So you have a ballin' prioritized product backlog but for some reason your sprint planning meetings take way longer than anticipated. As the meeting gets more monotonous, the team becomes disengaged, important questions are never raised, details are missed, and the sprint becomes a mess.
Does this sound familiar?
Truth be told, any agile meeting that is longer than an hour is an inefficiently run one. If it's the sprint planning meeting that drags on, you've basically crippled the entire sprint. The last thing you want to have is the team bolting for the door, just happy to escape the torture of planning because you've set a bad tone that will linger around your team like a grey cloud for the remainder of the sprint.
The good news is that there is a solution: the backlog grooming meeting.
Backlog grooming is the unsung hero of the agile cadence. Everyone knows about the planning meetings and demos; the alpha and the omega. Though you underestimate the grooming meeting at your own peril.
The grooming meeting is a pretty simple concept. If your backlog is in order, take an hour during the middle of each sprint to discuss the details of the items from the top down. Try to get as many stories pointed as the team can in an hour and then leave. You may need to have a couple of these meetings throughout the sprint in order to get a big enough leg up on the next iteration.
If you get far enough ahead, the team will have a good understanding of the upcoming tasks that they will be working on along with the details on how they will develop these user stories. Knowing what they will be doing in the future provides insight on where the business is headed and can often help the developers in their current tasks with a greater understanding of what's to come. Another benefit is that the team identifies areas of the project which need further development before they can begin coding. The product manager now has enough time to get those questions answered before the team starts development.
All of this makes the Monday sprint planning meeting flow like a nice ocean breeze.
If you are a particularly busy team (since you're agile I'm sure you are) finding times to get everyone in a room can often be difficult and the grooming meeting is usually the first casualty since "we can just do the pointing during planning." If you fall into this trap and your team's sprints seem to always start off on the wrong foot, be sure to schedule in some mandatory grooming meetings. Your entire sprint and team will benefit.
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