Perhaps the most important set of back-end automations revolves around your sprints, specifically, the ability to compare performance across all past sprints. Sprints are the backbone of your agile scrum framework. To get results, you need to complete work effectively and efficiently in this fixed-length time period. And, in true agile fashion, you should always be on the lookout for opportunities to iterate and improve your sprint process.

Insightful reports play a critical role here. They let you analyze performance across key metrics, and when you can compare results across multiple sprints, you gain a powerful historical view of your team’s progress. This perspective helps your team to remain focussed on the bigger picture, spotting trends in velocity, team member efficiency, and overall output.

To formulate these high-level reports, you’ll need to combine a custom field with powerful automations. The first step in this process is creating a “Sprint” custom field in your Sprints folder. Create dropdown options to reflect the naming convention you’ve decided to adopt for your sprints (ie. Sprint 1, Sprint 2, etc.). This creates a one-for-one mapping of your sprint folder, allowing every task to be labelled with the corresponding sprint list name. To do this, include automations in your sprint template to ensure that all tasks created in, added, or moved to your sprint lists, automatically inherit the correct ‘label’. By building this into the template, each new sprint comes pre-loaded with the automations you need - only slight adjustments required. With this powerful data point tagging your tasks automatically, you can unlock powerful dashboard reports from your Sprints folder. Whether it’s sprint velocity, individual velocity (a controversial topic, we know), or time estimates versus actuals, you’re perfectly positioned to assess whether your sprint processes are actually improving.

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