Sprint Evaluation

At the end of each sprint, your teams will be evaluated based on a rubric that is specific to their course (and sometimes the sprint!). You will not evalueate your own teams; this can create potential conflicts of interest. Instead, your team(s) will be evaluated by another project manager that is in your recitation section. This evaluation is done in the PM tool, and the results will be available in the tool for you to review and share with your teams.

Planning for Sprint Evaluation

It is your job to get your team ready for evaluation each sprint. In order to do this effectively, you need to understand how the teams will be evaluated! You should be very familiar with which rubric will apply, and you need to review and assign any work to your team necessary for them to succeed, and provide guidance when their work is not aligned to the rubric. The rubrics can be found on this website,

It is ALSO your job to do some preparation for the team you will be evaluating. The time you have to do the evaluation, much like the weekly meetings, is too short to do a thorough job, especially when it comes to looking at their scrum boards. Just like with the status meetings, you can start a sprint evaluation and save it as a draft. This allows you to go into the teams scrum board and review things in more detail PRIOR to the evaluation meeting, allowing you to focus on the product demo!

Task Assigment During Evaluation Week

You also need to plan ahead for the work that your team will be doing during the evaluation week! Since sprint evaluations take place during your regular meeting time, you will NOT fill out a status report for that meeting. You WILL still have your checkpoint meeting during evaluation week. This means you should assign tasks for evaluation week in the checkpoint meeting PRIOR to evaluation week, and it will be due during the checkpoint meeting after the evaluation.

During Sprint Evaluation

During the evaluation, you should fill out the form in the PM tool for the appropriate sprint. The rubric is built into the form. For any area that you give the team less than full points, you need to leave feedback for the team about where they went wrong. This will both help the team understand how to do better next time, and also help their PM understand what to look out for in guiding the team in the future.

After the Sprint Evaluation

Once you complete the evaluation (remember, you can start this after sprint end but prior to the evaluation time), you will submit it. This should be done on the same day as you have the sprint evaluation meeting. At this point, it will be visible to the teams regular PM (and your teams evaluations will be visible to you). You should review the evaluation that your team received, to ensure that you are aligned. It's possible for people to have honest disagreements on how a team has performed; if you disagree with the evaluation, you should reach out to the evaluating PM, and discuss these differences. They may have missed something, or you may; communication is key! If you find that there is some dramatic difference and you can't achieve consensus, you can escalate this to me. These differences may be that you feel the evaluation was too harsh - it may also be that you feel it was too generous. It can be frustrating if you spend hours telling your team they will lose points unless they shape up, and then they don't!

Note that it may be tempting to "go easy" on teams in the evaluations to minimize conflict and feedback. This is not a good plan for your grade as a PM - I also randomly review these, and discrepancies between weekly status and evaluations will be examined. If it appears that you are not doing your job in these evaluations, it will impact your grade negatively.

Once you have negotiated with the evaluator, you can publish the evaluation for your team (this implies your agreement with the results). This will make it visible to your team. You should ALSO walk through those results with your team in your next scheduled meeting, to both celebrate success and decide where changes might be necessary.