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Importance of Self-Management in Sprint Planning

Updated: Jul 28, 2023

“Good teams incorporate teamwork into their culture, creating the building blocks for their success.”-Ted Sund quist


Sprint planning

When it comes to agile and scrum, self-managing teams are one of the highlighted points as it is said that it makes a lot more difference in a system, process, and teams. Self-management means a group or team that does not require continuous mentoring and guidance to make decisions, they can manage their priorities, decision-making, and problem-solving, along with taking further steps for betterment. Self-management is not new to all of us but we see in a traditional working system that self-management is conveniently skipped.


In this competitive and unpredictable market, traditional systems are not enough to gain success as time is the most crucial element. So it is required to have agile and scrum with self-management quality in teams. In scrum measuring the value of delivered with done incrementing during the sprint is necessary. By understanding the shortcomings of the traditional working system scrum and agile are built where they can go beyond the old system and introduce much more reliable and faster processes and change of mindset so that it can support the organizations in delivering the right product value to their customers in the shortest possible time.


The main use of self-managing in scrum and agile is used in sprint planning where decision-making is important. In sprint planning teams are mainly focused on deciding the what, how, who, why, and when of the product or features. In short, we can say that in agile and scrum self-management is introduced so that the decision-making can be done quickly reducing the wastage of time between two decisions and processes. But while implementing self-management it is necessary to have a clear goal and clear accountability. When teams have self-management then the scenario at sprint planning will be like this:


self management

The teams will firstly decide on why they will take on this to the next sprint, why working on this product is important and why we should involve our time in this product further. Along with the team product owners will also help in getting the answers and together they will decide the sprint goal by understanding the team proposal and market scenario.

Then teams will also decide on taking the items in the current sprint and are they achievable within the sprint from the product backlog. So it means secondly teams will decide what product backlog items will be included in the sprint.


Furthermore, scrum teams combine to decide on how to implement items and which steps to be followed. What are the building blocks and sequence of items to be built? Which steps will be taken for the required expected quality and how a team will collaborate?


Self-managing teams in agile and scrum are responsible for some of the managerial roles and relieve them from it. Some of these roles include

  • Teams monitor their progress and check if they are on the right track.

  • Teams themselves manage their off-track direction and bring themselves back on track.

  • The team themselves manage and decide how they will work.

  • Teams resolve their conflicts and problem within themselves. They get to the solution within themselves and maintain the team’s collaboration and trust.

Even though managers in Agile and scrum are not responsible for

  • Tracking the sprint status of a team

  • Not facilitate any status or manager meetings

  • Order teams on working overtime and what to do things

  • Decide on the team members to be taken aside for solving production issues

  • Monitor the team in agile and scrum

Teams never hide or skip managers during their progress and have to compete for transparency with them because teams are well aware that managers have much higher responsibilities with their teams and projects that will help the team and organization to lead to success.

Scrum self-management helps the team and individual to bring value by providing the highest motivation and creativity. Self-management helps teams to solve the problems quickly and accurately as the person working on it needs to take the decision increasing the confidence of the individual and trust of an organization towards them.

“Time is the most precious element of human existence. The successful person knows how to put energy into time and how to draw success from time.”- Denis Waitley



About Advance Agility

We, at Advance Agility, are the new-age Agile Coaching, Consulting and IT services company. We enable end-to-end Digital Transformation. Agile execution is integral to our being. We are doing SAFe implementation with small, medium and large organization across the globe. Our vision is to be the leading Agile execution player globally. To keep adding value at every process stage. We are on a mission to empower our clients, move from concept to cash in the shortest sustainable lead time by adopting human centric approach to business agility. Embracing the change is in our DNA. Things that keep us apart are Quicker and Seamless execution with an End-to-end gamut of services. Our Global presence and Stellar Track Record give us an edge over our competitor.


Connect with us at advanceagility.com to learn about SAFe and SAFe Implementation. We provide various SAFe certification courses along with DevOps, Scrum, Agile Coaching and more trainings. Write to us at contact@advanceagilty.com for any agile training or consulting needs. We are always looking for competent agile trainers as well. So if you are a good trainer or want to become one, do get in touch with us to that we can learn, grow and achieve together.

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