Sprints and full calendars

Shifting a team’s work to revolve around two-week or monthly sprints can improve output and satisfaction. Especially as marketing ops teams grow and become more relied upon in a marketing organization, the ticket queue tends to pile up far faster than the output of the team can knock it down.

A sprint structure allows an ops team to set the constraints of the work, and avoid being sucked into the black hole of an endless ticket queue. So a more agile workflow here is almost a no-brainer.

But it’s easy to talk about the merits of a sprint structure, and another thing to execute on it well. For starters, choosing the amount of work that gets done in the coming sprint can be tricky. Forget about prioritization for a moment and consider just the amount of hours in the day available to each person on the team. Even with tickets well prioritized, most teams will find themselves with too much to realistically fit into a two week sprint.

I think there’s two steps to address this.

1. Translate the estimated time commitment/story points into a tangible moment on your calendar. I’ve written about the merits of using your calendar as a to-do list, and the same should be true with the work you and your team are committing to. It doesn’t have to be a perfect estimate, but a well padded two hour block for Tuesday is a good place to start. This is the only way you can help safeguard your team’s time to actually getting the work done, because a calendar slot directly recognizes the trade-off being made. Be aware of the pitfall of this approach by not scheduling your days too tightly though. You need some slack in the day, both for the tasks that invariably shift or take longer than expected, and for the miscellaneous stuff that always creeps in.

2. Perform your sprint planning at least a week in advance of that sprint’s scheduled start date. The beauty of this is that most people’s schedules are fuller within the next five business days. So if you get your planning in first, you get to decide how the hours get carved up, and where and when you’ll do the work. After all, if you don’t decide how the time gets used, someone else will.