Estimating task effort can be one of the most challenging aspects of running Agile teams. It’s like a guessing game where the stakes are too high, and accuracy is crucial.
Teams often face the dilemma of differing opinions and lack of clarity, leading to a compromised project direction.
Instead of relying solely on individual opinions, why not use the collective wisdom of the team?
Pointing Poker is one way to allow teams to engage in meaningful discussions and arrive at more accurate estimates together.
Let’s learn how to use it to improve your project planning and Agile team collaboration.
How Pointing Poker Improves Planning and Team Progress
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Is Pointing Poker?
Pointing Poker, also called Scrum Poker or Planning Poker, is a collaborative technique used in Agile software development to estimate the effort required to complete a task or feature.
Initially introduced by James Grenning in 2002, it has since become a widespread practice in Scrum and Extreme Programming frameworks.
The poker pointing process is simple but effective.
How is Pointing Poker played?
Team members use numbered cards, laying them face down rather than announcing their estimates (of the effort required to complete a task or feature) out loud. Once everyone has placed their cards, the values are revealed simultaneously.
This approach prevents any one person’s estimate from influencing the rest of the team—a cognitive bias known as anchoring. After revealing the cards, the team discusses discrepancies and refines their estimates.
Pointing Poker combines consensus-building with effort estimation, allowing multiple teams to leverage their collective insights.
This Agile estimation technique encourages open discussion, bringing different perspectives to the table and ensuring that estimates are more accurate and well-rounded. It’s a powerful tool for planning, promoting collaboration, and creating transparency in decision-making processes.
💡 Did You Know? User stories are also known as Agile epics.
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Are the Benefits of Using Pointing Poker?
Pointing Poker is fun and interactive, transforming how Agile teams approach sprint planning.
Let’s explore its key benefits:
- Improved estimation accuracy: By involving the entire team in the estimation process, Pointing Poker helps achieve more accurate results. How? Each team member contributes their unique perspective, leading to a more balanced assessment of task complexity and effort. This collective input reduces the likelihood of overestimating or underestimating the time required for tasks
- Consensus building: Pointing Poker’s standout feature is its ability to foster consensus. Instead of relying on a single person’s estimate, the process requires everyone to agree. This encourages a more inclusive environment where even less vocal team members can share their insights
- Identifying gaps and improving requirements: As team members justify their estimates, they often highlight gaps or ambiguities in the project requirements. This feedback loop helps to clarify and refine the project scope, leading to better planning and implementation
- Building a reference framework: Over time, the estimates produced in Pointing Poker sessions create a reference framework. Teams can use this historical data to compare and gauge the effort required for future tasks, leading to more accurate planning
💡 Did You Know: In Agile scrum terms, story points are a unit of measurement that estimates the effort needed to complete a user story or task, considering factors like complexity, effort, and risk.
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow Pointing Poker Works
Let’s see how it works and how ClickUp for Agile Teams can make the process smoother and more effective.
Step 1: Select the task for estimation
The first step in Planning Poker is picking the task or user story you need to estimate. Whether it’s a feature, bug fix, or project milestone, this task should be straightforward so everyone understands what’s involved.
If you want to neatly organize all your tasks, give ClickUp Tasks a try. You can assign story points to a single team member or multiple assignees, add detailed descriptions, and include relevant documents or links, ensuring your team has all the context they need.
When working with user stories, the ClickUp Agile Story Template helps you organize them easily and prioritize features. It enables you to capture essential project needs, improve team understanding, and stay aligned on what matters most.
Here’s what it does for your team:
- Helps arrange user stories in a logical order, optimizing the workflow for quicker delivery
- Monitors progress transparently by utilizing agile burndown charts and other visual tools
- Ensures individual objectives are in sync with broader project goals for better outcomes
Step 2: Discuss the task with the team
Before jumping into estimations, everyone in the room must understand the scope and complexity of the task.
With ClickUp Docs, you can create a collaborative space where team members can share task details, add their insights, and reference previous work. By linking user stories and workflows with Docs, everyone can easily contribute their thoughts or raise concerns in real time.
Moreover, no more scattered conversations across multiple channels. You can keep all task discussions in sync and in one place with ClickUp Chat. You can also link Tasks or Docs to your Chats, ensuring that all relevant conversations are automatically connected to the user stories being discussed.
Step 3: Everyone picks a story point
Once the team understands the task, each member selects an Agile story point. Traditionally, Planning Poker involves distributing cards with values like 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100, and a ‘?’ card. Each number reflects the relative complexity of the task.
However, with many teams now working remotely, traditional methods may not suffice. To adapt, ClickUp offers multiple options for you and your team to collaborate effectively in the office or remotely. Here’s how you can use ClickUp to streamline this process.
- Use Sprint Points ClickApp in ClickUp and estimate the effort required for tasks. You can customize the point values and track the total effort using Dashboards through charts like burnup, burndown, and velocity charts
- Set up a matrix on ClickUp Whiteboards‘ infinite canvas to enable real-time story point estimation, letting team members add virtual cards for their estimates, comments, and justifications
- Create customized ClickUp Forms where your team members can input their story point estimates for tasks. It makes it simple to gather everyone’s opinion in one place and quickly compile the results for further discussion. Plus, responses can be automatically converted into trackable tasks
Step 4: Reveal the estimates
After everyone has chosen their story point, you simultaneously reveal the estimates.
This is the exciting part!
If the estimates are similar, say everyone chooses 3 or 5 points, that’s a good sign the team is aligned. But what happens if there’s a significant disparity in the estimates? This is where the real collaboration begins. Let’s continue.
Step 5: Discuss the differences
If there’s a wide range of estimates, the team must discuss why some people think the task is easier or more complex than others.
🌟Example: If one team member estimates ‘5’ and another estimates ‘13’ for the same task, this opens the floor for discussion. The person who gave a higher estimate might explain that they foresee potential blockers, while the lower estimate may come from someone familiar with similar tasks.
ClickUp Assigned Comments make this discussion more dynamic. You can tag team members in the comments, ask specific questions, and cover any details that might have been missed earlier. For more context, you can even share links or files directly in the task comment section.
Step 6: Vote again and reach a consensus
The team must refine their understanding of the task, clarify uncertainties, and address any risks or discrepancies.
Afterward, each team member votes again with a new estimate based on the refined understanding.
Typically, this second round of voting brings the estimates closer together, ensuring the team reaches a consensus. You can revisit the Docs and previous tasks to compare with similar projects if needed.
ClickUp Time Estimates are an excellent tool for making story point estimation more accurate during Pointing Poker sessions. By breaking tasks into time estimates for each team member, you can avoid guesswork and ensure everyone understands the workload.
Step 7: Track and review progress
Once a final estimate is set, you can assign story points in ClickUp and monitor progress through ClickUp Dashboards. You can create tailored dashboards that display key metrics related to user stories, task progress, and team workloads. This helps visualize how estimates align with actual time spent.
Additionally, Time Tracking with ClickUp lets you see the time spent on tasks versus estimates, helping refine future Planning Poker sessions.
🌟Example: The Global Time Tracking feature on ClickUp allows to start and stop timers from any device, allowing team members to easily log time spent on tasks during estimations.
Step 8: Refine and improve future estimates
Planning Poker is not a one-time activity—it’s an ongoing process of learning and improving. Consider these key questions when you want to refine it:
- Were there consistent underestimations?
- Were there instances of overestimations?
- How accurate were the estimates compared to the actual time spent?
- What factors contributed to any discrepancies?
- How can we adjust future estimates based on this data?
ClickUp Goals enable teams to establish specific objectives for refining future estimates in Pointing Poker.
🌟Example: You can set a goal to enhance the alignment between estimated and actual effort by a targeted percentage. This helps maintain focus on continuous improvement and ensures that estimation practices evolve based on past performance.
If you want to leverage historical data and performance analytics to refine your estimation techniques for future sprints, try the ClickUp Agile Scrum Management Template. It covers everything from backlog grooming to sprint reviews, helping the product owner, engineering, and QA teams collaborate effectively.
Its key features include:
- Flexible task management
- Actionable visuals for sprint optimization
- Collaborative tools to maintain consistent workflow
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow Pointing Poker Enhances Planning and Boosts Team Building
Now that you understand the step-by-step process of conducting Pointing Poker let’s explore how it enhances planning efficiency and strengthens team collaboration.
Streamlined estimation
Pointing Poker speeds up estimation by structuring discussions and helping teams quickly assess the complexity of tasks.
Instead of long, drawn-out debates, everyone provides their input simultaneously.
If you want to help your team focus on the most urgent tasks, try ClickUp Task Priorities. With four simple priority levels—Urgent, High, Normal, and Low—your team members can discuss and estimate the most critical task first.
Building consensus
We’ve already understood that Pointing Poker encourages consensus by pushing your team to discuss varying perspectives on task complexity, ultimately aligning on a shared estimate.
ClickUp Chat helps build consensus by providing a centralized space for real-time discussions. Every conversation can be linked directly to related tasks, ensuring context is maintained, and critical insights are not lost during the estimation discussions.
Improved predictability
Accurate estimations lead to optimal sprint planning and more realistic project timelines. By estimating tasks more accurately, your team can better predict how long projects will take.
If your team needs help visualizing sprint progress and understanding team performance based on story points, check out ClickUp Sprint Dashboard cards. Here’s a breakdown of what those cards do:
- Velocity cards show past completed story points, helping forecast future sprint capacities
- Burndown cards track remaining work versus time left to ensure sprint goals are met
- Burnup cards compare total work done against scoped work to visualize progress and scope changes
Enhanced collaboration
Collaboration is at the heart of Pointing Poker, where every team member’s input is considered.
ClickUp’s real-time collaboration tools, like Docs, Comments, and Chat, allow teams to discuss, document, and refine their estimates together. These features enable smooth communication, even in remote settings, ensuring everyone stays in sync.
When you @mention with someone with ClickUp @mentions:
- In a comment, they become a task watcher
- In a Task description, they get a notification but aren’t added as a watcher
- The comment and their name are highlighted in the task and Inbox
- On private tasks, you can opt to share the task when mentioning them in a comment
👀 Bonus: If you’re a manager or scrum master, convert all your scrum meetings into focused and productive ones with the ClickUp Scrum Meeting Template.
Empowering every voice
In traditional planning sessions, quieter team members may not always get a say. With Pointing Poker, everyone’s opinion counts.
ClickUp Comments and Mention make sure no one is left out. By tagging relevant team members in discussions, everyone is encouraged to share their perspectives, leading to more balanced decision-making and inclusive collaboration.
Tracking progress
Finally, tracking how well estimates align with actual outcomes is crucial for improving future estimations.
ClickUp Reporting Tools and Dashboards provide teams with insights on Agile metrics like estimated accuracy, allowing them to refine their planning process. By reviewing past performance, your teams can continuously improve and adjust their estimates for future sprints.
👀 Also Read: Optimize Your Workflow with Agile Time Tracking
Summarize this article for me pleaseBest Practices for Using Pointing Poker
Pointing Poker is one of the most effective tools for Agile capacity planning. It’s like any skill—simple to start but requires care to master.
With these five best practices, you can get everyone in your team involved and start estimating like pros.
- Forget clock-watching: When diving into Agile, don’t fall into the trap of translating everything into hours. Story points are all about sizing up the work based on complexity and the team’s understanding, not just the time it might take
- Speak up, don’t just follow: It’s easy to get swept along with everyone else’s thoughts during a Pointing Poker session, but beware of groupthink. Encourage every team member to voice their views and defend their estimates. This keeps your sessions from just being an echo chamber
- Keep it simple: Stick to a standard series of cards, like Fibonacci, the T-shirt sizing method, or an efficient tool like ClickUp. Consistency is key here. Adding too many custom cards can lead to confusion and misuse, which just slows everyone down
- All hands on deck: Don’t sideline people because they’re new or less experienced. You might miss out on crucial insights, and hey, it’s about team effort
- Monitor for escalation: It’s typical for point values on similar tasks to increase gradually. Regularly check new tasks against older ones to make sure they really need a higher estimate
Summarize this article for me pleaseRefine Your Agile Planning Process with Pointing Poker and ClickUp
Pointing Poker is a fun and interactive gamified technique for effective project planning. It creates an environment where every team member’s input is valued and contributes to well-rounded task estimates.
To amplify the benefits of Pointing Poker, you can use ClickUp’s features like Task Management, Forms, Comments, Docs, and Dashboards as powerful catalysts in several ways. They not only make the process smoother but also make sure that it produces effective results.
Ready to optimize your team’s planning and progress? Sign up to ClickUp today!
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