Sprint project management: Your complete guide

When linear project management frameworks like Waterfall and Critical Path aren’t delivering the results you need, it’s time to explore a new approach. Sprint project management, the backbone of the Agile framework, has clear benefits:

Transparent organization, with clearly defined task lists, sprint phases, and roles
Improved results, with continual feedback and opportunities to improve your approach
Boosted morale, with short and achievable bursts of work that make it easier to keep up momentum

Many ‘guides’ out there will tell you what a sprint is, and then leave you high and dry. This one is different.

First, I’ll cover the basics of sprint project management and help you decide whether these techniques fit your team and your project. Then, I’ll cover some of the common pitfalls you’ll have to navigate with this approach and give you the tips and tools you need to solve them.

And, because sprint project management relies heavily on progress tracking and project overviews, I’ll introduce you to Wrike. Wrike is a powerful, customizable work management platform with all the features you need to optimize your sprint planning and execution.

What makes sprint project management unique?

Let’s start by looking at how sprint project management differs from other project management methodologies.

If you’re still deciding whether an Agile methodology will work for your team, these principles can inform your decision. Or, if you’ve been trying sprint project management for a while and you’re still facing issues, going back to basics can get you back on track.

Sprint project management is different from sequential methods because it’s shaped by the four core ideas of Agile project management:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over detailed documentation
Customer collaboration over rigid contracts
Responding to change over following a plan

These ideas guide the project manager’s decisions, and that changes the approach to the project goals and the way tasks are prioritized.

When you apply the principles to real-world project work, you’ll notice three main outcomes:

A cyclical project structure
A flexible project plan
A more collaborative project experience

I’ll look at each of these characteristics in more detail now.

Sprint structure: Cyclical, not linear

The most obvious difference between sprint project management and a Waterfall approach is that sprint projects are managed in cycles, not straight lines.

The most common way to plan a project is to split up the tasks that go into making a deliverable and work on them in sequence. You know what the final product should look like in the very first phase of the project, you sign off on each major task before work on the next one begins, and you review the whole project in a single closing phase. This leaves you with a project management plan that can be plotted on a project timeline like a Gantt chart. Let’s contrast this with a sprint project:

Instead of scheduling all your project tasks in the planning phase, you add them to a sprint backlog. This is why sprint project management works well for developers. Every user story or bug can be added to the backlog when it’s reported, and then tackled during the next sprint to create an improved version of the product.

The tasks in the backlog are prioritized and allocated to sprints, which are time-boxed periods of between one and four weeks (depending on what works best for your Scrum team).

Then, your team tackles those tasks as a set, and they hand the deliverables to the client when they’re completed at the end of each sprint.

While traditional project structures focus on the five phases of a project management lifecycle, sprint projects have phases within each time-boxed period of work:

The planning phase, where the sprint planning meeting is held, and the backlog tasks are analyzed and delegated
The implementation phase, where the work is executed
The review phase, where the deliverables are approved
The retrospective, where you hold a sprint review to evaluate the results and look for ways to improve future sprints

Instead of moving from initiation, through planning and execution, to project closure, the sprint cycle repeats for as many iterations as it takes to clear the product backlog.

Sprint project planning: Flexible, not fixed

As I’ve touched on, sprint projects are also planned differently from sequential ones. Rather than defining the deliverables in detail in the project plan, they have the space to evolve.

Imagine your team is charged with developing a new version of a site used for official record-keeping. Compliance regulations leave you with very little flexibility, which means the requirements for the site are clear from the beginning of the project. In this case, a Waterfall approach makes sense.

But if you work for a different client to design, for example, an e-commerce site, you need a more flexible approach. In this case, breaking the project into Scrum sprints gives you room to do A/B testing and implement lessons from user analytics. In this case, sprint project management sees your team continually reviewing and adapting the project plan to build the site that you and your client agree is most likely to boost sales.

Flexibility and idea sharing are core to sprint project management. They’re built into the daily standups — known as Scrum meetings — which your team holds. You’ll also hold a sprint retrospective or sprint review meeting at the end of each cycle, where you can analyze your performance and look for ways to implement your client’s feedback as early as the next cycle.

Sprint project team: Collaborative, not siloed

There are very clear roles in a sprint team:

The Scrum master, who’s often the project manager too, oversees the project, eases collaboration, and organizes the daily Scrum meetings. They work with the client and other project stakeholders to define the project goals and communicate them to the team. Within each cycle, they allocate the resources the team needs so they can focus on burning through their tasks.
The product owner is responsible for making sure the product meets the customer’s requirements. They’re involved in prioritizing the backlog tasks, setting sprint goals, and reviewing the work to ensure it aligns with the customer’s objectives and their own.
The development team executes the work during each sprint cycle. In traditional Agile software development projects, this would mean writing code, fixing bugs, and testing. The development team might include quality assurance specialists to ease the workload for the developers and help improve the results.

The client also provides input as needed, including feedback on the deliverables from each sprint cycle.

This clear team structure opens the lines of communication and brings a high level of accountability to the project. It’s also designed to facilitate problem solving.

During the daily Scrum, for example, your team explains what they’ve been working on, flags roadblocks, and asks for the resources they need to complete their workload by the end of the sprint. Because of the flexibility I mentioned above, the Scrum master can focus on implementing those changes to keep up the momentum behind the project.

All of this creates a more collaborative project where the voices of all the stakeholders and the project team are heard at key points throughout the cycle. Rather than waiting for the end of a project phase, or even an entire project, there’s space for feedback to be given in increments, so the product and the process can be continually streamlined.

Put simply, sprint project management can be the right choice for teams where:

The project involves a high number of individual tasks, often interlinked and complex
The deliverables are expected to evolve or go through several different iterations over the lifetime of the project
The team and the manager are comfortable with a high degree of flexibility and input from the client

Sprints are traditionally used in software project management, but it’s possible to divide other types of projects into Agile sprint cycles too.

Marketing teams, product developers, and startups, for example, can all benefit from sprint project management to break a large amount of work or a high number of deliverables into more manageable chunks.

Common issues with sprint project management

Sprint project management is flexible and adaptable. It speeds up delivery to keep product owners and clients engaged. It can even help you identify problems earlier to lower the risk of project failure.

But even if sprint project management is the perfect choice for your team, there are some common pitfalls to be aware of.

I’ll be up-front here. The best way to avoid these common issues is to use a project management tool designed to cope with the unique aspects of the Agile approach.

You can’t stay responsive and communicative without a detailed overview of your backlog and your current sprint. You can’t control scope creep without a reliable record of what you’ve achieved so far. And the intensity of the sprint cycle means you simply won’t have time to email individual team members to share resources and keep them in the loop.

In this section and the final part of the post, I’ll also take you through the Wrike project management features that can centralize and streamline your sprints.

Let’s start by focusing on the challenges you’ll need to overcome to manage a sprint project successfully.

1. Unclear or changing requirements

Sprint project management — and Agile projects more generally — often run into issues when the stakeholders are too vague about their priorities. You might also work with clients who want to change their goals in the middle of a project.

The flexibility of the sprint structure is a blessing and a curse. The chance to pivot based on feedback can mean you create continually better versions of your product. But if they’re poorly planned, requested changes can make you lose focus — or even send you back to rework tasks from a previous sprint.

Another issue that sprint project managers need to mitigate is scope creep. If you work with a client who insists on “small changes” throughout the project, your timeline can easily start to slip. This can drastically compromise the quality of the product, the team’s experience, and, to be frank, your bottom line.

For example, imagine you’re working with a client who reveals a new compliance requirement halfway through the project, when you’re already testing a prototype. This creates a huge amount of additional work not only for your product developers but also for people like the technical writers working to create the instructions and notes for the product.

The good news is that you can put safeguards in place to reduce the impact this vagueness can have on your project. These solutions lie in the way you communicate expectations and draw the boundaries around your project.

Set clear expectations in sprint project management

When you create a standard intake process, you set clear expectations for everyone involved in your sprint project.

With an intake form — either for entire projects, or to add tasks to your backlog — project managers can get a clear picture of the client’s requirements and decide whether it’s possible to deliver them. By creating a DoR (definition of ready) and a DoD (definition of done) before the beginning of a project, you crystallize the project’s end goals, which can make it easier to stay focused through the iterations.

This documentation also makes the product owner’s job easier. The information you gather during the intake process (for example, in one of Wrike’s dynamic request forms) helps them communicate the project goals and the client’s pain points to the sprint team. It’s also vital to plan and invest in your communication strategy if you intend to use sprint management for complex projects. By centralizing communication about the project (for example, by using Wrike for your internal project messages), you build a record of the key discussions and decisions and ensure all your crucial updates are seen.

Put simply, a sprint project manager needs to solidify the project process, communicate expectations, and record the decision-making process from day one. Then, you can overcome the unpredictability that can send a sprint project off the rails.

2. Overcommitting and undercommitting

Newer product managers often over- or underestimate how much work their team members can complete during the time frame of a sprint. Even when you’re experienced with the Scrum framework, you might be under pressure from your managers to complete more story points per sprint.

Either way, you’ll run into issues.

Overcommitting during sprint planning is a quick way to miss your goals. You also run the risk of burning out your team, both because the workload is too high and because you’re missing out on the motivation that comes from the small, regular wins you expect on a sprint project roadmap. On the other side of the coin, undercommitment is a waste of your precious project resources.

Fix scheduling problems in the sprint project management

There are solutions to these pitfalls, too. It all comes down to using project management software to allocate tasks to your sprints more accurately. For example:

A task management solution helps you break larger aspects of your project, or even complex individual tasks and milestones, into manageable chunks. This helps you describe your product backlog items more accurately and gives you a better idea of how many hours each item will take to complete during the sprint process.
Capacity planning tools will give you a better idea of how much work your team could complete in a sprint. This is particularly useful if you work with team members from other departments, or if you’re facing a situation where a key member of, for example, your software development team has scheduled vacation. Tools like Wrike’s capacity planning software include automations to track your team’s workload and fairly allocate the tasks in your sprint.
Project reporting software can help you learn from your past sprint cycles. Wrike’s reports can show you how much you achieved in previous sprints, and how much of a crunch you faced in the final days. You can use these records to plan your upcoming sprints more accurately, basing your management decisions on data, rather than your gut feeling or the mood of your team.

3. Poor communication

Communication is key in sprint management. As I mentioned above, without fixed processes for exchanging information, the flexibility that’s built into this style of management becomes a disadvantage rather than a strength.

Imagine you have a sprint team that schedules daily standups, but not everyone attends because the team is distributed. When they don’t have the time and space to share their needs, they can be overlooked until later in the project. This makes it harder to build a culture of continuous improvement, and can even compromise your timeline and the quality of the product.

Communicate seamlessly in sprint project management

There are also solutions here that come down to centralization and documentation. When you use powerful and scalable communication tools, you solve a whole range of issues that can otherwise cause bottlenecks in your process.

By using centralized, asynchronous communication tools alongside your Scrums and pre-sprint meetings, you give every team member a way to catch up on the decisions you made. You also keep the lines of communication open for them to request the resources they need in good time.

Here, it’s also helpful to share a visualization or a summary rather than a transcript. With Wrike, you can use the generative AI features of our Work Intelligence® software to summarize documents and comment threads. You can also diagram your sprint progress, for example, in a burndown chart, and even include these visualizations in your real-time team dashboards. Again, the speed and clarity of communication in the software your Agile team uses are fundamental to the success of your sprints.

When you can shorten the time it takes to alert your team to a new task, communicate exactly what needs to be done, and show them who to contact if they need support, you’ll find it far easier to clear your sprint backlog in the time you have.

Sprint management with Wrike: 5 essential features

When you want to improve sprint planning and management, Wrike adapts to the way your team works best. With a detailed, live overview of every aspect of your sprint and advanced scheduling and risk management features, Wrike keeps you focused and shows you new opportunities to improve your process every time you start a new sprint cycle.

Monitor your progress in real time: Wrike includes tailored team and management dashboards that update automatically when your sprint tasks change status. With hundreds of potential integrations, we can pull the latest information from all your platforms, so you never miss an update.
Plan your standups with ease: With a shared team calendar, you can see what everyone has on their plate and avoid scheduling conflicts as you plan meetings during your sprint.
Prevent burnout by balancing workloads: With our sprint planning tools, you can monitor your team’s capacity from multiple angles and quickly adjust when tasks start to fall behind.
Improve stakeholder communication: Wrike’s easy-to-use platform keeps all your project contributors apprised of your sprint status, even across different departments at your company.
Get started fast with sprint planning templates: Wrike includes templates for Agile and hybrid project management, including tools to help you get the most out of sprint planning and retrospectives.

Whether you’re a seasoned Agile project manager looking to iron out recurring issues or you’re a newer manager looking for a fresh way to organize your work, sprint project management, done well, creates quality results for your clients and a great experience for your team. This style of management is much easier when you have the right tools in place.

Learn more about what Wrike can do for your projects today.

Sprint project management: Your complete guide