How to Make Sprint Planning More Fun with a Live Q&A Ice Breaker
The most important part of agile development is the sprint planning meeting, where you figure out what you’re going to do during the next sprint (usually 2 weeks). It’s pretty dry stuff, but if you make it fun, it can even be enjoyable, and that’s what we’re going to do here. To make sprint planning more fun, we’re going to use a live Q&A session as an ice breaker!
Start off with an ice breaker
If you are in charge of your team's sprint planning and looking for some new ways to make it more fun, then this blog post is for you. Rather than jumping right into the logistics of the meeting, why not get your team energized and engaged by doing an ice breaker? One way that you can do this is by using a live Q&A session via Sendsteps. Meeting attendants can ask ask the speaker questions via their phone that will be displayed on a big screen. The speaker will look at the screen and can pick the questions he wants to answer. This will make people feel more excited and stimulated, because people are more interactive. Some examples include:
What do we want to achieve in the next two weeks?
How do you look back on the last sprint?
The basics of a sprint planning session
Sprint planning is a meeting where you align your team on the work that needs to be done, break down the stories, assign tasks and estimate them. It's usually just an hour but it can also be more than one. It's important that people leave sprint planning sessions feeling energized and excited about what they will do next. One way to do this is by having an ice breaker before the meeting starts as explained before.
The benefits of a live Q&A ice breaker
The benefits of an ice breaker during sprint planning are two-fold: it gets everyone out of their heads and breaks the ice. It gives you a better idea of what your team is good at (and not so good at) so that you can make the best possible use of their talents in future sprints. It also helps you see where there are gaps in your skillset or knowledge, so that you can then do research on how to fill those gaps. Finally, it gives team members the opportunity to share their thoughts about the project and get valuable feedback on what they want from the product before they dive into work. In order for an ice breaker during sprint planning to be successful, though, it needs to be planned ahead of time.
Having trouble coming up with good icebreaker questions for your sprint planning? Here's a ready-made template from sendsteps with great icebreaker questions.
Saskia Zwaak
Saskia started as the first intern on the marketing team and is currently a full time Junior Marketeer. She established the roots to create new blogs with the purpose of creating content to help others. Nonsense content is not up to Saskia’s standards as she only believes in bringing value to her readers.