Which weekdays are best to start and stop sprints?
You are ready to start sprints for your project and are deciding what day of the week to start. It would be a natural choice to start on a Monday and end on a Friday, right? For most of us, individuals have been accustomed and have a rhythm of thinking of Monday at the start of their work week and Friday when their week ends. Why mess with something that is natural to us? When I first started with Scrum, these were the thoughts I had when asking this question. However, I quickly discovered that these days aren’t the best ones as I started the sprints. Over time as I have observed many teams as a coach, I have seen enough of the same patterns to recommend a different approach.
Let’s first start with holidays and vacations. There are many American holidays that fall on either a Monday or a Friday. Even if your organization is open for business that day, people tend to take vacations during this time mostly because their children have school off and it provides the opportunity to take a long weekend. In fact, many times people will not just take 3 days of a weekend, but extend their vacation to 4 days. In Seattle, our nicest weather days happen in the late summer. Therefore, you will find people taking time off during these nice days and mostly around the weekend. If nothing else, people are taking off early on Fridays and the office will seem quite empty on a Friday afternoon. I am assuming your organization sees the same effect on those sunny, warm days! You risk not having members of your team available for some if not all of the key planning and review activities around the start and end of Sprints. This can be very challenging because you aren’t getting the perspectives from all team members and may be missing key information, knowledge or skills necessary to be able to commit to the upcoming sprint.
One of the goals of Scrum is for the team to establish a regular cadence or rhythm. Teams start each sprint on the same day, the lengths of their sprints are always the same, and they end their sprints crisply with delivery of potential shippable product increments. As part of this cadence, the team should stop the sprint one day and start the very next day. If a team ends their sprint on a Friday and starts on Monday, the time between sprints gets a little fuzzy. In addition, it creates a situation to where the team ends up working weekends trying to work through loose ends in getting more delivered in the sprint, and causes confusion on Monday if the team can get started on the next sprint or not. If this starts to happen every sprint, there becomes an expectation (from the team and/or management) that weekends can be used (or perhaps expected) to deliver on Monday. Personally, I have a real problem with this from a sustainable pace perspective. Because teams go from one sprint to another without any break, the weekends are crucial for the team to maintain this pace and work-life balance. Take this away from the team, and they will quickly burn out. It takes discipline to deliver every sprint, but if teams always have an “escape hatch” that they can work over the weekend, they will use it often. Better to fix a firm date and if the team cannot deliver, they will figure out a way to resolve the issues so they deliver for future sprints.
For all of these reasons, my recommendation is that you don’t start or stop sprints on Monday or Fridays. That leaves the only options to start the sprints either on Wednesday or Thursday, and end those sprints on Tuesday or Wednesday, respectfully. The sprint ends on one day and starts on the very next day. Most likely, you will have most if not all of your team members available for sprint planning, review, demo and retrospectives. If you aren’t starting and stopping on these days, you need to ask yourself and your team if they are having these problems and if it resolve many issues by having a mid-week start and end dates for sprints. Given my experience, I have seen great improvement and sustainability of the team by making this simple change. Try it out and let me know how it works for you!