What the Military can teach us about Sprint Planning

As a coach, I've seen many Sprint Planning sessions. Some are more effective than others. When it comes to planning, the military has a long history and we can learn a few things from them.

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything

                                                                              - Dwight Eisenhower

I have always interpreted the meaning behind this quote by Eisenhower to mean that through the act of planning, we gain a shared understanding of what we are attempting to do; the plan itself may change, but the goal won't

The military talks about "Commander's Intent" which looks at the mission, the desired end state, and the purpose of an operation. While this seems to be bigger than a sprint goal, a good sprint goal will help the team understand the end-state of the sprint.

If the team has a good sprint goal, it will help them deliver on the intent but still give some flexibility on how they deliver. Without following any specific military planning technique, here are some other aspects of a military plan that we can borrow in our sprint planning:

• Resources & People: Do we have all the equipment we need? Are test environments ready? Do we have test data? Do we know who is going to be available? Any planned vacations or holidays that impact the sprint? I encourage my scrum masters to keep a spreadsheet to keep track of the team so they can tailor their capacity to the available developers. 
• Lessons Learned: Have we included kaizens from the last retrospective into our plan? Do we have them on the sprint backlog?
• The Plan: The team should self-organize around the work that needs to be accomplished.
• Contingencies: Once we have a plan, do we thing about what could go wrong, a technique the military calls Red Teaming. What do we do if the test environment goes down? What if that snow being predicted for the end of the week is worse than they predict?

Taking the extra time to discuss all these aspects to the plan will build a stronger understanding of the plan, which will help the team make better decisions when things don't go according to plan.