Sprint Planning: How to Promote Engagement
When you’re running a business, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Two examples are keeping your customers happy or making sure you have enough resources to handle an upcoming deadline. Therefore, there are plenty of fires to put out on any given day—and too often they’ll burn out of control without some intervention. To help combat this problem and take back control of your schedule, consider holding regular sprint planning meetings with the members of your team. Quite often it can be hard to keep these meetings exciting when discussing regular topics. Doing a live Q&A session will get people interactive and more excited to participate actively. After your sprint planning, you should therefore close the meeting well with a Q&A session.
Why do a Live Q&A
Doing a live Q&A session can be a great way to promote engagement because it forces you to be on your toes. Not only do you need to answer questions that are coming in live, but you also have the opportunity to respond quickly and react in real-time. The best part about doing a live Q&A session is that you get the chance to connect with colleagues who you might not talk to as much during an ordinary sprint. A sprint often covers regular topics which means people will often be bored. You are not likely to actively engage with one another when this happens. But when offering a live Q&A session, people will be forced to interact with each other more. With Sendsteps it is possible to do a live Q&A during your presentation.
Coming up with questions beforehand and what should you cover
When running a live Q&A session, it's important to keep track of the questions being asked in order for you to answer them quickly and effectively. It can be difficult if you have many people asking questions at once or a lot of time between one question and the next. To help organize your Q&A session, we recommend having a list of possible questions with the corresponding answers. This way, when someone asks a question, you are often able to answer a question more effectively and quickly, because you have thought of possible answers beforehand. It is recommended to use sprint-related questions that can help to improve a sprint planning. Examples are stated below:
Why isn't subject X considered for this sprint planning?
Why is this sprint valuable for the company?
Can we put in preferences for the next sprint?
Things To Know Before Running The Q&A Session
Before running the live Q&A session, you should know the following:
What are some of your most frequently asked questions?
Are there any specific topics or themes that you want to cover in this session?
What is the call-to-action for your audience at the end of the live Q&A session?
You've Done The Session, Now What? Closing the meeting well
When wanting to close the meeting well, keep these five tips in mind.
Thank everyone for coming and being a part of the meeting.
Ask for feedback on the meeting and what people want from future meetings. You can use a live Q&A session.
Explain how you'll follow up with attendees.
Let attendees know when and where the next meeting will take place.
Ask attendees if they have any other comments or questions.
Closing the meeting well means you can implement feedback into your next sprint planning!
For your next sprint planning Sendsteps offers more multiple interactive features like word clouds, open-ended questions, multiple choice, and quiz questions. These features create an interactive environment, which ensures that the meetings are engaging and interactive. Helping to get your sprint off on the right foot, an interactive session can provide new perspectives on customer needs and help foster empathy between you and your audience. These benefits make this approach well worth trying – so let’s get started!
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.