How to Promote Engagement During Sprint Planning with a Live Multiple Choice and an Ice Breaker
The challenge of engagement during sprint planning happens all too often, especially at the beginning of the development cycle. How can you keep your team members engaged during sprint planning and throughout development when a lot of decisions need to be made? This article on how to promote engagement during sprint planning will help you with some useful tactics. Examples: using a live multiple choice and an ice breaker to keep your team members engaged and thinking outside the box during sprint planning.
Ice Breaker
Take a minute before you start the meeting. Create some ice breakers that your team can do as they're settling in. Or download on of our icebreaker templates.
A fun way to break the ice is through a word association exercise. Take one word and give each person on your team two minutes to come up with as many words as possible that have something in common with that word. For example, if we chose the word apple, we could come up with words like fruit, red, juice, etc. To make this even more accessible you could use a live word cloud and give everyone the option to answer with their phones.
Another way to get people talking is through brainstorming questions. Ask them their opinion on various topics such as their favourite vacation spot, what they would do if they won the lottery, or what song they would sing for karaoke night! Also, for this option a live word cloud can be used. Ice breakers can serve to create a more relaxed atmosphere.
Multiple Choice Questions with Answers
Live multiple choice questions help get people engaged in the session and speed up the process of making decisions. It also provides structure for new members, or those who are less comfortable speaking in groups.
The idea is to use live polling software like Sendsteps so that you can see what participants are voting on their phones or laptops during sprint planning. For example, you could start by having team members vote on three topics for the meeting:
What are the upcoming tasks during the next period of time in our company?
Which topics should have priority?
How do we ease the process of sprint planning
Sendsteps offers many different ways to do interactive presentations, which makes meetings or presentations more effective.
Roksanna van Dam
Roksanna works as an intern and mainly focuses on making content and the company's socials. Roksanna loves to teach herself and her audience new discoveries and has a creative mindset, which she combines with her work to create unique, fun, relevant blogs and templates.