PI Planning Flashcards
PI Planning
Program Increment (PI) Planning is a cadence-based, face-to-face event that serves as the heartbeat of the Agile Release Train (ART), aligning all the teams on the ART to a shared mission and Vision.
PI planning is essential to SAFe: If you are not doing it, you are not doing SAFe.
PI Planning Details
the unwritten SAFe ‘rule’ is “the people who do the work plan the work.” When physical presence is not possible, real time, concurrent, virtual, face to face planning has now proven to be effective.
I Planning has a standard agenda that includes a presentation of business context and vision, followed by team planning breakouts—where the teams create their Iteration plans and objectives for the upcoming Program Increment (PI).
Facilitated by the Release Train Engineer (RTE), this event includes all members of the ART and occurs within the Innovation and Planning (IP) Iteration. Holding the event during the IP iteration avoids affecting the scheduling, or capacity of other iterations in the PI
Business Benefits of PI Planning
PI planning delivers many business benefits, including:
Establishing face-to-face communication across all team members and stakeholders
Building the social network the ART depends upon
Aligning development to business goals with the business context, vision, and Team and Program PI objectives
Identifying dependencies and fostering cross-team and cross-ART collaboration
Providing the opportunity for ‘just the right amount’ of architecture and Lean User Experience (UX) guidance
Matching demand to capacity and eliminating excess
Work in Process (WIP)
Fast decision-making
Inputs and Outputs of PI Planning
Inputs to PI planning include: Business context (see ‘content readiness’ below)
Roadmap and vision Top 10 Features of the Program Backlog
A successful PI planning event delivers two primary outputs:
Committed PI objectives – A set of SMART objectives that are created by each team with the business value assigned by the Business Owners.
Program board – Highlighting the new feature delivery dates, feature dependencies among teams and relevant Milestones.
PI Preperation
PI planning is a significant event that requires preparation, coordination, and communication.
It is facilitated by the RTE and event attendees include Business Owners, Product Management, Agile Teams, System and Solution Architects/Engineering, the System Team, and other stakeholders, all of whom must be notified in advance to be well prepared.
The active participation of Business Owners in this event provides an important Guardrail on budgetary spend.
For the event to be successful, preparation is required in three major areas:
Organizational readiness – Strategic alignment and teams and trains setup
Content readiness – Management and development preparedness
Logistics readiness – Considerations for running a successful event
Organizational Readiness
Before PI planning, there must be strategy alignment among participants, stakeholders, and Business Owners.
Critical roles are assigned.
To address this in advance, however, event organizers must consider the following:
Planning scope and context – Is the scope (product, system, technology domain) of the planning process understood? Do we know which teams need to plan together?
Business alignment – Is there reasonable agreement on priorities among the Business Owners?
Agile teams – Do we have Agile teams? Are there dedicated team members and an identified Scrum Master and Product Owner for each team?
Content Readiness
It’s equally important to ensure that there is a clear vision and context and that the right stakeholders can participate.
Therefore, the PI planning must include:
Executive briefing – A briefing that defines the current business context
Product vision briefing(s) – Briefings prepared by Product Management, including the top 10 features in the Program Backlog
Architecture vision briefing – A presentation made by the CTO, Enterprise Architect, or System Architect to communicate new Enablers, features, and Nonfunctional Requirements (NFRs)
Logistics Readiness
Preparing an event to support a large number of attendees isn’t trivial.
For physically collocated planning this can include securing and preparing the physical space.
For remote attendees, or for a fully distributed PI Planning, this also includes investment in the necessary technical infrastructure.
Considerations include:
Locations – Each planning location must be prepared in advance
Technology and tooling – Real-time access to information and tooling to support distributed planning or remote attendees
Communication channels – Primary and secondary audio, video, and presentation channels must be available
Day 1 Agenda
Business context – A Business Owner or senior executive describes the current state of the business, shares the Portfolio Vision, and presents a perspective on how effectively existing solutions are addressing current customer needs.
Product/solution vision – Product Management presents the current vision (typically represented by the next top 10 upcoming features) and highlights any changes from the previous PI planning event, as well as any forthcoming Milestones.
Architecture vision and development practices – System Architect/Engineering presents the architecture vision. Also, a senior development manager may introduce Agile-supportive changes to development practices, such as test automation, DevOps, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Deployment, which are being advanced in the upcoming PI.
Planning context and lunch – The RTE presents the planning process and expected outcomes.
Team breakouts #1 – In the breakout, teams estimate their capacity for each Iteration and identify the backlog items they will likely need to realize the features.
Each team creates their draft plans, visible to all, iteration by iteration.
Day 1 Agenda (cont)
Draft plan review – During the tightly timeboxed draft plan review, teams present key planning outputs, which include capacity and load, draft PI objectives, potential risks, and dependencies.
Business Owners, Product Management, and other teams and stakeholders review and provide input.
Management review and problem-solving – It’s likely that the draft plans present challenges such as scope, people and resource constraints, and dependencies.
During the problem-solving meeting, management may negotiate scope changes and resolve other problems by agreeing to various planning adjustments.
The RTE facilitates and keeps the primary stakeholders together for as long as necessary to make the decisions needed to reach achievable objectives.
Day 2 Agenda
Planning adjustments – The next day, the event begins with management presenting any changes to planning scope, people, and resources.
Team breakouts #2 – Teams continue planning based on their agenda from the previous day, making the appropriate adjustments.
They finalize their objectives for the PI, to which the Business Owners assign business value.
Final plan review and lunch – During this session, all teams present their plans to the group. At the end of each team’s time slot, the team states their risks and impediments and provides the risks to the RTE for use later in the ROAMing exercise. The team then asks the Business Owners if the plan is acceptable. If the plan is accepted the team brings their team PI objective sheet to the front of the room so everyone can see the aggregate objectives unfold in real-time. If the Business Owners have concerns, teams are given the opportunity to adjust the plan as needed to address the issues identified. The team then presents their revised plan.
Confidence vote – Once program risks have been addressed, teams vote on their confidence in meeting their team PI objectives
Plan rework – If necessary, teams rework their plans until a high confidence level can be reached. This is one occasion where alignment and commitment are valued more highly than adhering to a timebox.
Planning retrospective and moving forward – Finally, the RTE leads a brief retrospective for the PI planning event to capture what went well, what didn’t, and what can be done better next time
Solution Train PI Planning
This article focuses on the planning activities of a single ART.
However, large Value Streams may contain multiple ARTs and suppliers. In this case, the Solution Train provides coordination using a Pre-PI Planning event, which sets the context and provides the inputs for the individual ART PI planning events.
A Post-PI Planning event follows ART PI planning and is used to integrate the planning results of the ARTs that contribute to the solution.
