The Three-Day Sprint Planning Nightmare - Learning from Failure | Antti Horelli

Summary

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile Storytelling from the Trenches

Episode: The Three-Day Sprint Planning Nightmare - Learning from Failure | Antti Horeli
Host: Vasco Duarte
Guest: Antti Horeli, Agile Coach from Finland
Release Date: January 27, 2025

---

1. Introduction to the Episode

In this compelling episode of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, host Vasco Duarte welcomes Antti Horeli, an experienced Agile Coach from Finland. The episode delves into Antti’s challenging experience with a prolonged Sprint Planning session, exploring the complexities and lessons learned from this ordeal.

---

2. Guest Introduction: Antti Horeli

Vasco introduces Antti Horeli, highlighting his transition from technical roles to Agile coaching. Antti is recognized for his systems-oriented and empathetic approach, fostering collaboration and effective communication within teams. With decades of experience, Antti has dedicated his career to empowering teams to reach their full potential.

---

3. Antti’s Journey to Becoming a Scrum Master

Antti shares his background, recounting his studies in Computer Science and initial career as a developer. He describes a pivotal moment when he realized that technical challenges were only part of the equation. Faced with conflicting priorities and lacking the authority to make business value decisions, Antti sought a role that bridged technical and human aspects. This led him to embrace the Scrum Master role, marking a significant career shift away from coding to Agile coaching.

Antti Horeli [03:01]: "I started thinking that maybe, actually when I thought all the problems was on tech side, maybe there's something also difficult on the human side... I raised my hand, I want to try that."

---

4. The Three-Day Sprint Planning Nightmare

Antti recounts one of the most challenging Sprint Planning sessions of his career. Initially confident in their Scrum practices, his team entered the planning unprepared due to unforeseen priorities that consumed their time in previous weeks. What was anticipated as a few hours of planning escalated into a grueling two-day ordeal.

Antti Horeli [06:47]: "The whole planning thing took about two days..."

As they delved into their backlog, they discovered that many items were larger and more complex than anticipated, necessitating extensive refinement during the planning itself. This lack of preparedness was exacerbated by sudden business changes that completely disrupted their carefully laid plans the very next day.

Antti Horeli [08:11]: "The PO came back and said actually this is all the wrong stuff."

This sudden shift left the team demoralized and frustrated, culminating in what Antti describes as one of the most disappointing moments in his career.

---

5. Lessons Learned and Takeaways

Reflecting on the experience, Antti emphasizes the critical importance of backlog refinement. He advocates for separating refinement from planning to ensure that Sprint Planning sessions remain focused and efficient.

Antti Horeli [09:19]: "Refinement work really pays off... maybe split into smaller groups or something."

Additionally, Antti highlights the necessity of having visibility into higher-level business decisions that could impact the team’s work. By ensuring that the Product Owner effectively communicates such changes beforehand, teams can avoid being blindsided, thereby reducing emotional stress and fostering better adaptability.

Antti Horeli [10:42]: "Making really sure that these kind of higher level things that happen... we know about them at least a little bit."

---

6. Balancing Communication: Sharing vs. Oversharing

The conversation transitions into the delicate balance between sharing sufficient information and avoiding information overload. Vasco poses the question of how much the Scrum Master should share with the team, considering that not all business discussions will translate into actionable items for the team.

Antti admits there’s no one-size-fits-all rule but suggests using retrospectives as a feedback mechanism to gauge whether the team feels overburdened or underinformed. If retrospectives frequently highlight communication issues, it signals a need to adjust the information flow.

Antti Horeli [11:24]: "If we seem to have retrospectives or other situations where this thing comes up as a problem often, then we have to do something about, we have to share more."

Vasco adds the strategy of involving the team in decision-making by inviting them to opt-in for more information during Sprint Reviews or Retrospectives. This approach respects the team’s autonomy and ensures that only relevant information is shared, preventing both information overload and gaps in essential knowledge.

Vasco Duarte [13:43]: "Leaving that option for the team to make a decision on their own."

Antti agrees, noting that this method not only balances information flow but also engages the team more deeply.

Antti Horeli [14:02]: "The team can kind of realize... you might not know about. Let's talk about this a bit more and kind of gets them engaged."

---

7. Final Thoughts and Conclusion

The episode concludes with Antti expressing appreciation for the discussion, affirming the value of sharing such challenging experiences to foster learning and growth within the Agile community. Vasco reiterates the importance of communication balance and encourages listeners to apply these insights to enhance their Scrum practices.

Vasco Duarte [14:14]: "Remember that sharing is caring."

---

Key Takeaways:

• Backlog Refinement: Regular and separate backlog refinement sessions prevent Sprint Planning from becoming overwhelming and unfocused.
• Visibility into Business Changes: Ensuring the team is aware of higher-level business decisions in advance mitigates unexpected disruptions.
• Balanced Communication: Utilize retrospectives to assess and adjust the level of information shared with the team, fostering a healthy communication environment.
• Team Autonomy: Allow teams to decide their preferred level of information sharing to enhance engagement and ownership.

Notable Quotes:

• Antti Horeli [03:01]: "I started thinking that maybe, actually when I thought all the problems was on tech side, maybe there's something also difficult on the human side..."
• Antti Horeli [06:47]: "The whole planning thing took about two days..."
• Antti Horeli [10:42]: "Making really sure that these kind of higher level things that happen... we know about them at least a little bit."
• Antti Horeli [14:02]: "The team can kind of realize... let's talk about this a bit more and kind of gets them engaged."
• Vasco Duarte [14:14]: "Remember that sharing is caring."

---

This episode serves as a valuable resource for Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches, illustrating the importance of preparation, communication, and adaptability in Agile practices. By learning from Antti’s experience, listeners can better navigate the complexities of Sprint Planning and foster more resilient and effective teams.

Transcript

[Pasco Duarte]

Hi there. Pasco Duarte here, your host. I wanted to share a story with you. You know how sometimes Agile just feels like following another checklist when like processes and frameworks feel more important than what we are trying to achieve and sometimes even like handcuffs. I was talking to a customer of the Global Agile Summit and he used a term that kind of stuck in my he said, I have Agile fatigue. And I've heard that a lot from people since then. But here's the thing, it doesn't have to be this way. So we started thinking and at the Global Agile Summit, which is happening this May, we're bringing together practitioners who've actually done that, who've broken free from this, you know, install the framework kind of mindset. We want to focus the summit on real life, first person stories of Agile all succeeding that inspire you to action. We're talking real experiences, practical solutions, and of course, amazing insights from leaders like Gojkoacic, who will be one of the keynote speakers, and Jurgen Apelo, who will be one of the keynote speakers as well. If you're ready to leave the Agile fatigue behind, just join us in Dalit. The early birth tickets are now available@the globalagilesummit.com and mark your calendar. We will have workshops on May 18th, that's a Sunday. And then the conference itself will happen on May 19th and 20th of 2025 in Tallinn, Estonia. So let's make Agile exciting again. And remember, go to agile globalagilesummit.com that is, and get your early birth ticket. Now. It will only be available until early March, so grab it now. And now onto the episode. Hello everybody.

[Vasco Duarte]

Welcome to one more week of Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. This week we have with us Anti Horeli. Hey, Anti. Welcome to the show.

[Antti Horeli]

Hi Vasco. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

[Vasco Duarte]

Absolutely. It's a pleasure to have you. So Anti is a fellow Finn. I mean, I'm not a Fin, but I do live in Finland. Ante is an agile coach from Finland dedicated to empowering teams. He carries with him a systems oriented, empathetic approach that allows him to foster collaboration and effective communication. With decades in it, Antti transitioned from technical roles to methodology, where he passionately helps people and teams reach their full potential. So, Antti, that was a short intro. Tell us a little bit more about yourself and how did you end up becoming a Scrum Master?

[Antti Horeli]

Okay, thanks for asking. That's a bit of a story in itself. Well, I guess in this sense my story is kind of typical, so I've studied Computer science. When I went into work life, I kind of thought that tech is my thing, those are the problems that I want to solve, and that's how I make the world better. And several years went by and I was very happy doing that. But then I did kind of have this. At least I'm not sure if it was that at the moment, but looking back, a kind of epiphany moment when I was doing work in my dev team and it wasn't maybe a team in the real meaning of the word. I had three separate projects I was doing and then everyone else was doing other things. And then I had three stakeholders come to my desk during the same morning and say that you have to do this. I think this is the most important. And I was a developer. I didn't really understand the business value of all of that. I didn't feel I was the correct person to make the priority decision on which one of these things I should be doing. And then I started thinking that maybe, actually when I thought all the problems was on tech side, maybe there's something also difficult on the human side, on what we choose to do, how we organize to do stuff, all that. And then in our organization, a Scrum Master role was introduced. I raised my hand, I want to try that. And here we are. At some point, I made even a partly conscious career shift to trying out Agile coaching as my whole thing. And I haven't written code for years now.

[Vasco Duarte]

Very good, very good. This sounds familiar. The whole story of code is interesting. Technology challenges are interesting, but then you get to work in a team or a group of teams, and then you figure out that actually the technology part is the easy one.

[Antti Horeli]

Yep. At least that you can solve. Like you can like to say now, this is done very rarely in the teamwork in the process area. You can say that, okay, this is now done.

[Vasco Duarte]

Yeah, absolutely. That's a good point, actually, because when it comes to people, nothing is done. We're in constant flux. And when you put loads of people together, collaborating and being affected by decisions, moods, illnesses, whatever you have in mind, that becomes a lot more complex. Now, of course, that complexity and the human side is filled with amazing things, right when people reach their potential, when they achieve great things together. But as Scrum Masters and Agile coaches, we sometimes need to go through some difficult stories before we can achieve those great things. And today's Fail Monday here on the podcast Anthy. So let's explore one of those stories, tell us a little bit about the context, and then walk us through the story. Like we'll take the takeaways later. We'll discuss what we can learn from it later. But tell us that story, Anthony.

[Antti Horeli]

All right. Well actually I've got kind of two short ones and one is kind of small scope one and other is bigger. At the early parts of my Scrum Master career, I very clearly remember one Sprint planning that was kind of my go to horrible Sprint planning ever later on. And we my team, we kind of thought we had Scrum going, we were doing decent there. But for some reason we came into Sprint planning like totally unprepared. I guess that happens. Something more important took our time in the previous weeks and then we didn't really realize that we just started planning and then the whole planning thing took about two days and every.

[Vasco Duarte]

Wow, tell us a little bit more.

[Pasco Duarte]

So you frustrated, you get into the room, right?

[Vasco Duarte]

And you're thinking maybe it's going to take one hour or two hours, right.

[Pasco Duarte]

And then things start.

[Antti Horeli]

We kind of looked at, okay, we're not really clear. So maybe it'll be like half a day or something, three hours. That might be usual tricky planning for us but, but then we, we slowly start to understand we don't really know the stuff we have on our backlog. We look into them, they started kind of sort of exploding like okay, actually this is way bigger. We have to look into this before we can commit to anything. Before, before we can even say can we do this or not and all that. And for some reason we didn't realize this, we just kind of slugged all this refinement stuff into the planning itself. Maybe we should have just, you know, stepped back and split or something and do refinement. Just focus on that or something and okay, okay, that was half of the problem. The big, big kind of bummer game actually after the two days because for some reason and this, I think this wasn't typical for us but for some reason there was something business wise happening in the background that kind of missed our whole backlog up. The thing we had just very painfully tried to get a grip of and it messed it up like the very next day. So we had a painful two day planning and then on third day we just started kind of the sprint. The PO came back and said actually this is all the wrong stuff.

[Vasco Duarte]

Wow, that must have been very frustrating for the team.

[Antti Horeli]

Yeah, I think the whole team kind of says oh really? Okay, we're going to go to the bar right now. We'll be back in an hour.

[Vasco Duarte]

We'll not be back in an hour.

[Antti Horeli]

Oh well, let's see. We were fairly, how do you say, responsible, but still that was, that was like, oh my God. No, no. That's like maybe the single most frustrating moment in a lot of, you know, my co care. I remember the emotion still.

[Vasco Duarte]

Yeah, that stays with us. Right.

[Pasco Duarte]

Like you put a lot of effort.

[Vasco Duarte]

Into understanding stuff that, okay, we weren't ready, but we need to work through them. And you put a lot of effort into trying to understand those back and forth, making technical decisions, maybe even being committed, emotionally committed to some kind of architectural pathway. And then sudden everything changes. Wow.

[Antti Horeli]

Yeah. And it kind of, the emotion kind of piled up there. So it's kind of bad luck, I guess, in that sense as well. But still.

[Vasco Duarte]

So when you look at this story, like what would you do differently today?

[Antti Horeli]

Well, one thing I have really taken taken to heart is that refinement work really pays off. So the first kind of bigger problem or the smaller problem, we try not to get into that. Or then if we do realize that in the sprint planning, we're all over the place, we don't really know the items here. Then maybe like say we're not doing planning today, we will do refinement work today and kind of focus on that and figure out how to do that best. Maybe split into smaller groups or something, depending on how big of a team you have, and then do the planning the next day or something like that. But I guess the bigger problem was that we just did not for some reason have visibility into the backlog or like the backlog we did, but kind of what was happening like on the higher level. And usually our product owner knew this stuff and kind of brought it into the, to us. But for some reason that didn't happen at that time. So making really sure that these kind of higher level things that happen and that might kind of affect what we do eventually absolutely will affect what the team does. We know about them at least a little bit. So it doesn't seem so emotionally stressful when they kind of mess things up. I mean, change happens and that's something to understand and that's okay. But it's always worse when you kind of get blindsided by something you maybe didn't have to get blindsided by. You could have known.

[Vasco Duarte]

So that's where the famous trade off comes in.

[Antti Horeli]

Right.

[Vasco Duarte]

Like you can share a lot with the team so that they are aware of what's going on and what might be coming their way. But then there's also the, the point where is this too much? So when you look at that trade off, which is, I mean, it's a fair question, like how much can we share? Because not all things that are going on will turn out to be decisions or they won't turn out to be reality because they are just hypothesis ideas that are being discussed. When you look at that question, how do you define it for yourself? Where do you draw the line between what's sharing just enough or oversharing with the team?

[Antti Horeli]

Wow, that's a really good question. So kind of balancing communication so you don't overwhelm anyone, but still, you know, enough. That's a really tricky thing. And I think it goes wider. Like between development teams, for example, how much do they need to talk to each other so that they know what they're doing? So they don't like to take decisions that hamper each other, but they can't know all the details because then they'll just be, you know, communicating all the time and not, not getting anything else done. I don't have kind of a rule for that. I think it's maybe, maybe more of a instinct or something like that. And, well, maybe it's kind of the litmus test is that if, if we seem to have retrospectives or other situations where this thing comes up as a problem often, then we have to do something about, we have to share more. But if it's, if it's on the other side that people feel that they're getting overburdened with information, they would just, you know, want to focus on developing the work. Then we have tried to tone it down a little bit and it goes kind of up and down. It depends on the situation, the kind of volatility of the organization, stuff like that.

[Vasco Duarte]

So I really like that, using the retro as kind of a thermometer, checking if it's too much or too little. Another thought that I had is that the owner would come into the team, like for example, a Sprint review or even a retrospective. If the PO is participating and say, hey, there's these things going on, not sharing any details. Do you want to know about it? Right. And this is also an aspect of self management for the team because some teams will want to know more about something than others and that's okay, right? Like, as long as it's information that is not somehow confidential, then it's perfectly okay to share. So I think that for us as agile coaches and Scrum masters, it's also about being able to always check in with the team. Hey, there's some stuff going on regarding possibly new integration that is coming. Do you want to know more about it? It might not happen but we're talking about it. Do you want to know more about it? Right, like leaving that option for the team to make a decision on their own. What do you think about that?

[Antti Horeli]

Yeah, that's a very good point I think and it also has the benefit of the team can kind of realize maybe even from the kind of short two sentence description that okay, this might have technological impact that you actually might not know about. Let's talk about this a bit more and kind of gets them engaged in that way as well.

[Vasco Duarte]

Absolutely.

[Antti Horeli]

I like that idea a lot.

[Vasco Duarte]

Great point, great point. Thank you for sharing that story Anthy.

[Antti Horeli]

Alright, thank you.

[Pasco Duarte]

We really hope you liked our show and if you did, why not rate this podcast on Stitcher or itunes, share this podcast and let other Scrum masters know about this valuable resource for their work.

[Vasco Duarte]

Remember that sharing is caring.