Nexus Planning
Hi
Do you have any best practice when to held nexus planning? Do you recommend to held the nexus planning after individual team sprint planning or before?
Looking forward to hear to best practices for dependency management.
Thanks in advance
The Nexus Guide says:
Each Scrum Team’s Daily Scrum complements the Nexus Daily Scrum by creating plans for the day, focused primarily on addressing the integration issues raised during the Nexus Daily Scrum.
Hence these issues should be understood and brought to each Daily Scrum.
The Guide also says:
The Nexus Daily Scrum is not the only time Scrum Teams in the Nexus are allowed to adjust their plan. Cross-team communication can occur throughout the day
so if the timing of cross-team collaboration is presenting difficulty, ask why. In Scrum, regardless of whether it is at scale or otherwise, collaboration ought to be an ongoing dynamic.
NB this principle also applies to Nexus Sprint Planning. Teams ought to be able to collaborate on their own Sprint plans while their representatives also collaborate on a cross-team basis. There is no particular reason to stage-gate these things out, and every reason to try and avoid doing so.
Previous editions of the Nexus Guide (such as the January 2018 edition) were more explicit than the current (January 2021) edition.
In previous editions, Nexus Sprint Planning began with "appropriate representatives" from each Scrum Team reviewing the Product Backlog, crafting a Nexus Sprint Goal, selecting Product Backlog Items for each team, and then each team holding their Sprint Planning to craft a team Sprint Goal and plan their Sprint, with additional interactions between each team as necessary.
What Nexus describes is similar to the concepts of Sprint Planning 1 and Sprint Planning 2 from the LeSS framework.
However, the November 2020 Scrum Guide and January 2021 Nexus Guide removed some aspects that were considered prescriptive, including exactly how to organize the Sprint Planning. The teams that form a Nexus can continue to follow the previous descriptions or some of the LeSS practices or they can develop new ways of working and still be consistent with the LeSS framework.
Something to keep in mind - there are no best practices when working in a complex domain. I've had good luck with the concepts of Sprint Planning 1 and Sprint Planning 2 from LeSS, so in the absence of other suggestions or ideas that seem more appropriate for the context, that's where I'd start.