Sprint planning template

Sprint planning helps Agile teams prioritize work and decide which team members have the capacity to take on certain projects. But without a clear way to track tasks—and your team’s bandwidth—it’s hard to know if you’re scheduling the right amount of work at the right time. 

That’s where this sprint planning template can help. It provides the structure you need to effectively manage Agile projects and ensure your team is focusing on tasks that matter. 

What is a sprint planning template? 

A sprint planning template is a pre-made framework that helps Agile teams plan and execute sprints. Our template lays out everything you need to make your sprints as efficient as possible—including how to prioritize tasks, manage your team’s capacity, and track work from planning to completion. 

This template isn’t a set-and-forget-it tool. Instead, you should use our template throughout the course of your sprint—from your initial sprint planning session to your final retrospective. That means your planning process is directly connected to your team’s work, and everyone can reference a single system of record to see what’s on deck, what’s in progress, and what’s been completed.

What are the benefits of a digital sprint planning template?

A digital template is useful during the entire sprint lifecycle—not just during sprint planning meetings. It provides a central place where you can track backlog items, assign tasks, adjust deadlines, and communicate updates to stakeholders. Since everything happens in one system of record, you can avoid duplicate work and ensure your whole team is on the same page. 

With our digital sprint planning template, you can: 

• See a bird’s-eye view of all your team’s tasks, including the status of each deliverable. 

• Track deliverables through each stage of work—backlog, prioritized, in progress, developing, and completed. 

• Use template tasks to standardize backlog items and ensure stakeholders are providing the right information for your team. 

• Visualize your sprint in different ways—as a standard list, Kanban board, timeline, or calendar. 

• Use color-coded custom tags to track key information like task priority, product stage, and story points.

• Attach relevant Google docs, images, videos, and other files to tasks.

• Communicate with your team—and stakeholders—directly where work happens. 

How to use our sprint planning template

Effective sprint planning looks different from team to team. That’s why we made this template customizable—so you can adjust it to fit your team’s specific needs. As you get started with sprint planning, here are some best practices to keep in mind: 

• Keep your sprint structured. Just having a list of to-do’s doesn’t help you understand if your sprint is on track. Use our sprint planning template in Asana Boards view, which displays your sprint project as a Kanban board. Group tasks by work stage in corresponding columns. Then, simply drag and drop tasks to a new column as they enter a new stage.

• Add a clear owner and deadline to each task. Sprint capacity planning is all about figuring out who on the team can tackle certain work in a specific timeframe. To create the best sprint schedule, give each task an assignee and deadline to make responsibilities clear. When possible, clarify your sprint goal in the task or project as well.

• Make important details easy to find. Set your sprint up for success by tracking all the details for each task with custom fields, like task priority and story points. That way you can ensure your team is focused on the top priorities without getting overloaded.

• Provide regular updates. Your Agile sprint plan in Asana helps every meeting—from kickoff to stand up to sprint review and sprint retrospective—run smoothly because everybody can find their work and quickly give a recap without searching around or forgetting something.

Integrated features

• Board View. Board View is a Kanban board-style view that displays your project’s information in columns. Columns are typically organized by work status (like To Do, Doing, and Done) but you can adjust column titles depending on your project needs. Within each column, tasks are displayed as cards, with a variety of associated information including task title, due date, and custom fields. Track work as it moves through stages and get at-a-glance insight into where your project stands.

• Custom fields. Custom fields are the best way to tag, sort, and filter work. Create unique custom fields for any information you need to track—from priority and status to email or phone number. Use custom fields to sort and schedule your to-dos so you know what to work on first. Plus, share custom fields across tasks and projects to ensure consistency across your organization. 

• Reporting. Reporting in Asana translates project data into visual charts and digestible graphs. By reporting on work where work lives, you can reduce duplicative work and cut down on unnecessary app switching. And, because all of your team’s work is already in Asana, you can pull data from any project or team to get an accurate picture of what’s happening in one place.

• Inbox. Inbox is your mission control center in Asana. Your Inbox will update you on important project and task changes in real time, so you’re always up to date on the latest project information. Coordinate work, comment on tasks, respond to requests, and view project updates, all in one place. 

Recommended apps

• Jira. Create interactive, connected workflows between technical and business teams to increase visibility around the product development process in real time—all without leaving Asana. Streamline project collaboration and hand offs. Quickly create Jira issues from within Asana so that work passes seamlessly between business and technical teams at the right time. 

• GitHub. Automatically sync GitHub pull request status updates to Asana tasks. Track progress on pull requests and improve cross-functional collaboration between technical and non-technical teams, all from within Asana.

• Zoom. Asana and Zoom are partnering up to help teams have more purposeful and focused meetings. The Zoom + Asana integration makes it easy to prepare for meetings, hold actionable conversations, and access information once the call is over. Meetings begin in Asana, where shared meeting agendas provide visibility and context about what will be discussed. During the meeting, team members can quickly create tasks within Zoom, so details and action items don’t get lost. And once the meeting is over, the Zoom + Asana integration pulls meeting transcripts and recordings into Asana, so all collaborators and stakeholders can review the meeting as needed.

• Slack. Turn ideas, work requests, and action items from Slack into trackable tasks and comments in Asana. Go from quick questions and action items to tasks with assignees and due dates. Easily capture work so requests and to-dos don’t get lost in Slack. 

Sprint fundamentals you can plan with Asana

Our sprint planning template can keep up with your Agile team—no matter what sprint stage you’re in or what type of Agile methodology you use. Use our template to hit sprint goals during each of these key phases: 

• Agile sprint planning

• Scrum sprint planning

• Sprint scheduling

• Sprint backlog grooming

• Product backlog grooming

• Scrum capacity planning

• Sprint review

• Sprint retrospective

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