How Scrum Teams Plan, Forecast & Deliver

How Scrum Teams Plan, Forecast & Deliver

Scrum doesn’t eliminate planning—it just becomes less rigid.

It’s a common misconception that planning is anti-agile, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, Scrum organizations often plan more frequently and intentionally than in predictive environments, but how planning is done changes. As a project manager working in a Scrum organization, it’s important to understand how Scrum teams plan, forecast, and deliver, and how your role fits into the equation.

Distilling the Myth: Agile Means No Planning

With Scrum, teams form a prioritized backlog of upcoming work, but that backlog isn’t static—it gets work added, subtracted, and moved around all the time. This ever-changing list of priorities leads many project managers to believe that Scrum teams just pick and choose what they want to work on without a plan.

Let’s bust that myth apart! Planning with high-performing Scrum organizations actually happens more frequently than with non-Agile ones. The key difference is that planning happens with flexibility rather than rigidity. Scrum teams can make informed decisions as new information emerges, ensuring that what they’re working on is the most important work to the business and its customers.

How Scrum Organizations Plan Work

Now that you know Scrum teams do plan work, you’re probably wondering how planning happens when you need to be agile. It’s simple. Scrum teams plan early and often and at the last responsible moment.

Let’s say you’re going on vacation in six months. It’s not too early to select your travel dates and book your flight and hotel rooms. That’s planning the basics, and not the details, so you can say with a lot of confidence there won’t be a lot of changes. But what if I told you to decide today to make all of your restaurant reservations and plan what you’re going to eat and not to divert from the plan. It seems a little ridiculous, doesn’t it? After all, how do you know what you’ll be hungry for in six months?

You don’t want to plan too early and with too much certainty for tasks that aren’t happening for a while because one thing we do know for certain—life is full of uncertainty! What if you suddenly developed a shellfish allergy, but you were unable to change your order? That would kind of suck!

How to Forecast Delivery with Scrum

A lot of project managers feel like there’s no way to forecast delivery in Scrum if everything is constantly changing. However, Scrum teams can forecast delivery more accurately than traditional teams, and here’s why: the closer you are to the delivery date, the more accurate you’ll be.

Have you ever witnessed an impending hurricane when the meteorologist shows the Cone of Uncertainty? That cone is widespread a week before the hurricane is about to make landfall, but every day that it gets closer, the cone shrinks, and the picture becomes more accurate. That’s how agile forecasting works.

Scrum works in timeboxes, and each sprint is a timebox. Most commonly, teams deliver work in two-week sprints. Since the teams work together week after week, over time they learn how much work they can finish in two weeks. So when a new project comes to the team, they can forecast how many sprints it will take to complete.

Since there are variables in Scrum, it’s best practice to give a date range for delivery rather than a date set in stone. As the team learns more and it gets closer to that date range, you can give stakeholders a narrower range with a lot more certainty.

How Scrum Teams Deliver Work

Have you ever managed a project that took a year or more to deliver? There’s a good chance that by the time it got to customers, the work was no longer relevant. And as we’re all working at the speed of AI, those timelines have shrunk even more.

Scrum teams deliver work in iterations, also known as sprints. The idea behind iterative development is building a small product feature that can go to customers, getting rapid feedback from stakeholders and the marketplace, and then using those learnings to decide how to build the next iterations.

How Project Managers Fit into the Equation

As a project manager in a Scrum organization, you won’t plan every task at the team level, but you’ll still provide tremendous value by forecasting delivery timelines, communicating timelines to stakeholders, managing risks and dependencies, and aligning stakeholders. Your excellent communication skills, attention to detail, and ability to plan and forecast are still essential to an Agile organization. As you learn to plan flexibly, pivot when needed, and encourage exploration and learning, you’ll be a huge asset to both Scrum teams and leadership.

Learn Scrum for Project Managers

If you’ve ever wondered how project management fits within Scrum—or how to remain an effective leader in an agile organization—our Scrum for Project Managers course was designed specifically for you.

You’ll learn how to work with Scrum teams, manage dependencies, communicate effectively with stakeholders, forecast delivery, and lead without relying on command-and-control practices.

Whether you’re new to Scrum or looking to sharpen your agile leadership skills, this course provides practical techniques you can apply immediately. Learn more about Scrum for Project Managers, and get the skills you need to thrive in a Scrum organization.