Many product and engineering teams work in Agile sprint cycles to keep a constant and efficient production schedule. Sprint planning meetings can be time consuming and results of them can end up in one-off spreadsheets or boards. Asana is a flexible tool that you can easily adapt to your Scrum practices, even as they change. By planning sprints in Asana, teams can have full clarity on sprint plans, milestones, launch dates, and backlog, with work efforts and communication together in one place.
Follow along with the article to build your own sprint planning project, and take a look at other resources directly below.
Resources for creating sprint plans | Link |
|---|---|
Asana-created template | |
Case studies & webinars |
How to create a sprint planning project
- Create a new project (either as a list or board) for your sprint. The product manager or technical project manager should be the Project Owner.
- Add project members and set them to receive notifications when there are status updates.
- Make sure the Project Owner provides status updates at the beginning and end of every sprint (or as needed) to share progress.
- Individuals can comment on their sprint milestone tasks to as needed to share updates.
- Add sections (list layout) or columns (board layout) to organize your work by individual sprint, or by categories like “ready to do,” “in progress,” “done,” and “backlog.” As your team makes progress, remember to move tasks into different sections or columns.
- Add custom fields for sprints so you can track when work is scheduled to be completed, expected hours, and priority. Add custom fields to your sprint planning project by clicking the blue Add Custom Fields link at the top of the project.
- Create tasks to represent sprint work and assign them to teammates. You can set a specific due date within the sprint, or make the milestones due on the last day of the sprint. Use start dates to show the span of time you’ll need to work on something during a sprint.
- Add rules to automatically assign tasks, update custom fields, and more. For example, you can set a rule that moves a task to a different column, updates a custom field, or marks it complete.
- Once created, save your sprint planning project as a template by clicking the project header dropdown and selecting Convert to Template. Then you can just create a duplicate of the template to jump right into your sprint planning.
When teams regularly check and update this project, you may find that you can have fewer standup meetings and shorter sprint planning meetings, and that they become far more efficient.
Tips for managing your sprint project
Plan your sprint with Timeline
Head to the Timeline tab of your project to map out your sprint and ensure you can fit in all prioritized work. You can use it to see any sprint task dependencies and drag and drop tasks to resolve conflicts. Timeline provides a quick way to check in on all the moving pieces of sprint work to ensure you reach your goals by the end of the sprint. Use filtering on your Timeline to see tasks by custom field to ensure priorities are on track.
Manage sprint workloads and monitor sprint project progress with Portfolios and Workload
To gauge team bandwidth for sprint planning, leads might track costs, hours, or points manually and across meetings, which can be time consuming and inaccurate. Instead, create a project portfolio with all your sprint projects.
Then use the Workload tab to visualize your team’s capacity based on tasks they’re already assigned in Asana. Workload helps you make informed staffing decisions to keep workloads balanced and important sprint work on track. Use the Portfoliosee real-time progress, deadlines, and priority all in one place.
Make sure to set up effort, hours, or t-shirt size custom fields across all sprint projects for more accurate bandwidth planning.