Strategies for Setting Realistic Sprint Goals

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There’s a lot to be said about a career in web development. You have the pleasure of interesting, challenging, and important work. You have significant job security in a vast and ever-expanding field. And you have tremendous earning potential and robust opportunities for career advancement.

But there are challenges. The work can be relentless. Budgets are often tight and deadlines are even tighter. Sprints can be an ideal strategy for helping scrum teams get a tremendous amount of high-quality work done in a relatively short period of time.

But sprints aren’t a panacea for the fast-paced and high-pressure workplace environments that scrum teams encounter every day. If you want your sprints to be successful, then it’s critical that you plan them well. This includes setting realistic goals that promote optimal results without overwhelming your team.

What Is a Sprint?

Fundamentally, a sprint is a set of project goals condensed into a specific, and often very brief, timeline. The sprint is designed to help scrum teams meet often highly demanding project outcomes and timelines. In sprints, team leaders define a specific goal and establish an abbreviated time period in which the team comes together to complete a designated roster of high-priority project tasks.

The sprint helps to ensure that even the most complex and ambitious projects are progressing according to schedule and in adherence with client requirements and specifications. Each sprint is generally followed by a period of testing. Tests ensure that the desired outcomes for that particular stage of project development have been met according to the client’s particular needs and goals.

This then allows the scrum team to make necessary modifications before moving on to the next set of high-priority tasks in the subsequent sprint. The result is an approach to web development that is profoundly customer-centric, ensuring an enhanced client experience, better product outcomes, and an exceptional product and company brand.

The Challenges of the Sprint

As previously suggested, there are many benefits to the sprint model, especially when schedules are tight and work demands are overwhelming. Sprints allow scrum teams to closely collaborate on a shared set of high-value sprint goals, directing their attention to this central, common mission to the exclusion of all other work obligations for the duration of the sprint.

Challenges can arise, however, when sprint goals are not well-chosen, are ill-defined, or are unrealistic. Problems in defining your scrum team’s sprint goals may leave your team feeling overwhelmed and demoralized. Likewise, poorly defined sprint goals may result in product outcomes that fall far short of client expectations and requirements.

The Role of the Project Manager

Project managers are generally the first line of defense when it comes to conducting a successful sprint. Project managers, for instance, are uniquely qualified to understand the particular goals, needs, and priorities of a project. This enables them to define segmented development strategies to bring those elements to fruition.

Sprint goals are the milestones that must be achieved in that sequential process of project development. But the achievement of these milestones is predicated on sequencing, prioritization, and pacing, all of which fall under the project manager’s purview.

Sequencing and Prioritizing

When it comes to realistic sprint goals, defining priorities and determining the sequence in which each high-priority task must be completed is the first order of business.

For example, in project development, there are few priorities more important than security. If, however, you find your scrum team completing one or two sprints with little or no regard to cyberthreats, your team may be vulnerable to a host of cyberthreats, from brute force attacks to more subtle but no less harmful breaches.

The failure to prioritize and sequence goals effectively may well result in inefficiencies, missed deadlines, and financial losses. As in the previous example, by not addressing cybersecurity as a first order of business in a first sprint, your team may well find itself compelled to go back to square one. They may need to redo all the work that has already been done in order to address a vulnerability that should never have arisen in the first place.

Proper Pacing

Sprints, by definition, are designed to get a great deal of high-level work done in a relatively short period of time. That does not mean, however, that sprints should be used as an excuse to overwhelm your scrum team with untenable quantities of work.

In fact, if you consistently stuff your sprints with overwhelming amounts of work, sooner or later your team is going to experience burnout due to overwork. And when workers are exposed to chronic stress in this way, their work performance and their physical and mental health will suffer.

Web development, after all, is always already a formidably challenging work. It requires tremendous cognitive effort, long hours, and intense skill. If you combine this with an ultra-demanding volume of such high-level work and fast-paced work schedules, you’re placing a tremendous burden on your team.

Eventually, the mind and body rebel. Your workers will either become physically sick, emotionally exhausted, or professionally disengaged – or all of the above.

However, by pacing your sprint goals, and by being more realistic about how much can be done and in what time frame, you’re not only going to yield better results but you’re also going to have a happier, healthier team.

Pacing enables your team to progress steadily toward the project’s completion while using each sprint not only to get valuable work done but also to memorialize all that the team has already accomplished during the development cycle. In this way, sprints become the marker of past successes rather than the shadow of previous failures.

The Takeaway

Sprints are a highly effective strategy for completing ambitious web development projects on tight timelines. However, sprints are only as successful as the goals they are designed to achieve. Establishing realistic sprint goals helps to keep your team motivated, prevent inefficiencies, and improve overall project outcomes.

The key to establishing realistic goals for your sprints is to ensure that you have sequenced and prioritized your sprint goals properly. It’s also important to ensure you are pacing your sprint goals in a manner that will motivate and galvanize your scrum team without overwhelming them.

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