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Nexus Sprint Planning - Appropriate Representatives or All Members?

Last post 06:29 pm October 13, 2019 by Bahaddin Ahmadov
5 replies
12:05 pm July 20, 2018

In the Nexus guide, page 7 : 2nd para under "Nexus Sprint Planning"

" During Nexus Sprint Planning, appropriate representatives from each Scrum Team validate and make adjustments to the ordering of the work as created during Refinement events. All members of the Scrum Teams should participate to minimize communication issues ".

Bit confused here :

For the Nexus Sprint Planning - who are the participants? is it the "appropriate representatives from each Scrum team "or "All members of the Scrum teams"?

My understanding is as follows:

- 1st "appropriate representatives" from each Scrum team meet up to discuss and review the refined PB. They then pull the PBI's that each team will most probably work on.

- Then "all members of the respective Scrum team" come together and plan in detail in their respective Scrum team's Sprint Planning.

a) Is this the right understanding

b) This doesn't stand out clearly in the Nexus guide, page 7( as quoted above)?

Thanks

Bharath S


03:42 pm July 20, 2018

a) Planning is not *necessarily* as linear as that, there could be some to-and-fro involved whereby representatives meet multiple times.

b) One way to read it is that all Scrum Team members participate and appropriate team representatives are used for certain purposes.


02:37 am July 21, 2018

One way to read it is that all Scrum Team members participate and appropriate team representatives are used for certain purposes.

 

 As Ian said, the key to interpreting this sentence is what are the appropriate representatives to do? What are the certain purposes?

The appropriate representatives validate and make adjustments to the ordering of the work as created during Refinement events to confirm and to minimize the potential dependencies before all Scrum Teams can pull the PBIs.


10:05 am August 1, 2018

Thank you very much for the clarifications Ian and Ching. Gave the much needed insight.


12:02 pm August 1, 2018

Bharath  it is confusing. In 2009 as I stated I actually scaled 6 teams in a Nexus type way before it even existed. I was struggling with the Nexus Sprint planning until I ordered the book they recommend.

Once I read the case studies It made sense. It explained it as a pre-planning meeting before each team’s individual sprint planning’s.  We know in the real world that the “appropriate members” are the folks who are considered the “Tech or Dev Leads or ones with the most domain knowledge” even though there is no reporting structure on the teams with all being equal. They meet with the PO and decide what each team will work on for that sprint and then take it back to their team and plan like you would any other sprint. That’s one way to think about it.

The phrasing vacillates between ”all” and “appropriate” members in a lot of the material. Confuses you.

Just like the Nexus Sprint back log is the sum of all team’s spring backlogs. That one got me to. I had to go set this up in my own personal Jira cloud instance and see how this would be configured in the real world. Once I did that it made since. I won’t go into details but that ambiguous wording gets the best of us.

As I always say I think real world scenarios vs theory. My brain does not allow me to think in theory but rather in real world practice.

Ian is right about the to-and-fro. This will extend your normal sprint planning and it should because you are working with many teams especially if they are co-located.


06:29 pm October 13, 2019

a) Planning is not *necessarily* as linear as that, there could be some to-and-fro involved whereby representatives meet multiple times.

b) One way to read it is that all Scrum Team members participate and appropriate team representatives are used for certain purposes.

Ian i cant understand. If Nexus consists of 9 teams, and each team consists of 9 people (as development team). 

So minimum 81 people should participate in Nexus Planning meeting?


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