Planning in Scrum

Many people wrongly assume that Scrum does not have any planning. I will say to them that they are entirely wrong and that we don’t do much upfront planning, but we continuously plan. Planning in Scrum is split into various levels that I will discuss in this article. However, what Scrum does not have is a detail cannet chart for the whole project as teams know that information in the cannet chart is inaccurate and gives a false sense of control. In the traditional waterfall project, the planning is done up front when the team know the least details about the project and product. So any plan created at that stage is going to be wrong, and for this reason, Scrum does not see any point in investing so much time and energy in upfront detailed planning.

In Scrum, we do regular planning at different stages and different levels of detail:

Product Roadmap:

The product roadmap is a very high-level strategic plan showing what order the product features will be delivered.

Sprint planning:

The team with the Product Owner, plan what they will deliver in the next sprint. They will discuss how they will achieve this goal.

daily Scrum (stand up):

The Dev team discusses what they did yesterday and plan for what they will work on today. Daily Scrum or as it is called in many organisations daily stand up is a planning meeting for the whole team and is not a status reporting meeting.

backlog refinement

The team reviews the upcoming stories in the backlog and any technical dependency. The team also checks if the stories are ready for taking into the next sprint.

Release Planning

A very high-level multi-sprint planning session to plan what features will be delivered in the upcoming release.

Alternative to Agile: upfront planning:

with upfront planning, you don’t get regular chance to check and correct the deviation from the project plan, so this means that upfront project gains a significant deviation from the project plan.

The team is going to be more committed to the plan they have created than the one that has been handed over to them by someone else.