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About this lesson
Using Project Online Desktop, you can define the sprints, add tasks to those sprints, and then use a board view to define the completion of the work.
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Using Sprints.mpp471.5 KB Using Sprints - Completed.mpp
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Quick reference
Project Online desktop allows you to manage your project using agile techniques. A common approach to managing agile projects is to define sprints. These sprints can last as long as you need but are typically two to four weeks in duration.
Using Project Online desktop, you can define the sprints, add tasks to those sprints, and then use a board view to define the completion of the work.
Steps
To access sprints, follow these steps:
- Select the Project tab.
- In the Properties section, select the Manage Sprints icon.
- A dialog appears. Select the Add Sprints button and when you are done, select the Ok button.
- A new tab appears. Select the Sprints tab and you will find icons that allow you to manage your project.
- 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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