Using Sprints

Quick reference

• 00:04 While the Task Board is quite useful for just updating the percent complete
• 00:08 of a task or showing the progress of a task as it goes through the project,
• 00:11 there's another way that you can manage projects.
• 00:14 And that's a more agile way, using what we call Sprints.
• 00:18 Click the Project tab, and then click the Manage Sprints icon.
• 00:22 In Agile, you set up what's called a Sprint.
• 00:25 Usually they're about two or three weeks in duration.
• 00:28 What you'll do is put all of the work items that you want to do in that Sprint,
• 00:32 and only focus on them.
• 00:34 You typically do not do any other work other than what's in that Sprint.
• 00:38 By default, Microsoft Project will set up one Sprint for you.
• 00:42 You can add more by clicking this Add Sprint button.
• 00:45 Now, I would be cautious here because you probably don't want to create let's say 50
• 00:50 Sprints, even though you know that your project might have 50 of them.
• 00:54 That's because on occasion, and
• 00:56 I don't recommend you do this as a best practice, but on occasion you might need
• 01:01 to create a duration of let's say four weeks instead of two weeks.
• 01:05 You can do that with this little dialog here, and then click Add, and you can see
• 01:11 now we've got a few two week Sprints, and then we also have this four week Sprint.
• 01:16 Click the OK button, right now we're still in the Task Board view.
• 01:21 But notice up here this this new Sprints tab, and that's not going to go away.
• 01:25 This will show up on your project from now on.
• 01:29 So let's take a look at what we have here.
• 01:31 There's the Task Board, that's what we're on now, then we can click Planning.
• 01:35 Now what you're seeing here is a list of all the items in your backlog,
• 01:40 with that same filtering capability up here on the top right.
• 01:45 But now you're going to say, here are the activities that we're going to work on for
• 01:51 Sprint 1, that two week time period.
• 01:54 And then we could say well, following those two weeks, we'll add a few more.
• 01:59 Now you don't need to plan out all these Sprints,
• 02:01 as a matter of fact you probably don't want to,
• 02:04 maybe something won't get done in Sprint 1 and it needs to move to Sprint 2.
• 02:08 Don't try to get so specific right now, you want to maybe plan
• 02:12 about a month to not more than two months in advance with these Sprints.
• 02:16 It can be a little monotonous doing all this dragging and dropping.
• 02:19 So if you want to get really fast with it, you can click on the drop down underneath
• 02:24 the Planning icon, and choose the Sprint Planning Sheet.
• 02:27 And then you can just go ahead and set the Sprints here if you like.
• 02:32 And of course you can use that drop down that you've learned in previous videos.
• 02:37 Once you go ahead and click back up here, and go to the Planning Board,
• 02:41 you'll see that it's automatically populated.
• 02:44 So really, the Sprint name is nothing more than a custom field.
• 02:47 Before we really get started here working with the Sprints,
• 02:51 I want to point something out, notice how Sprint 1 has all these words acquire or
• 02:55 acquisition in them.
• 02:56 I'm going to go over here to the Sprint icon to look at how I'm going to plan
• 03:00 the sprint.
• 03:01 Notice there's nothing listed here that says acquire.
• 03:06 I see Excavate, Pour, and Purchase.
• 03:08 If I come back here to the planning icon,
• 03:11 you can see those items are over here in Sprint 2.
• 03:14 Well why is that?
• 03:16 Well that's because if I click this Manage icon, you can see the first
• 03:21 Sprint started by default when I originally created this project.
• 03:26 Well now we're recording this video, and you can see it's at 3/8/19.
• 03:31 So in fact, what I'm looking at in when I come to the Sprint is Sprint number 2.
• 03:38 To see the other Sprint, what I can do is click the drop down underneath
• 03:42 the Sprint icon and then choose Sprint 1.
• 03:45 There we go, there's our acquire items.
• 03:47 I'm going to go back over here to Sprint number 2.
• 03:51 Notice that there's something over here that's blocked, well,
• 03:55 that's because in a previous video, we use the Task Board to move that to Blocked.
• 04:01 So that's okay, if the Task Board and the Sprint Board are essentially one and
• 04:06 the same, they have the same functionality.
• 04:10 As a matter of fact,
• 04:11 this Blocked didn't even exist in Project until I created it in the previous video.
• 04:17 So what happens when we want to work with another item that's not on the board,
• 04:23 we can go back to planning, and let's take Install drywall and
• 04:27 put that into Sprint 2, or our current Sprint.
• 04:31 I'll go back to the Sprint and there's our Install drywall.
• 04:36 And you can take this box or what we like to call cards in Agile,
• 04:41 and drag it and drop it to the proper place.
• 04:44 One of the nice things that Microsoft Project gives you is the ability to work
• 04:49 in the board, and in a sheet view, and we looked at the sheet view once before.
• 04:54 When you're working in a Sprint, you can actually go ahead and
• 04:58 take an activity and move it to the next column.
• 05:02 Here, I'm going to take Excavate land and move it to next up.
• 05:05 If I click on the Sprint icon, you can see there it is.
• 05:09 But what I want to point out, is we set up a rule that says when you drag and
• 05:14 drop that card to next up, it sets the percent complete to 25%.
• 05:20 I'm going to double click, Excavate land, and it says 0.
• 05:23 Why does it say that?
• 05:25 Because it only sets it to 25% if you use this drag and drop functionality.
• 05:32 If I double click on Poor foundation, you see it's 0,
• 05:37 and drag it over here and double click, you can see it's 25%.
• 05:43 So the one that I manually edited in the sheet did not update.
• 05:48 So just be aware of that,
• 05:51 use the board view as much as possible.

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