Project financial management

Optimize your workflow with Structure’s sprint planner

An agile Scrum framework can improve productivity . Much of this benefit comes from sprint planning.

Sprint planning ensures all stakeholders stay informed, aligned, and committed to shared objectives. Teams that skip this crucial phase risk misalignment and counterproductive outputs.

With the right information and the proper tools, sprint planners can optimize their agile practices. Let’s explore how you can optimize your agile sprints before they start.

What is sprint planning?

A Scrum team’s product backlog generally contains months of work – far more than developers can accomplish in a single sprint. During sprint planning, teams select which backlog items to complete in the upcoming sprint.

What is a sprint in project management? Simply put, it’s a one- to four-week period within which a development team pursues a narrow scope of short-term goals. Sprints require careful planning to optimize their efficiency and ensure success.

The following stakeholders are key participants in sprint planning:

• Product owner

• Scrum Master

• Developers

Every sprint starts with a dedicated planning meeting. Before the meeting, the product owner prepares and refines backlog items as user stories, each with clear acceptance criteria. During the meeting, the product owner presents individual user stories to the developers. 

Once developers understand a story, they discuss how to implement it, assign story points, and add it to the sprint backlog. This process repeats until developers commit to a realistic number of user stories.

Scrum events 

The Scrum framework consists of five events: , the sprint, daily scrum, sprint review, and sprint retrospective. We’ve already defined sprints, and we’ll discuss sprint planning in detail below. But first, let’s explore the other major Scrum events.

Daily Scrum

Each day of the sprint, the development team holds a short, timeboxed meeting – generally 15 minutes or less. In this meeting, developers discuss progress toward the sprint goal and identify obstacles so they can plan the next 24 hours.

Sprint review

At the end of the sprint, the Scrum team holds a collaborative feedback session called a sprint review. This event typically takes four hours, but the duration depends on the sprint’s length. During sprint review, teams collaboratively inspect the working product increment and adapt the product backlog to ensure the product continues to meet evolving needs.

Sprint retrospective

Immediately after the sprint review, the Scrum team holds the sprint retrospective. This is a timeboxed event, generally up to three hours for a one-month sprint. The Scrum team inspects its process in the sprint retrospective and plans actionable improvements for future sprints.

Benefits of sprint planning

The primary goal of sprint planning is to enhance shared stakeholder understanding. It also improves deliverables and facilitates retrospective learning.

• Enhances shared understanding: All stakeholders can voice their needs and concerns in sprint planning meetings. This gives developers greater clarity on priorities while providing product owners with deeper insight into technical constraints and feasibility. 

• Improves deliverables: During sprint planning, the Scrum team breaks down user stories into actionable tasks with clear acceptance criteria. Reducing ambiguity enables teams to focus on high-value features. Moreover, sprint planning minimizes scope creep, accelerates development cycles, and delivers more reliable, customer-centric outcomes.

• Facilitates retrospective learning: The Scrum team draws on lessons from prior sprints during sprint planning. These insights refine estimations and adapt processes for future sprints.

Essential elements for effective sprint planning

Sprint planning requires specific focus areas, personnel, and methods to guarantee success. The absence of any of the following components compromises clarity, alignment, and successful delivery.

• What: In the Scrum sprint planning meeting, the product owner presents the sprint’s primary goal and identifies backlog items that support the sprint goal.

• Who: Effective planning requires the participation of both the product owner and developers. The product owner clarifies the goal’s business value while the team evaluates technical feasibility. Either party’s absence causes misalignment.

• How: Developers collaborate to outline tasks required to meet the sprint goal. This plan emerges through discussions balancing the product owner’s prioritization of value with developers’ assessment of effort.

Scrum teams should leave sprint planning with a clearly defined sprint goal and a validated action plan. They should have an unambiguous understanding of the sprint’s tasks, responsibilities, and acceptance criteria.

Steps to prepare for a productive sprint planning meeting

Prioritize these steps to prepare for a sprint planning session:

• Confirm stakeholder attendance: Ensure all participants know the sprint planning meeting time, location, and purpose.

• Align with the product roadmap: Review the roadmap to confirm the sprint supports broader strategic goals.

• Prioritize the product backlog: Groom user stories to ensure clarity, accurate estimates, and clear prioritization.

• Analyze past sprint data: Evaluate key metrics from recent sprints (e.g., average velocity, sprint completion rates, and defect resolution trends).

• Assess team capacity: Document individual team member availability and adjust sprint commitments accordingly to avoid overloading resources.

Once you’ve completed these actions, prepare and distribute an agenda document. This should include meeting objectives, time allocation, key discussion topics, expected outcomes, and preparation requirements for stakeholders.

Best practices for successful sprint planning

The following best practices will ensure successful sprint planning: 

Refine your backlog

, aka refinement, organizes the backlog and prepares it for sprint planning. A healthy backlog is DEEP: detailed appropriately, estimated, emergent, and prioritized. Product owners should refine the backlog a few days before the sprint planning meeting.

These steps will keep the backlog well-structured:

• Remove outdated items: Regularly remove user stories that are no longer relevant.

• Detail top priorities: Clearly define requirements for high-priority items while leaving lower-priority items less detailed until the team is ready to work on them.

• Update estimates: Continuously adjust estimates as new information emerges to maintain a realistic and achievable backlog.

• Break down large stories: Split complex or oversized stories into smaller, actionable tasks. 

Book consistent meetings

Choose a consistent meeting time in advance to avoid unnecessary delays. Schedule it on the same day and time for each sprint. Consult your team to confirm a recurring time that works for everyone.

The length of the sprint determines the duration of the sprint planning meeting. The gold standard is a maximum of eight hours for a one-month sprint. For a two-week sprint, teams typically allocate two to four hours. More experienced Scrum teams often streamline the process and complete it in less time.

Set realistic expectations

Developers frequently overcommit during sprint planning, which leads to missed deadlines and compromised quality. Developers can set realistic expectations with the following guidelines:

• Review past sprint performance: from previous sprints. 

• Account for nondevelopment tasks: These include time for meetings, testing, bug fixes, and other nondevelopment activities. 

• Break work into smaller increments: Ensure tasks are simple enough to be completed within the sprint without overextending the team’s capacity.

• Incorporate buffer time: Allocate buffer time for unexpected issues or delays. Teams typically reserve 15–20% of the sprint’s total capacity for unforeseen work.

• Use relative estimation techniques: Relative estimation techniques help you accurately estimate effort. These include story points or T-shirt sizing. Story points estimate effort based on complexity, effort, and risk. T-shirt sizing categorizes tasks into size-based groups (e.g., XS, S, M, L, XL).

Planning sprints with Structure PPM

Tempo’s Structure PPM is an adaptable project and portfolio management solution that integrates seamlessly with Jira. It streamlines high-level workflows, improves collaboration, and aligns teams with strategic goals.

With Structure, project managers can perform the following tasks: 

• Establish a clear framework: Create a new structure to organize and visualize sprints and tasks in a unified space.

• Incorporate data: Enrich your sprint planning structure with vital information like task status, assignees, and priorities.

• Assign tasks: Use drag-and-drop functionality to allocate tasks to sprints, ensuring efficient workload management.

Start managing your team’s sprint planning with Structure PPM

Ensure the Scrum team’s alignment with from Tempo. As the number one project portfolio management software for Jira, Structure connects work from multiple projects, teams, and methods into one consolidated view to inform and optimize your sprint planning.

Ready to upgrade your project management and get the most out of agile methodology? Visit our website to learn more and start your free trial today.