Your Sprint Planning Companion

Are you part of a high-performance Agile team, striving for excellence in project management? Look no further. Planiac is a powerful web application module of Agilibo, by Archibo. It is designed to supercharge your sprint planning process.

How Does Planiac Work?

Planiac is a tool that simplifies and enhances your sprint planning process. Here's how it works:

Sit Comfortably:

No need to gather in a physical meeting room. You can participate from the comfort of your own space, making it ideal for remote work.

Plan Effectively:

Create user stories with ease, eliminating the need for traditional pen-and-paper methods.

Estimate Efficiently:

Use estimation cards within Planiac to make the planning session feel like a fun and engaging game.

Planiac is a valuable tool to be utilized during sprint planning sessions when estimating User Story points. After defining the sprint goals, the Scrum team can leverage Agilibo's Planiac to estimate User Stories, facilitating the calculation of committed story points for the sprint. This aids in determining how much of the commitment is achievable, streamlining the sprint planning process.

Ready to experience the power of Planiac for yourself? Take it for a spin with our free demo. Get started now!

Section 1. Finding Planiac

FAQ: Do I have to register separately for Planiac If I don’t have an Agilibo account?

You don't need to register separately to Planiac if you already own a registered Agilibo account. If you don't own have a registered account but want to create one, You can click here to see the process.

After successfully logging in to Agilibo, you will see the app-switcher icon on the top left pane of Agilibo's dashboard. Open the app-switcher and click on “Planiac” to begin the journey of user story estimation!

Section 2. Creating and joining Planiac events

After a successful registration and login process, you can create a secure event of Planiac by clicking the "Create Planiac" button. Then you can start following the steps below-

Name your Planiac event.
Make your event password protected. Planiac automatically generates 4-digit alphanumeric password, but you can manually set password too if you want.
Select the team that wishes to join the event.
Select the sprint that you will plan with your team.
Schedule the event.
Choose the estimation cards to play.
Set your choices of running the Planiac event based on
- Whether your team can change votes after reveal or not
- Enabling Planiac to calculate score and timebox each user story
- Creating JoyMeter session automatically
Click on "Schedule"

Creating and joning Planiac events

FAQ: Does Planiac allow to edit/make changes inside the session after creating it?

You can change the session name, password, the schedule, teams and even the estimation cards anytime. Just click on the “edit” button on the middle of the “Actions” column of your session and you can make any changes you want.

Now, that was all about creating Planiac events. After creating the event, you can click on “Start” to initiate the session.

FAQ: Can I join Planiac sessions as a guest?

Joining Planiac events that are created by someone else from your team are way easier. You can filter sessions according to teams, sprints, creators, and statuses to join different Planiac sessions. However, you cannot join Planiac sessions as a guest unless you get invitation mail/link from the facilitator. Once you receive the invitation link, you can access to the session by using your name and the password provided.

Section 3. Changing Facilitator roles

FAQ: Can everyone facilitate the Planiac sessions?

A sprint planning session is generally hosted and facilitated by the Scrum Master. The scrum master can make anyone in the scrum team but the guests a facilitator whenever necessary.
Planiac primarily allows the creator of the event to facilitate the whole session. If you join a Planiac session that is created by someone else, you cannot facilitate by default. As a user, you can only estimate the user stories.

Being a facilitator, you can add more people to facilitate beside you. To make another user a facilitator, you can use the following steps-

On the right pane you’ll see the list of the users that have joined the session and online. Move your mouse pointer to the three dots (…) icon and click on it.
You will see an option to make the user a facilitator. Click on “Ask to facilitate”.

The recipient user will receive an instant notification saying “XYZ has requested you to be a facilitator”. Now as a user if you want to accept the request, you can click on (✔) button. On the contrary, if you choose not facilitate, you can click on (×) button.

Section 4. Selecting user stories to estimate

As a facilitator, you get to select the user stories from the sprint backlog that has been created in Agilibo. You will see the list of the user stories in sprint backlog on the left side of your screen. You can scroll down to find the user story you want to estimate, or you can just type the keywords of the user stories to find them faster.
You can click on the user stories to see the description, and then click on “Estimate’ to start estimating.

FAQ: Can I create new user stories in the middle of the session?

Planiac allows the facilitators to add new user stories in the middle of the session, as it is expected from the team to suddenly come up with an additional task that will be important to achieve the sprint goal. You can click on the (+) icon to add new user stories.

Not only can you create, but also can you edit information like the names, descriptions and acceptance criteria of any user story as a facilitator whenever needed. On the left of the “Estimate” button, there’s another button to “Edit”. You can edit your user stories if you see any of the user stories fail to be INVEST (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small and Testable), or if it is not aligned with the Sprint Goal etc.

When you select a user story to estimate, the user story number and the title will be displayed over the virtual poker table inside Planiac. On the title tab, there is a button which you can click to expand and see the description to have ideas about the user story.

Section 5. The estimation process

After selecting the User story, the assignee explains the works that satisfy the acceptance criteria and make the user story “Done” by definition. While the explanation is ongoing, anyone can ask the assignee and the reporter any questions regarding the user story. Once the user story is explained, you and your teammates can start estimating. Here’s the process you can follow to estimate the User Stories-

Pick a numbered card from your deck of estimation cards according to the significance and effort you understood from the explanation. You can skip the estimation by choosing the “pass” card from the deck if you don’t feel confident about estimating the user story you’re not familiar of.

Whenever you pick a numbered card, you will see a list of user stories that have been previously estimated with that number right beside your deck. With this feature, Planiac allows you to understand how many points you should give, and increase the possibility to estimate as accurate as possible.

Click on the (√) button to confirm your points for estimation and wait for others to finish.

When everyone is done estimating by following the process above, the facilitator will reveal all the estimation numbers. The member estimating the lowest and the member estimating the highest points explain their point of views.

Generally, if the team feels that they are not on the same page regarding the estimation points, the user story is estimated again. The facilitator can click on the “Re-estimate” button for multiple rounds until everyone on the team agrees to one estimation point.

FAQ: What if even after re-estimation the team members are yet to be aligned, and are giving different votes?

We can see multiple cases where the team members face challenges to be on the same page. That is when PO comes into the picture. Because after PO is here and he clarifies the US, there is one more round of discussion and this should be explained.

The following process can be repeated for all the user story estimation. You can easily provide right estimation to any user story and that is the significance of Planiac. After Estimating all the user stories of the sprint backlog, you and your team can look at the prioritized user stories and decide what the sprint goal of the upcoming sprint can be.

So, this is how you successfully sit, plan and estimate on Agilibo’s Planiac. To learn more about it, you can click here and check out more FAQs.