Sprint Planning Deck

About this template

Fourteen slides to run a planning session

This deck is the agenda for the planning meeting itself, not a report about it. It runs in the order a good session runs: capacity first, then the goal, then the split, then whatever the team cannot finish alone. Putting capacity before selection is the whole argument – a sprint is chosen inside the hours that actually exist, and the closing line, “We take on only what we planned”, is what that buys.

Seven agenda lines, four body pairs

Slide 2 runs what goes into this sprint, sprint goal, breaking the work down, risks and dependencies, planning meeting and retrospective, key metrics, trend analysis. The first four each carry a divider and a body slide across slides 3 to 10, line 05 is the comparison on slide 11, and the cards and bars are slides 12 and 13. The commitments read-back at the end of a session is not built as its own slide; either add a pair after slide 10 or read it off the closing slide.

The four body slides

1. What goes into this sprint: “32 person-days free, 3 days of leave taken out”, “Top 12 stories on the backlog locked in”, “15% held back for urgent work”. The leave deduction and the buffer are separate on purpose – subtract leave from capacity, and reserve the buffer inside what is left.
2. Sprint goal: one sentence. “Automated retries on failed payments, done” is the sample. The other two lines exist to defend it: “Off-goal requests move to the next sprint” and “Items that do not serve the goal are dropped”.
3. Breaking the work down: “Anything over 8 hours is split in two”, “Write a definition of done for each item”, “Flag every item with a dependency”.
4. Risks and dependencies: “1 item waiting on an outside review”, “2 items waiting on final design”, “A fallback task named for blockers”. Name the fallback in the meeting, not on the day someone gets blocked.

The metric cards and the velocity bars

Slide 12 holds “Capacity (person-days)” 32, “Stories committed” 12, “Points planned” 38 and “Urgent-work buffer (%)” 15. Capacity and stories repeat slide 4, so edit them as a set. Points planned is the one number that has to line up with slide 13: the bars run “S24 actual” 41, “S25 actual” 37, “S26 actual” 44 and “S27 plan” 38, so the plan bar and the card must carry the same figure. The last bar is styled as the plan rather than an actual, which is what makes the chart readable as a commitment against three delivered sprints. The footnote reads “Unit: internal tally” because points are not comparable across teams – keep that caveat or delete the chart.

The comparison slide

Slide 11 separates “Planning” from “Retrospective”: counting capacity, choosing and cutting, agreeing done up front on one side; looking at the result, recording why work carried over, adjusting how the team works on the other. It is there for the session that drifts into a post-mortem twenty minutes in.

What goes wrong

• Committing to a velocity average and calling it capacity. Thirty-two person-days already has the leave taken out; an average of past points does not know about next week’s holiday.
• Spending the 15% buffer at planning time. Once it is allocated it is not a buffer, and the next urgent request takes a committed story out instead.
• Writing a goal that is a list. If slide 6 needs a comma, the sprint has two goals and one of them will lose.