Sprint Plan

Sprint Plan

Plan a sprint with capacity estimation, story selection, dependency mapping, and risk identification. Use when preparing for sprint planning,

Category: development Source: phuryn/pm-skills

What Is This?

Overview

Sprint Plan is a structured skill designed to guide development teams through the full sprint planning process. It combines capacity estimation, story selection, dependency mapping, and risk identification into a single cohesive workflow. Rather than treating these activities as separate concerns, Sprint Plan treats them as interconnected steps that must be balanced against each other to produce a realistic and achievable sprint.

The skill works by accepting inputs such as backlog files, velocity history, and team availability data, then producing a prioritized sprint plan with clear sequencing and flagged risks. It is particularly useful when teams struggle to align story selection with actual team capacity, or when hidden dependencies between stories cause mid-sprint blockers. By surfacing these issues before the sprint begins, teams can make informed decisions during planning sessions rather than discovering problems after work has started.

Sprint Plan is built for use with AI-assisted development environments and integrates naturally into preparation workflows before formal sprint planning meetings. It reduces the time spent in planning ceremonies by doing the analytical groundwork in advance, allowing the team to focus on discussion and decision-making rather than calculation.

Who Should Use This

  • Scrum Masters who need to facilitate sprint planning sessions and want to arrive with a pre-analyzed capacity and story breakdown.
  • Product Owners who are responsible for backlog prioritization and need to understand how story selection affects sprint scope.
  • Engineering Managers managing multiple team members with varying availability, time off, or split allocations across projects.

Why Use It?

Problems It Solves

  • Teams consistently overcommit to sprints because capacity is estimated informally or based on headcount rather than actual availability.
  • Story selection is driven by stakeholder pressure rather than velocity data, leading to incomplete sprints and missed commitments.
  • Dependencies between stories are discovered mid-sprint, causing blockers that delay delivery and disrupt team flow.
  • Risk identification is skipped during planning due to time pressure, leaving teams unprepared for common failure modes.
  • Planning meetings run long because analytical work is done in the meeting rather than before it.

Core Highlights

  • Calculates team capacity based on individual availability, accounting for holidays, meetings, and part-time allocations
  • Selects stories from the backlog using velocity history as a constraint
  • Maps dependencies between selected stories to identify sequencing requirements
  • Flags risks associated with specific stories, team members, or external dependencies
  • Produces a prioritized sprint backlog with recommended sequencing
  • Supports input from backlog files, velocity spreadsheets, and team calendars
  • Generates a summary suitable for sharing with stakeholders before the planning meeting

How to Use It?

Basic Usage

Invoke the skill with a description of the sprint context and any relevant files:

/sprint-plan "Sprint 14 for the payments team, starting Monday. 
Team: Alice (full), Bob (4 days), Carol (out Wed-Thu). 
Velocity: 34 points average over last 3 sprints."

You can also pass backlog files directly:

/sprint-plan backlog.csv velocity_history.json team_calendar.ics

Specific Scenarios

Scenario 1: Reduced capacity sprint. When a team member is on leave or a public holiday falls within the sprint, pass the adjusted availability explicitly. The skill will recalculate capacity and recommend removing lower-priority stories to match the reduced velocity ceiling.

Scenario 2: Dependency-heavy backlog. When multiple stories share a common technical dependency, the skill will group them and recommend sequencing the blocking story first. It will also flag the risk if the blocking story is large relative to available capacity.

Real-World Examples

A payments team used Sprint Plan before their planning meeting and discovered that three high-priority stories all depended on a single API integration that had not been started. The skill flagged this as a sequencing risk and recommended moving the integration story to the top of the sprint.

A mobile team with two engineers on partial allocation used Sprint Plan to recalculate their effective velocity and removed two stories that would have caused overcommitment.

Important Notes

Requirements

  • Team availability data must be provided for accurate capacity calculation, including any planned absences or split allocations.
  • A backlog with story point estimates is required for scope balancing. Unestimated stories will be flagged but not included in capacity calculations.
  • At least one sprint of velocity history is needed. Three or more sprints produce significantly more reliable recommendations.