Sprint planning

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.

Instacart plans launches with Asana

Creating a sprint planning project

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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 project actions drop-down menu and selecting Manage Custom Fields.
5. Create tasks to represent sprint milestones and assign them to their respective owners. You can set a specific due date within the sprint, or make the milestones due on the last day of the sprint.
6. You can also house the milestone tasks in other projects to keep goals in sight.

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.

Do more with sprint planning

Use Calendar View

Once you’ve mapped out your sprint plans, you can use Calendar View to get a visualization of the sprint to see gaps or busy times. You can see custom field colors on your calendar, too, to make sure priorities are handled on time.

Track progress on My Dashboard

Add sprint planning projects to your Dashboard so you can see the progress charts and latest status updates across all your projects at a glance.

Set up an Instagantt integration

Use the Instagantt + Asana integration, to create Gantt charts side-by-side with your existing Asana projects. You can visualize your sprint schedule and start dates, and see where dependencies are. Changes made to projects in Instagantt are automatically updated in Asana, too.

Tracking your sprint plans in Asana will give your team complete clarity on priorities, milestones, and progress. When teammates can see goals, expectations, and deadlines, it’s easier to stay on track so you can hit launch dates and deliver a great product. That’s truly agile sprint planning.