some teams don't assign story points to every item in their backlog. They might just assign them to the user stories. They might avoid assigning user story points to bugs that come up during the sprint, particularly if they're not related to any of the stories originally mapped to the sprint. This makes sense since it's often tricky to estimate a bug - some take very little effort to resolve, while others are quite complex.

Your backlog might also include smaller jobs or technical tasks that would take anywhere from a few minutes or a few hours to complete. These tasks may not have story points assigned if they require very little effort.

But it’s important to note that these tasks still matter. They still deliver value back to the user. And they're essential as part of your goal: to deliver working software. But you can't always plan for them or estimate them ahead of time.

So, how do you incorporate them into your workflow?

You might need to discuss some different ideas and strategies with your team.

For example, you could set aside a buffer in your capacity to allow for an average amount of bugs and other jobs that don’t get story-pointed. That way, you can stay on track with the stories you have assigned to the sprint, while getting other items ticked off the list.

Either way, if your team is working on tasks that don’t have story points, you have to consider the impact on capacity. You will need to adapt, assess whether the sprint goal is still doable, and adjust your plans accordingly.

What happens if you get the estimate wrong?

While you should aim to make your user story point estimates as accurate as possible, you might have under or overestimated the amount of risk, effort, and complexity involved in bringing a story to life.

This might mean you don't get all the work planned for your sprint done. Maybe you need to move some of it over to the next sprint, which will mean reprioritizing and adjusting your user story map.

Fortunately, this process is pretty straightforward if you use digital user story mapping software like Easy Agile TeamRhythm.

Retrospectives or sprint reviews are a good time to discuss any issues with your team where estimates were off. Take some time to go through what happened, understand why more or less effort was required, and discuss how you might do more accurate estimates in the future.

Assign story points inside Easy Agile TeamRhythm

With Easy Agile User Story Maps for Jira, you can add and edit story point estimates directly on your story map. Simply select the story or issue and edit the story point field.

It will automatically update your sprint/version statistics with new totals, so you can see your capacity, arrange stories into sprint/version swimlanes, ensure you’re making the most of your velocity, and avoid over-committing.

Plus, your whole team has access to the user story board and estimates - perfect for in-house or remote user story mapping, online collaboration, and updating estimates at any point in the process.

Curious about Easy Agile User Story Maps? Features include so much more than story points, like:

• Drag and drop prioritization
• Visualized customer journeys inside Jira
• Sprint/version swimlanes for organizing stories
• Easily add or edit stories inside your story map
• See sprint/version statistics at a glance
• Easy collaboration with team members
  

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