A room for Software delivery teams

Sprint Planning Exchange

Plan a sprint with visibility into adjacent projects, interruptions, and unresolved dependencies.

Why this might help

Sprint planning gets messy when your team can't see what's happening around them. Another team's release is landing mid-sprint. Someone's on-call rotation eats three days. A dependency from last sprint still isn't resolved. The sprint context canvas helps your team lay all of that out before you commit to anything. You look at the full picture together — work, interruptions, and open questions — so the plan you make actually reflects reality, not just wishful thinking.

Does this feel familiar?

  • Your team commits to a sprint and then discovers halfway through that a shared service is frozen for another team's release.
  • Someone gets pulled into on-call or support duty and the sprint quietly falls apart because no one planned for it.
  • A story keeps getting carried over because it's waiting on another team, but nobody flagged it as blocked at planning.
  • Two teams plan the same sprint week without knowing they're competing for the same person's time.

Try this together

  1. Before you open the planning board, spend five minutes listing every known interruption — on-call shifts, company events, team members with partial availability — so they're visible from the start.
  2. Ask each person to name one thing from the previous sprint that's still unresolved or waiting on someone outside the team.
  3. Check in with one adjacent team to find out if anything they're shipping this sprint could affect yours — even a quick message works.
  4. Draw a simple line between any story that depends on an outside decision and mark it clearly so the whole team sees it, not just the person who knows about it.
  5. End planning by reading the sprint back out loud as a short story: 'We're doing X, but we know Y might slow us down, and Z is still waiting on the other team.' If it sounds shaky, adjust before you lock it in.

Sprint Context Canvas

  1. Open a new sprint context canvas and write the sprint goal at the top in one plain sentence — something your whole team would agree on.
  2. Add a section for known interruptions and fill it in together: on-call rotations, partial availability, company-wide events, anything that eats real time.
  3. List every story or task that depends on a person, team, or decision outside your group, and note what exactly you're waiting for.
  4. Add a row for adjacent projects — note what nearby teams are shipping this sprint and whether any of it touches your work.
  5. Review the canvas as a team before finalising commitments. If the interruptions and dependencies look heavy, trim the plan to match what's actually possible.

Questions worth talking about

What do we already know could interrupt this sprint, and have we actually made room for it?

Which stories are sitting on a decision or piece of work that someone outside this team controls?

If the adjacent team ships late or changes direction, which of our commitments breaks first?

A few common questions

What if we don't know what adjacent teams are doing this sprint?

That's actually the most common starting point. Even a quick message to one team lead before planning can surface a lot. You don't need perfect information — you just need enough to avoid the most obvious collisions. A shared channel or a short weekly sync with neighbours helps over time.

How is this different from just using our regular sprint board?

A sprint board tracks what your team is doing. The sprint context canvas captures what's happening around your team at the same time. Think of it like checking the weather before you plan a picnic — the board tells you what food to bring, the canvas tells you whether it's actually a good day to go.

Can Tindlo help with this kind of planning?

Yes, in a specific way. Tindlo's multi-layer workspace lets your team put sprint work, personal schedules, and Google Calendar events on the same shared time axis. That makes it easier to see interruptions and adjacent work sitting alongside your sprint commitments, rather than scattered across separate tools.

Keep the story close to the schedule

A date makes more sense when you can also see the reason, the owner, and the work around it. Tindlo brings those pieces together when a calendar alone isn't enough.

See how Tindlo works →

Where would you like to go next?

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