Jumping With A Plan

Jumping into a complex effort without a plan is asking for it. Between a few simple index cards, post it notes or slips (Slip Method is an old school technique similar to stories) you can manage a lot. Give our scrum excel planning tool a try and see how much you really need.

It is free, open source and available from our Facebook for download.

BTW – If you have feedback please let us know. If you want to polish it, send it back and we like if we would be happy to reference your contribution.

Excel Planning Tool

Here is the scrum excel spreadsheet planning tool that has been used by many of our clients. And it is still in use.

This tool is made available under the creative commons for your use and modification, please attribute the source.

The Scrum Excel Planning Tool can be used to track daily status for each sprint, sprint burndowns, track stories and tasks as well as the Product Backlog. This is a no-frills bare bones tool for managing the work. It takes a small amount of setup. The current release requires very little explanation but, if you need help just ask.

The Excel-based tool is for managing the work in an agile product. It tracks and manages both stories and tasks as well as work remaining to complete those tasks. It supports tracking product, release and iteration at the workload burndown. The tools supports a story centered work break down structure WBS. Start using the tool by loading the known Product Backlog into the Product Backlog worksheet and then work through your sprint planning to load a given sprint. Product Backlog items can be derived from the planning effort or from interviews with customers and the Product Owner. Product Backlog items represent the prioritized functional and non-functional requirements for the system to be built. From a “Managing the Work in an Agile Project” it represents the work we think we might have to do. Details about how to derive and estimate the Product Backlog are in our Scrum Methodology Blog post or in Advanced Scrum Topics.

We are happy to provide this for your use. If you are satisfied then please let us know and if not please let us know. This is a simple tool yet fairly powerful tool to get started with a Scrum Team.

The tool has been built with a YAGNI (just enough and no frills) point of view to support a team. It can handle 15 people or so with clear evelvating goals and one product. After 15 folks on one team you need to do other things to handle the communcation and cooridnation. However, again it can scale with the right focus. Agile distributed work patterns can be achieved but, other considrations are necessary to achive good balance.

Enjoy

- the 3Back Team

Download For FREE Exclusively on 3Back’s Facebook

Instructions on How to Download The Scrum Excel Planning Tool:
Go to 3Back’s Facebook, Go to the Scrum Planning Tool Tab, Click Like, Download the Scrum Excel Planning Tool.