10 Aspects for Tech Leaders to Watch Out for Setting Priorities for Future Sprints

Sprint is becoming a familiar concept, especially to tech leaders as more companies across industries are adopting agile methodologies. To maximize the expertise and benefits of a team sprint, it is important to start planning with a firm hold of the project or focus based on top priority. Since there are many opinions provided by the staff members of the organization on top tech priorities, it is usually the tech leader who has to make the final decision on what comes first.

A team leader must have the ability to explain the reasoning behind the prioritization decisions. A team leader must work to unite the team and give the best efforts during the sprint. Following are certain aspects that are needed to be considered by a team leader to review and determine priorities for future sprints.

Business Goals and Needs

It is important for tech leaders to ensure that tech priorities are driven by business goals and needs. There can be an increase in value only if there is a positive impact on the business. Technology providers who do not focus on business impact and business problems always end up by the wayside.

Objectives and Results of the Business

It is important to take into consideration the objectives of the business while organizing future sprints. This will help the team to focus on and commit to the plan that can make real differences. By integrating objectives and key results of the business with sprint goals and the product vision, teams can successfully prioritize high-impact items and trace their progress against measurable targets that generate positive business results.

Organizational Priorities

In terms of money, resources, and time, tech always has competing priorities. Integrating sprint priorities with business priorities is the one factor that can help in identifying priorities for future sprints. If the priority of the organization is customer retention, then prioritize sprints that increase customer satisfaction.

Customer Needs

It is always important to determine the needs of the customer. It is crucial to ensure that the company's solutions meet the expectation of the customer and to identify existing customer challenges, and understand investment opportunities. The company must be able to tie plans to customers' long-term strategic plans.

Value Delivered to Customers

A project should be of high priority to deliver higher progressive value to customers. By prioritizing sprints based on progressive customer value delivered and repeatability of the feature request, as well as weighing the importance of the product feature to customers' needs, the leader will help drive the team to maximize the value delivered in a sprint.

Quantifiable Value

Tech leaders must always look to exhibit what's going to measurably drive value to the business. For example, a project that enhances the efficiency of a critical business process or that drives new sales or higher revenue will take top priority. And even for those projects that deliver value, tech leaders must be confident of the plan to measure the business impact.

Business Security

Sprint teams should always have a mentor that can communicate the needs and trouble points of the business in real-time. Persistently the team must prioritize work around what helps the business most. Sometimes before addressing business needs, cybersecurity threat remedies should be given top proprietary.

Risks and Benefits

A team leader must consider both benefits and risks of the company. For example, if an item is technically risky, it should be planned first.  It is important to consider architectural changes before anything else. The items can then be tested more accurately by the working team.

Exterior Factors

The task that unlocks the future work is the most critical task. It is important to balance this task with tasks that have all their dependencies met and are ready to work. If this step is not followed then many items can get blocked in the future causing inefficient thrash.

Principles of Architecture

Tech priorities should be combined with the architecture principles of future business requirements and the maintainability of the solution. For the short term, tech priorities should be linked to the relevance and impact of features in the next minimum viable product. In every alternate sprint, teams should identify new updates and the roadmap of technology used to avoid unnecessary custom code.