Sprint planning is the topic for Scrum Dynamics episode 13, sponsored by D365UG. Host Neil Benson covers all the aspects of sprint planning for Dynamics 365 projects:

• What is sprint planning and when does it take place?
• Who attends sprint planning, and what to do if the product owner can’t make it?
• How long is sprint planning?
• What happens during sprint planning? Sprint goals, sprint backlog forecasting, Dynamics 365 feature design.
• What’s needed for sprint planning?

And Neil shares his top ten tips for successful sprint planning workshops:

1. Take a break at the end of part two of the sprint planning workshop.
2. The product owner should draft the sprint goal before sprint planning.
3. If your product owner can’t attend, run sprint planning as best you can and then run a confirmation session as possible as possible.
4. Consider carefully whether enumerating and estimating tasks will improve productivity or not.
5. Use the storytime session immediately before sprint planning to ensure all the high-value items meet your definition of ready.
6. Don’t fill your sprint backlog full of items to match your forecast capacity. Leave a buffer.
7. Don’t forecast the completion of a spike and its related story in the same sprint.
8. Play first of five to measure everyone’s level of comfort with the forecast sprint backlog.
9. The scrum master’s job is to help the team fine-tune its forecast sprint backlog.
10. Run sprint planning in the afternoon on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.

You can find out more about how to apply Scrum to your Dynamics 365 projects with the Introduction to Scrum for Dynamics 365 video course. Click here to claim your CRM Audio subscriber discount.