The Challenge
The Blackbird team is working on an Analytical Product alongside four other teams. They have a well-defined backlog and conduct detailed sprint planning, breaking stories into tasks and estimating effort. However, they often face uncertainty around some tasks and proceed without fully understanding all steps, leading to dissonance during execution and sometimes failing to meet the sprint goal.
As an Agile leader, how would you coach the Blackbird team (or their leadership) to improve their planning practices, handle uncertainty better, and increase their chances of meeting sprint goals?
Solution:
As a coach, my approach would be to help the team not only improve their planning but also strengthen their ability to adapt to change during the sprint.
Better Planning
While the Blackbird team seems to have a well-defined backlog, I would encourage them to review and strengthen their Definition of Ready (DoR). In particular:
- Ensure that dependencies are clearly identified and resolved before sprint planning. Dependencies should be part of the DoR.
- Avoid striving for a perfect plan. If most of the work is clear, the team should proceed and start delivering value.
- Plan for uncertainty by maintaining a capacity buffer. Each individual should plan for about 80% of their capacity, especially if parts of their work involve ambiguity. Buffers should not be hidden in task estimates but managed transparently at the individual or sprint level.
Responding to Change
Tracking progress and adapting mid-sprint is key to maintaining alignment with the sprint goal.
Here are practices I would introduce:
Shift from an individual task-focus to a team-level focus on achieving the sprint goal.
Introduce a mid-sprint review during the daily stand-up, around the midpoint of the sprint. Instead of the usual three questions, team members answer:
- What have I accomplished towards the sprint goal?
- What is pending from my side?
- How do I view the work remaining? Do I need help? Is there a need to revise the sprint goal?
Based on this discussion, the team can:
- Reassign work dynamically to maximize chances of success.
- Re-plan or adjust the sprint goal if needed — as an exception and with team consensus.
With half the sprint still ahead, the team has enough runway to align to the updated plan and meet either the original or adjusted sprint goal.
As an aside, let me share some situations:
There is a resistance to change the sprint goal mid-sprint, it is rightly so, as it implies that one is not able to plan for a sprint of couple weeks. At the same time it is not ok to ignore the unmet sprint goals. One of two has to happen:
- Review the plan for the sprint and adjust the sprint goals and work towards it.
- Review the goals achieved / not achieved in the retrospective and take necessary actions.
There has to be transparency, which propels action:
- changes in the sprint goal mid-sprint surfaces an underlying problem. Why so? How to avoid?
- similarly the retrospective will bring up the issues related to not meeting the sprint goal and the possible solutions for them.
