Should you start with planning your sprints and then see how it fits your versions? Maybe start with versions and understand how your sprints look like? Maybe planning versions by themselves is enough? How do you start?

Decouple external planning from internal planning

External value (features your customers will enjoy) moves the organization. It is why you get paid. No one will pay for “let these kids develop for fun only”, this is why open source projects were born, for developers to write some code that may or may not be used by others. Versions are communicated out to your customers, named in a language your customers can understand “in version 1.0 we will allow our customers to upload their profile image” rather “we will integrate jQuery and develop highly scalable upload mechanism over Amazon Cloud”.

Internal value (features your organization will enjoy) keeps the organization fully operational, doing its best over time. It is usually not communicated out (your customers don’t really care if you’re using C# 4.0 or C# 3.0) and not named in customer’s lingo.

Versions are more tangible

Most of us stick to planning versions and our sprints actually look the same as our versions. We’re results oriented and we want to please our customers. Moreover, no external power is actively pushing us toward internal value.

Sometimes internal value > external value

If you’re strictly results oriented, you might produce great results but only for short, unpredictable periods. Sometimes you’ll need to delay customer’s value to handle broken “machine” in your factory. Your customers won’t like this delay, but they will understand it if you’ll offer tradeoffs and communicate “we are fixing internal machine to keep our high level of production steady”. They will prefer stable producing rather than insane, poor quality or unpredictable results.

Use Sprints to prioritize internal value with external value

Maybe you can devote 5% of the sprint to maintain your ability to produce fast? Maybe 10%? Maybe 1%? It’s really up to you to figure out what you want to push every sprint. Be careful of dismissing internal value, it’s your role to actively push for it.

How do I start?

I prefer to set some goals for my sprint first: (a) is there an internal value I want to push? (b) Are there people in my team that I want to push by leading features? (c) What is my team availability for this sprint?

With this in mind, I’m starting to plan my versions for the sprint and next one, making sure I understand perfectly what should enter the sprint and when. This is the first time I validate my plans. If the planned versions fully occupying my sprint (or even more than that), I raise a flag and trying to figure out if something can be shifted without causing damage. If not, and I have some “buffer”, it leaves me with understanding how much of my internal value I can push inside the sprint, alongside external value. This is the second time I validate my plans. Did I manage to push my goals to the sprint while producing external value? If I notice there is a big need for internal value that cannot wait, I will try to understand alternatives with our product team and supply tradeoffs.

Then, all is left is to organize when should each feature start/end and making sure external value (versions) are released on time while internal value is keep moving. Keep your head above the water, plan to last.