Sprint Plans — backlog, owners & certification

A Sprint Plan is a timeboxed backlog of items committed to a single sprint goal. It's where the loose units of work from Adapt & Agree become an agreed, owned plan you can run in Run & Register.

Building the plan

Give the plan a goal, a start date, and an end date, then fill it with Goals — the committed units of work. (We call them Goals, not "backlog items", to keep them distinct from the Backlog Item tool.) Each Goal is either:

Manual — a one-off entry you type in, or
Drawn from an artefact — pulled in from an existing Experiment, Note, Backlog Item, Requirements Spec, or Work Package.

Goals drawn from an artefact stay linked to their source, so from the plan you can click straight through to the experiment or artefact behind them.

You can't add the same Goal twice: a repeated manual title, or an artefact that's already on the plan, is turned away, and the picker only lists sources you haven't pulled in yet. The Add from an artifact picker also stays open as you work, so you can add several Goals in one sitting without reopening it each time.

Owners

Every Goal needs an owner — the person accountable and responsible for it — and an owner must be a project member.

The default owner of an item is whoever adds it.
When you Save & commit, any item still without an owner is removed from the plan. (An owner is required to be part of the plan; certification is not.)

Certification — a 2-step process

Assigning an owner is step one; the owner then certifies (step two) to become the certified owner:

Assign to me takes ownership immediately, with no notification — you still click Certify to complete step two.
Assign to a member notifies them; they accept to certify.

A plan's % certified shows how much of it has true ownership — 100% means every item has a certified owner. It's an indicator, not a requirement: a plan runs whether or not it's fully certified.

A Manager and above can assign or reassign the owner of any Goal that isn't certified yet — just pick a member from the assign list. Once a Goal is certified it's locked and can't be reassigned directly: to free it up, the certified owner or an admin can uncertify it, or a manager can request a transfer (below).

Assigning, certifying, uncertifying and transfer requests are all recorded in the Project Audit Log (see also Member rights).

Transferring a certified goal

When a Goal is already certified but needs a new owner, a Manager and above can Request transfer instead of reassigning it. This notifies the certified owner that someone else wants the Goal, and the response is theirs:

Accept & release — their certification is cleared and the Goal is freed, so a manager can assign a new owner. (They stay the owner until that happens.)
Decline — they keep the Goal and their certification, and nothing changes.

A manager can also cancel a request while it's still pending. The request and the owner's response are emailed to the people involved and recorded in the audit trail.

Marking work complete

Separate from ownership, each Goal has a Completed toggle — a simple done flag. It's independent of certification: completing a Goal doesn't require it to be certified, and doesn't change who owns it. The Goal's owner, or any Manager and above, can mark it complete or reopen it, and each change is recorded in the audit log.

Alongside % certified, every plan shows a % complete — the share of Goals marked done. The two measure different things: % certified is about ownership accepted, % complete is about work finished. Both appear on the plan, in the plans list, and on the calendar.

On the calendar

Plans with a start and end date appear as bars on the Run & Register sprint plan calendar, labelled with their certification and completion percentages, so you can see the whole loop's work across its timebox. A plan without dates is listed separately — add the dates to place it on the timeline.

Plans across loops

A plan that's not begun — none of its items are certified yet — carries forward into the next loop when you pivot or persevere at Next or Not?, so committed-but-unstarted work isn't lost.