When Sprint Planning is Hunger Games with Meghan McInerny

“What advice do you have on structuring sprint planning meetings in an agency setting with different product owners and project teams (when each PM is 'competing' for the same development resources)?" That is the question I got during the Q&A portion of a webinar I did recently for The Bureau of Digital. This is a scenario where you have an agency model approach to the work, so people are spread across multiple projects with different team configurations all running at the same time. Except they are trying to do Scrum, and, in this particular case, there is no real clarity on project priority, which makes it pretty tough to figure out who gets first dibs when it comes to allocation of human knowledge workers. I did my best to respond to the question during the webinar, but I wanted to get some advice from an expert with deeper agency experience. So, I reached out to Meghan McInerny. Before stepping into her current role as Director of Strategic Experience Design at Best Buy, Meghan spent 13 years at Clockwork Interactive, the last 7 years of which she served as COO. She is also the co-author of Interactive Project Management: Pixels, People, and Process. In this episode of the podcast, we talk through the issues, risks, and opportunities that come with a “Hunger Games” approach to Sprint Planning and offer some advice on how to cope with and/or resolve the problem defined in the question above. We also talk about her current role at Best Buy and why that is such a fascinating problem space to be working in right now. Side Note: The webinar I did for the Bureau of Digital focused on the new version of my Sprint Capacity Calculator and how to get the most out of Sprint Planning. These webinars are normally available in a recorded format only to members of the Bureau, but they are very kind and have made this one public in case you’d like to check it out after listening to the podcast. Contacting Meghan Web: http://www.meghanmcinerny.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meghanmcinerny/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/irishgirl Links Meghan’s Book - Interactive Project Management: Pixels, People, and Process (Voices That Matter) https://amzn.to/3hyPRGA The Bureau of Digital: https://bureauofdigital.com Better Sprint Planning Webinar: https://youtu.be/Wlz5gSfqw74