Preparing a sprint

Once you’ve decided it’s the right time to do a sprint, there are a few things you should do to get everything set up for a productive and creative meeting.

Set outcomes and outputs

The first thing to do is write out exactly what you want to achieve by doing the sprint. What are you going to deliver out of it, what are you going to learn by working together that you wouldn’t have otherwise learned?

Write an agenda

Use the suggested activities in the index and select the right activities for your sprint. We recommend running a sprint for no longer than 6 hours in a day, and splitting up the day into 3 x 2 hour chunks (or 4 x 90 min). At the end of each section leave 20-30 minutes for coffee, food, emails and to stretch legs. You want to keep people awake and alert - keeping them in a room for too long is counter productive. It’s a good idea to think through the materials you’ll need for each session, any pre-requisites that will be needed (knowledge, homework etc) and how notes will be taken.

You can use this spreadsheet template to help you plan out an agenda.

Set homework

It’s always good to come to a sprint well prepared. We suggest you:

• Brief the client so they are able to present key elements of the project and what they’ve learned so far during the project
• Make sure the whole team has read the proposal, understands the project, and has answered any concerns they have
• If possible, do some preliminary user discovery so you can present user personas and user needs

Thinking about remote peers

We’re a remote company. While it’s often best to all meet face-to-face, it’s not always possible (especially if short notice, family arrangements or other things). There’s a number of things you can do to make sure remote participants are able to contribute effectively

• Get there 15 minutes early to prep the room - microphone/ speakers are set up, webcam is working, tv is working so we can see them.
• Make sure someone is taking live notes - if the sound cuts out, or they need to step out for a bit, this makes it easy for them to come back in
• Use a Slack channel or Google Drive folder to take images regularly (especially where sketching tasks are involved)

It’s your job as a facilitator to make sure they can follow/ join the conversation. There’s a few tips you can use to do this well.

• When you open a topic for discussion, start by asking the opinion of remote people - this stops the people in the room jumping on the topic and potentially excluding the remote joiners.
• If they’ve been quiet for a while, direct questions to them (“what do you think”)
• For larger gatherings: make sure that, when questions are asked, the questioner is near a microphone. You can use chats in Slack or Hangouts to repeat questions.
• Try using a flag system - especially where lots of people are remote, allow people to ‘raise their hand to speak’, and make sure the people in the room do the same when they want to talk.

OK, now you’re ready to start putting toegether an agenda! Go back