Shared Sprint Schedules

[Lee Cunningham]

Experimenting with Shared Sprint Schedules, I have discovered that it isn't just the schedule that is shared, but the sprint itself, such that a sprint's backlog is distributed across all projects sharing that sprint.  There is scant information in the Help files, and the Administration video is out of date (does not reflect the current sprint scheduling functionality).  I have read all of the discussion posts regarding sprint schedules, and am still having difficulty getting my head completely around the the practicality of this capability.  Perhaps an explanation of the scenarios that were in mind when this functionality was introduced would be helpful.  Also, any information from users in the "real world" as to why and how you use this would be welcome.

Thanks in advance!

[Maggie Bullington]

Sharing a sprint schedule lets a team work on more than one project in the hierarchy (or a group of teams who work together on the same projects and schedule – in this case you’d use both shared sprint schedules *and* the team asset). The ideal in the agile world is to have one team for one project, but that is not possible a lot of the time in reality (so my clients tell me ;)

So Team A works on 3 different projects. Those 3 projects should use the same schedule. Then Team A can select the root project in the tree along with the schedule filter (both features in 9.0) to view and plan their work across those 3 projects, while still keeping one sprint, one velocity, one taskboard….make sense? Even if you just have a parent project with several releases underneath, and one team working the project/releases, you’d want to share the schedule across the release projects to have a continuous schedule for that team.

 

-Maggie

[Stout, Michael]

Our organization hasn’t upgraded to the “winter of 09” release yet so I haven’t had the opportunity to try/test some of the features Maggie describes below.  I would love to see some demonstrations of the use case scenarios below or similar ones.  Would I be able to see something like that in one of the weekly product demos that V1 does each week?

 

--Mike

[Andy Powell]

Hi Mike and Lee,

 

Our weekly webinars don’t go into detail on the new features.  When Winter 09 came out we did a special webinar that focused on just the new features.  You may not have seen the announcement, but it was in our product newsletter.  We plan to offer a “What’s New” demonstration with each release and we’ll continue to announce it in the product newsletter.

 

For the Winter 09 release, we did record the webinar.  The plan is to put it up on our community site, but that hasn’t happened yet.  I’ll post out to this website when it happens.

 

Regards,

Andy

[Rene Rosendahl]

I think the various configuration options around setting up the project tree in combination with sprints, teams, schedules, programs, reporting, and project filters is powerful but also one of the more complex features of VersionOne. I agree with Lee that this topic is not well understood and documented and consequently many users won’t fully utilize the tool’s capabilities.

In addition to a webinar and/or documentation, would it be possible to maybe visually illustrate the 5 most common scenarios somehow? I think that would help guide people towards an optimal configuration.

I’m not sure what the best answer is here, but there’s definitely a void to be filled.

 

Just my 2 cents.

Rene

[Luanne]

It's funny that you mention this as we have been discussing this over
the past few weeks. With the Winter 09 release and the capababilities
that were added for the project tree we are now in a position to be
able to provide this type of information. Before it was difficult to
provide typical scenarios because each company is different and there
wasn't a lot of flexibility around the tree.

I'd like to get some feedback from the community on how you all might
want to see this type of guide.

-Luanne