#54 – Sprint Goal

Authors’ Comments:

According to the Scrum Guide, the Sprint Goal provides guidance to the development team on the ‘why’ of the upcoming sprint, and is a sprint objective to be met by implementing Product Backlog Items. The key is that the Sprint Goal causes the Development Team to work together rather than on separate initiatives.

If your team has difficulties phrasing a Sprint Goal, something needs to be fixed. A typical reason is that the team is not really working as a team, but instead as a group of individuals or a couple of sub-teams working on their own PBIs or User Stories. There could be several reasons for this, such as skill-set, interest, motivation, etc.

One way of moving towards enabling the team to create actual Sprint Goals is by investing a couple of sprints in becoming an actual team. Start by defining your Sprint Goal to be something like “To enable ourselves to create Sprint Goals” and initiate actions to make this possible, such as knowledge sharing, WIP limits, peer/mob programming, collective refinement sessions, etc. Just remember to include your PO and communicate the value-add of doing this work (i.e., the team becoming better at swarming and delivering the highest ordered PBIs at any time).