How do you Sprint plan in Asana?

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Hi there, I’m about to move forward with the paid plan for my team, and still have a few details I’d like to figure out.

  1. I have a backlog view that’s all tasks across all projects as a saved search (thanks to some earlier help here!). When we do the sprint planning, we add the sprint project to the task, and it properly puts it in the sprint board in the right position. The sprint project has a due date. I’d like for the task to take the due date of the sprint project when I add the task. The only automation I can find is one to add + number of days to the due date, and that’s not at all useful to me. I wonder if there’s something I’m missing here.

  2. I would like to keep the sections in sync. Once we start a sprint, we aren’t really looking at the individual projects or the backlog anymore until we go back to planning. When I move a task from In Progress to QA on the sprint project, I’d like it to move to the same section in the e.g., Infrastructure project. Haven’t been able to figure out how to do that either.

Are there some sort of shenanigans I can do with custom fields or something to make these things happen?

Thanks!

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Hi @anon29650799

I try to provide my take on your questions:

  1. I don’t think there is any existing rule where you can set all due dates of all task within a project to the same due date than the project itself (I am also not quite sure if this makes sense , as I personally prefer to have a more detailed planning with different due dates within the sprint, but that’s my personal opinion). The only way I see is that you set the due date of all sprint tasks manually as part of your spring planning. You could use the multi-select option where you can select and manipulate up to 50 tasks to make it easier :slight_smile: …

  2. To achieve your goal, you could work with custom fields that trigger a rule which moves the task to a specific section (e.g. if custom field «status» is change to QA , move task to board section «QA». However you would have to setup the same sections AND the same rules in each project you would want this to happen. You would also have to make sure that you add this custom field to your collection, so it is available in all your projects. It might be some work in the beginning - depending on how many projects you are having. But once you have set this up the change to the custom field would trigger the move to the specific section in all those projects. For future projects (or if you want so save some time in general :slight_smile: ) you could also create a project-template that already has those sections and rules set up.

I hope this helps. If something is not clear, let me know. Not sure if I got all your wishes right.

Cheers
Daniel

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Thank you for your reply, Daniel. We actually have standardized due dates within the sprint event. I don’t know if you find this interesting or not, but we do it that way to make sure there’s a cool-down period and people aren’t just sprinting all the time because that’s exhausting.

If you are curious, we run on a 3-week sprint cycle that starts on Tuesdays. So we sprint for 10 working days until two weeks is up, and then ALL the work stops. If it isn’t finished, it goes back into the backlog for re-evaluation to assess whether or not it’s actually still a priority. And then for the last week of the sprint, we do retro, planning, prioritizing, independent research, architecture or design planning/discussion, but honestly take a real breather and carefully prepare for the next sprint.

It’s a little unorthodox, but it’s been very successful for the last couple of teams I’ve been on. The up shot is that all tasks have totally consistent due dates. This really only makes sense because we really lean into backlog grooming every Thursday and break every story into 1 or 2 point tasks. Nothing gets assigned for work until we have that level of detail on the task.

I guess if we always do sprint planning on the same day each cycle I could make a rule to set the due date exactly 11 days in the future or whatever that works out to.

The custom fields idea is very useful. It is a little bit of work up front, but we don’t have that many projects in the field yet, so it’s feasible. And from there I can duplicate existing projects.

Thanks so much for your thoughts!

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@anon29650799 thanks a lot for your insights. This is indeed very interesting, as I am not that experienced with scrum/sprints. Thanks for this.

If all your planning and due dates are standardized and happening always on «the same» (relative to the starting date of the sprint) date you could definitely work with a project template. You could set a start- and an end date and it will always set the other dates (planning / due dates) relative to those. I hope this makes sense. Otherwise, just let me know.

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