What is An Epic in Scrum: Describing and Leveraging Agile Concepts
By: Hajime Estanislao, PMP, CSM; Editor: Geram Lompon; Reviewed by: Dr. Michael J. Shick, MSPM, PMP, CSM
Many teams face the challenge of focusing on long-term goals while delivering value incrementally. Without the right tools and strategies, this can lead to frustration, missed deadlines, and misaligned priorities.
Organizing large work items into epics allows you to break down complex tasks into smaller, manageable pieces called user stories while keeping your agile team aligned with broader business objectives. Agile epics help you maintain flexibility and adapt your projects to customer needs and market changes.
Imagine managing projects with bigger goals without being overwhelmed. With epics, you can prioritize tasks, track progress, and deliver value continuously—no more waiting until the end of a project to see results. Epics empower you to stay focused on the big picture while providing incremental wins to your stakeholders.
It is time to enhance your project management strategy. Start incorporating epics into your Scrum Framework and see the difference in how you plan, execute, and adapt your projects.
What is an Epic in Scrum Framework?
In the Scrum Framework, an epic represents a large, overarching body of work that cannot be completed in a single sprint. It often corresponds to a major feature or objective and needs to be broken down into smaller, manageable tasks, usually in the form of multiple user stories. These user stories are delivered incrementally over several sprints, ensuring steady progress toward the larger goal.
Though epics are not a formal Scrum element, Agile teams use them to manage complex projects. They create a hierarchy, linking long-term objectives with short-term tasks, allowing teams to work iteratively while staying focused on the product vision. This approach promotes flexibility and scalability, making maintaining control over large projects easier by delivering incremental value while keeping sight of the overall goal.
Epics also help teams organize and prioritize their work, ensuring that high-level objectives are broken down into actionable tasks that fit within Scrum’s iterative structure. By doing so, they connect broader business goals to the team’s day-to-day work, maintaining alignment between development efforts and product vision.
Planning Using Epics versus Traditional Project Planning
In project management, planning using epics in Agile contrasts significantly with traditional project planning approaches. These methods aim to organize and execute work but differ in flexibility, execution, and adaptability to changing circumstances.
Epic Planning in Agile
Epic planning is rooted in Agile frameworks like Scrum, where flexibility and iterative progress are the cornerstone of project execution. Epic planning allows teams to adapt their approach to create user stories as requirements evolve or customer feedback is received.
Writing Agile epics helps manage large-scale objectives by breaking them down into smaller, manageable components that can be delivered incrementally. By focusing on short-term progress through multiple sprints, teams can continuously deliver value without losing sight of the larger goal. Each sprint allows for ongoing learning and adaptation as teams gather customer feedback to make necessary adjustments. This process improves the product’s relevance and quality over time, ensuring it meets both user needs and business goals while remaining flexible to evolving requirements.
Traditional Project Planning
In contrast, traditional project planning – often associated with methods like Waterfall involves upfront, detailed planning where the scope, timelines, and resources are defined early in the project lifecycle. Once the plan is set, execution follows a linear path, with less flexibility to change. This approach is suitable for projects where requirements are well-understood from the outset and are unlikely to change significantly.
Traditional planning focuses on defining the project in fixed phases, such as initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and closure. Each phase must be completed before moving to the next, making it difficult to respond to changes that arise during the project lifecycle. As a result, traditionally planned projects can sometimes run into issues when there are unforeseen scope, budget, or changes in client needs.
The primary difference between the two approaches lies in flexibility and adaptability. Epic planning offers a more adaptive approach to changing conditions. Teams can revise their work incrementally, refining user stories and the overall epic as they receive feedback and encounter new challenges. This flexibility makes Agile planning well-suited for complex and dynamic projects where the final product vision may evolve.
On the other hand, traditional planning emphasizes comprehensive upfront planning and a more rigid approach to execution. While this method can provide clarity and predictability in projects with stable requirements, it can struggle to accommodate shifts in project scope or objectives. When changes occur, traditional planning often requires significant rework, which can delay progress and increase costs.
Reasons You Need to Know Epics When Using the Scrum Framework
Understanding how to use epics within the Scrum Framework is essential for organizing complex, large-scale work. Epics provide structure and flexibility, allowing teams to manage broader goals while delivering incremental value.
Without knowledge of epics, teams may struggle to break down large tasks, focus on long-term objectives, or adapt to evolving requirements. Business epics enable Scrum teams to align business goals with day-to-day development efforts and maintain agility in planning.
- Manage large pieces of work by creating Agile epics. It helps Scrum teams break down significant, complex work into smaller, more manageable tasks (user stories), ensuring progress without being overwhelmed.
- Epics provides a high-level vision representing overarching goals, helping teams maintain a clear, long-term vision while focusing on delivering smaller increments of value.
- Improving backlog organization prevents overloading with many granular items by grouping related work under a single, high-level epic.
- Epic enables cross-team collaboration that facilitates collaboration between multiple teams or departments working toward a shared objective.
- By using epics, teams can adapt to new priorities or changes in customer requirements without disrupting the entire development process.
- Support Incremental Delivery – Epics ensure that work is delivered incrementally, allowing continuous feedback and learning throughout.
Step-by-Step Instructions to Facilitate Hybrid Project Planning Using Epic
Hybrid project planning blends Agile and traditional approaches and is an effective way to manage complex projects. Epics play a vital role in this agile
Below is a process to facilitate hybrid project planning using epics to manage long-term goals while executing detailed short-term plans.
- Craft the Vision – Create Epics
- Decompose a Large User Story with Intent
- Set Priorities for Flexibility
- Bridge Sprints with Roadmaps
- Adapt and Iterate Continuously
Using epics in hybrid project planning enables you to balance long-term planning with Agile flexibility, allowing your team to remain adaptable while following a structured approach. Now, let’s check each step of creating epics to see how it works in practice.
1. Craft the Vision – Create Epics
The first step in hybrid project planning is to define the overall vision and objectives by creating an epic. An epic captures a high-level goal or feature that aligns with your long-term vision.
Begin by identifying what you aim to achieve and ensure it is aligned with your business objectives. This epic will act as an umbrella for related tasks and deliverables. Make sure to involve stakeholders early to ensure alignment and capture this information in the epic description.
2. Decompose a Large User Story with Intent
Once the epic is defined, the next step is to break it down into smaller, manageable pieces called user stories. In hybrid project planning, this process combines Agile’s iterative breakdown with traditional planning’s detailed task focus.
Each user story should represent a clear, actionable piece to be delivered within a sprint. This approach ensures that your team can track progress incrementally on smaller stories while the larger epic remains focused on providing value over time.
3. Set Priorities for Flexibility
Hybrid planning requires constant prioritization to remain agile. After breaking down epic into user stories, work with your team to prioritize these stories based on business value and urgency.
Use Agile backlog prioritization techniques and traditional
4. Bridge Sprints with Roadmaps
In hybrid projects, create a roadmap that connects the epics across multiple sprints. This roadmap provides a timeline of how and when milestones will be reached and all the user stories involved.
While Agile focuses on flexibility, the roadmap helps stakeholders and project managers understand the bigger picture and track progress across several iterations. This step ensures the agile team moves toward long-term objectives while delivering short-term wins.
5. Adapt and Iterate Continuously
A hybrid approach emphasizes continuous adaptation. Epics are flexible! Review and refine them as necessary.
Review and refinement could involve an epic or user story template to break down further, reprioritizing tasks, or even adjusting the epic itself if new information comes to light. Remain responsive to changes while ensuring the project vision stays on track.
With a well-defined process that combines the flexibility of Agile with a traditional planning structure, hybrid project planning using epics allows you to adapt to real-time changes without losing sight of long-term goals.
Considerations For Planning Successfully Using Epics
While epics are a powerful tool for structuring large work items, successful planning requires careful attention to certain aspects. One consideration is clear communication across teams. Since epics often span multiple sprints and teams, everyone must share a common understanding of the epic’s objectives, priorities, and expected outcomes. Miscommunication at the epic level can lead to misaligned efforts and wasted resources.
Tracking the progress of epics keeps your project on track. Tools like the epic burndown chart or charts can be invaluable in this regard, as they visually represent the progress of an epic and help teams stay on track over multiple sprints. Maintaining regular reviews of epic progress, especially during sprint reviews and backlog refinements, ensures that the work remains aligned with the broader business goals.
Remember that epics are not static. Like other Agile artifacts, epics should evolve based on feedback and changing business needs. Flexibility helps the team to adjust or even retire epics if they no longer provide value. This adaptability is one of the core strengths of using epics in an Agile framework.
Alternatives: Consider Rolling Wave Planning
An alternative to using epics in Agile is Rolling Wave Planning, a technique often employed in traditional
Instead of planning out every detail at the start of a project, write epics! This method allows teams to plan in waves – focusing on short-term deliverables with detailed plans while keeping long-term goals more flexible and high-level.
This method is for projects where not all the requirements are known upfront. As the project progresses, the development team gains an understanding of what is needed and can refine their approach. Rolling Wave Planning works well in hybrid project environments, where detailed short-term planning must be balanced with the flexibility to adapt the longer-term plan as more information becomes available.
The Rolling Wave Planning shares similarities with epics in Agile methodology, as both approaches allow flexibility and adaptability. However, while epics focus on organizing work within Agile frameworks, Rolling Wave Planning can be integrated into traditional and hybrid methodologies, making it a versatile option for project managers who need structured yet flexible planning methods.
Final Thoughts: Scrum Framework and Epics
In the Scrum framework, epics are an indispensable tool for managing large, complex bodies of work that require coordination across multiple sprints. They offer a structured yet flexible approach to planning, allowing teams to break down broad objectives into smaller user stories while maintaining focus on long-term goals.
Epics enable iterative progress, incremental delivery, and the ability to adapt to changing requirements, making them particularly valuable in dynamic environments.
By incorporating epics into your
References
Agile Alliance. (2024). Epic. In Agile Glossary. Agile Alliance. Retrieved October 2024, from https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/epic/
Rehkopf, M. (2024). Agile epics: Definition, examples, and templates. Atlassian. Retrieved October 2024, from https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/epics
Scrum Alliance. (2024). What is an epic in agile? Scrum Alliance. Retrieved October 2024, from https://resources.scrumalliance.org/Article/epic-agile
Thakkar, B. (2022, July 21). What is an epic in agile? Complete guide with examples. LogRocket. Retrieved from https://blog.logrocket.com/epic-in-agile-complete-guide-with-examples/
