PI Planning

What is agile PI planning?

PI Planning is a critical event for agile teams to set a clear direction for the upcoming Program Increment or Planning Interval (SAFe 6.0). It helps teams to identify potential risks, assess impact and effort, and benefit from coordination and alignment around priorities and milestones

PI Planning at its core promotes agility. By fostering closer alignment between stakeholders and development teams, it enables effective decision-making, promotes transparency, and encourages adaptive planning. This iterative approach empowers teams to continuously refine their strategies, ensuring successful outcomes and delivering value to stakeholders.

As a result it is necessarily a collaborative process - that ultimately optimizes the delivery of value by blending predictability and agility, while maximizing team efficiency and productivity. But we often overlook how to make the PI Planning event itself more agile.

While an important ceremony for any organization aiming to stay ahead of the competition in today's market - it can also be daunting. From figuring out the right approach to creating feedback loops that keep individuals focused and motivated, there are plenty of complexities when it comes to mastering agile PI Planning.

Additionally in today's distributed landscape, agile teams face unique challenges when it comes to effective collaboration and planning. The key to agile PI Planning agile requires a shift towards more flexible, collaborative and efficient processes and environments.

The key to agile PI Planning requires a shift towards more flexible, collaborative and efficient processes and environments.

This blog post will provide an overview on what challenges there are to agile PI Planning in Jira, and how you can overcome them using Jira together with Easy Agile programs.

Top 3 challenges of agile PI Planning in Jira

1. Collaborating across tools and timezones

Real-time collaboration is essential for agile PI planning, but it is challenging to implement in a remote or distributed environment. The pandemic accelerated the shift to a remote workforce, creating new challenges for PI planning.

Agile teams in Jira striving to effectively plan often face a version of these challenges. One of the most common obstacles teams face is the lack of a visual, intuitive platform that can accommodate the dynamic nature of agile planning. Teams end up using physical boards or switching tools, requiring manual work to implement back into Jira, which can disrupt the flow of work and lead to inefficiencies.

2. Misalignment and miscommunication

PI planning aims to break down silos and bring together multiple teams working on the same sprint. However, with so many teams involved in the planning process, it is common for teams to prioritize their specific goals or issues, leading to inefficient communication. The challenge lies in getting everyone to speak the same language, work to a shared understanding of priorities and ensuring they are all on the same page.

Another hurdle is accommodating cross-team dependencies. Agile teams often work closely with other teams across their organization, and their workstreams are often intertwined. Teams need a straightforward way to visualize these dependencies, to anticipate blockers and plan effectively. What’s more, the process of creating and managing dependencies across multiple teams can become complex and time-consuming.

3. Not being able to see the bigger picture

Lastly, long-term or bigger picture planning can be a struggle. It is easy for PI planning to become too focused on processes and lose sight of the bigger picture where we need to align our goals, objectives and capabilities. In short, it is crucial to align PI planning with the business and customer needs. The planning process should aim to deliver value to customers, build on existing success, and address new challenges. Achieving this requires collaboration, discipline, and creativity.

Teams need to be able to see the big picture and plan work in alignment with the business’ goals and strategy. to Without it, the disconnect can make it challenging for teams to align their day-to-day tasks with their long term goals. The lack of a dedicated space for capturing objectives and their business value can also lead to misalignment and missed opportunities.

So what is needed for agile PI Planning?

When looking for an add-on or additional solution to work with Jira to solve for agile PI Planning, it is key to find one that provides:

1. A shared view and understanding to maintain transparency and alignment for the ART, especially program-level visibility
2. Connection between business priorities and the work of delivery teams
3. Dependency management
4. Real-time collaboration
5. A tool that everyone can use and access to continue collaboration

Agile PI Planning with Jira and Easy Agile Programs

By using Jira and Easy Agile Programs for your PI planning, you can ensure that your agile workflows are streamlined, collaborative, and in line with your strategic objectives. Easy Agile Programs empowers teams to adapt quickly to changes, manage risks better, and deliver value more efficiently. What’s more, it is a native app embedded in Jira, meaning there is little to no configuration as the tool is set up using your underlying Jira data.

Read on to find out how it helps solve the challenges of agile PI Planning specifically.

1. A shared space to collaborate and iterate

The Program Board (ART Planning Board)

Remember, the key to agile planning is flexibility and collaboration, and the ability to adjust plans as necessary. At the same time, it is important to make the process as easy and intuitive as possible and to avoid wasting time on administrative tasks.

If your teams are in Jira, the first place to start is by creating an environment in Jira so there’s less manual overhead and cognitive load for everybody to be able to participate and for planning to translate into delivering. Easy Agile Programs digitises the SAFe Program Board (ART Planning Board for SAFe 6.0) which provides transparency to all members of the ART.

It is built using native Jira issuse and boards, and acts as a single source of truth during and beyond planning. It’s here we have a holistic view of the work we’ve committed to as an ART and an indication of whether we’re on track to achieve it, with the flexibility of making adjustments without leaving the tool should we need to.

The digitised Program Board in Easy Agile Programs is highly visual and also filterable, allowing you to focus in on specific teams, status of issues, or features/epics for focussed ART, PO and coach syncs during the Program Increment/Planning Interview.

The Team Planning Board

Unlike other tools, teams have a dedicated Team Planning Board for team breakout sessions. Here teams can break down features into stories and schedule them within sprints, estimate capacity and plan work collaboratively within and across teams. Given that teams have access to their own backlog and are scheduling work onto their own board in Jira, there is no downtime or double handling.

2. Anticipating and visualizing dependencies

Visualizing and managing program risks and dependencies is not only crucial for effective Planning - but it is also a clear indicator of how well we stay aligned as teams within the ART. Easy Agile Programs is a powerful way to visualize dependencies, enabling teams not only to create, identify, and understand the health of dependencies, but also to resolve dependencies across multiple teams. This fosters collaboration, breaks down siloes and mitigates potential roadblocks to progressing the work.

On the Team Planning Board

When teams are at the stage of breaking down features into stories or epics, they can easily create and understand dependencies within and across teams.This means that work is never created without understanding how it aligns or conflicts with other teams in the ART to maintain alignment. Creating dependencies is easily done through drag and drop:

On the Program Board

Identifying dependencies and potential risks to scheduling work is a critical part of PI Planning. Aside from visible dependency lines, Easy Agile Programs also visualises the health of those dependencies. Green means the dependency is healthy, orange means it is at risk, and red indicates a conflict. Black dependency lines indicate dependencies external the PI or Program - critical for the Release Train Engineers to address between ARTs.

This is all visible on the Program Board where we can also filter by dependencies:

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3. Bigger picture planning and alignment

Third level hierarchy

Connecting the work of the teams to what the business cares about is instrumental in the delivery of value. Easy Agile Programs provides the connective tissue between higher level business priorities and initiatives with third level hierarchy, making it easy to understand what is scheduled to deliver against business priorities and how it is progressing.

PI Objectives

From the Team Planning Board  can easily create draft PI Objectives and link them to Jira issues, ensuring alignment and transparency with business value. This is a critical part of linking what the team is working on to broader business objectives, and Easy Agile Programs literally links the issues to these objectives so that we can filter the work by objective.

Agile planning is iterative, and plans often require adjustments.

Can I still use Easy Agile Programs for planning if I'm not practising SAFe?

Absolutely. Easy Agile Programs is not just for teams practising the SAFe methodology.

The tool is flexible and adaptable, making it equally beneficial for any agile team that values interactive, visual planning. Regardless of the specific framework you use, Easy Agile Programs facilitates clear communication, makes it easier to manage dependencies, provides a shared view of team capacities and progress, and aligns teams with overarching business objectives.

This way, whether you're practicing Scrum, Kanban, or your own unique blend of agile methodologies, you can still leverage the power of Easy Agile Programs to foster a more collaborative and efficient planning process.

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Many organizations, especially those in highly regulated industries, struggle to manage large-scale projects. SAFe, or the Scaled Agile Framework, can provide a solution. (OR That's where SAFe, or the Scaled Agile Framework, comes into play.)

SAFe is a framework designed to help businesses make sustainable changes on a large scale. It offers training and guidance for implementing agile practices across the enterprise, whether it's at a small team level, department level, or throughout the entire organization.

In this blog post, we will delve deeper into the benefits of implementing SAFe, focusing specifically on how it can be utilized within the financial services industry to create a lean enterprise.

Benefits of SAFe for financial services

SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) is an incredibly valuable approach for organizations looking to enhance their operations. By adopting SAFe, financial services firms can achieve numerous benefits that are specific to their industry.

1. Business Agility: SAFe enables financial services firms to become more adaptable and responsive to market dynamics. By adopting SAFe practices at an enterprise level, organizations can foster a culture of continuous improvement, allowing them to quickly adapt to changing customer demands, regulatory requirements, and emerging technologies.
2. Enhanced Customer Experience: In today's competitive financial services landscape, providing exceptional customer experiences is paramount. SAFe promotes customer-centricity by encouraging regular feedback loops with customers throughout the development process. This allows financial institutions to gather insights, identify pain points, and rapidly iterate on their products and services, ensuring they meet the evolving needs and expectations of their customers.
3. Accelerated Time-to-Market: Time is of the essence in the financial industry. SAFe empowers organizations to speed up their time-to-market by breaking down silos and fostering collaboration between departments. By leveraging agile practices, financial services firms can respond quickly to market opportunities, launch innovative solutions faster ensuring they are first to seize market opportunities
4. Risk Mitigation: Compliance and risk management are critical considerations for financial services organizations. SAFe provides a structured governance framework that incorporates compliance requirements into the development process. This ensures that products and services adhere to regulatory standards.
5. Improved Operational Efficiency: Financial services firms deal with significant complexity, from managing intricate financial systems to addressing regulatory demands. SAFe helps optimize operational efficiency by promoting transparency, communication, and continuous improvement. By implementing Lean principles and agile practices, organizations can eliminate waste, optimize processes, and enhance overall operational performance.
6. Employee Engagement and Empowerment: SAFe emphasizes the empowerment of teams, fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous learning. This approach leads to increased employee engagement, as team members feel more involved in decision-making processes and have a sense of ownership over their work. The result is a motivated and empowered workforce that drives organizational success.

Visualizing Dependencies for Seamless Collaboration and Timely Delivery

In the intricate world of SAFe, covering every aspect can be overwhelming. For the purpose of this blog, let's focus on a specific use case.

The financial services industry often deals with complex projects involving multiple teams and stakeholders. In such scenarios, visualizing and understanding dependencies among teams becomes critical. This is where the SAFe program board comes in. It acts as a centralized space for teams to effectively visualize, manage dependencies, and progress transparently.

Consider the example of Easy Agile Bank, preparing to launch its self-service banking platform. Various teams, including software, marketing, and customer success, collaborate to make this launch successful. To ensure a seamless rollout, understanding team dependencies and efficient work scheduling are paramount. The goal is to prevent bottlenecks that could delay the launch of the new self-service banking app.

Let’s take a closer look at what this might look like. Below you can see the Team Planning board in Easy Agile Programs for the Software team. The red, yellow, green and black lines indicate dependencies. Some dependencies exist within the software team, while others are cross-team dependencies with the marketing team.

The color of the dependency lines reflects their health status. A red dependency represents a conflict, yellow indicates at risk, green signifies a healthy state and black indicates external dependencies outside the current view, such as work in the backlog or in an other Program Increments. To avoid bottlenecks, you need to address the red dependencies and the yellow where possible.

With Easy Agile Programs, visualizing dependencies becomes effortless. Teams can act swiftly and adjust plans accordingly to prevent delays in the app launch. For instance, the software team identifies a red dependency with the marketing team regarding the live chat system. While the software team plans to set it up in Sprint 2, the marketing team don’t plan on mapping out the live chat experience and messaging until Sprint 3. The dependency line serves as a visual indicator, prompting teams to discuss and reschedule work.

After a brief discussion, the software team decides to reschedule the live chat setup to Sprint 4. As a result, the dependency line turns green, indicating a smooth progress and successful avoidance of a potential bottleneck.

“When I would ask colleagues how long it would take to untangle and understand dependencies, they would suggest a week. With Easy Agile Programs, it took us three minutes”.

Stefan Höhn, NFON

Harness the Power of the SAFe Program Board

Overall, the program board can help teams prioritize their work and make informed decisions about resource allocation. By visualizing dependencies, teams can identify critical path items and focus their efforts on the most important tasks that need to be completed first. This ensures that teams are working in a coordinated, transparent manner and reduces the risk of unnecessary delays or conflicts.

The SAFe program board acts as a valuable tool for teams to effectively manage dependencies, promote collaboration, and achieve alignment in large-scale agile projects.

Easy Agile Programs allows teams to identify and create dependencies effortlessly, empowering teams to navigate the complex financial services landscape with ease.

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“The people who plan the work do the work” is the unwritten rule of the Scaled Agile Framework.

Yet, this can be easier said than done when we’re looking at multiple teams of people needing to plan together.

Add in the complexities of large enterprises that face their own unique challenges - ranging from product development to budget to implementing feedback to final delivery - and suddenly the idea of how to bring teams together for planning can feel harder again.

If you’re familiar with the Scaled Agile Framework, you will already be aware SAFe is designed to facilitate better collaboration and communication between multiple cross-functional groups. The core way to do this with SAFe is Program Increment or PI Planning (Planning Interval Planning in SAFe 6.0)

A plan can take on so many different forms - even just between teams - but with SAFe it is easier to see what ‘good’ looks like when it comes to efficient PI Planning.

The SAFe program board or ART planning board (SAFe 6.0), is a critical tool and output of PI Planning. It is a visual summary of features or goals, cross-team dependencies, and other factors that impact their delivery. Not only does this help with transparency, but it also increases flexibility that, in turn, helps minimize delays and unhealthy dependencies.

What is often overlooked is that PI Planning plays a crucial role in setting teams or the entire program up for success - including implementing other SAFe ceremonies or events.

In this article, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about program boards, including why they’re important in the planning process and how larger teams can use them in PI Planning and beyond.

We’ll also explore exactly how Easy Agile Programs digitises the SAFe program board, not only allowing the people who plan the work to do the work, but also allowing you to plan the work in the environment where the work gets done - in Jira.

NB: while the program board is referred to as 'ART Planning Board' in the updated 6.0 version of the Scaled Agile Framework, it is the same artefact and plays the same role in PI Planning and beyond.

What is a program board?

What does your teams plan or schedule typically look like?

Would it indicate to you what work was being done? Who was doing it? Perhaps even an indication of when they would and any key deadlines these teams are working towards?

The headline here is that a program board is all of this, but also more.

The program board is a visualization of the work being committed to during the Program Increment / Planning Interval or PI. It is simultaneously the facilitator of planning as well as the plan itself.

A typical idea of a program board - especially for collocated PI Planning sessions - is literally a physical board on a wall.
It would show:

• Columns: marking the iterations for the increment
• Rows: representing different teams within that increment
• Sticky notes: describing the features that teams are working on or used to indicate milestones that they’re working towards
• Strings: between these features to indicate if there are any dependencies

But how does a program board help the planning process?

A program board facilitates better team collaboration because it streamlines project communication and planning, while also ensuring better communication between the involved teams.

Moreover, program boards help define the responsibility of each team involved in making the idea a reality, which in turn, helps to streamline the process as a whole.

During PI Planning, the program board supports teams to visualize and manage dependencies across the PI; giving them greater clarity of the work in detail, how the work relates to what the business is trying to achieve and to each other, what tasks need to be done, and crucially, whether there are any issues that may cause delays.

A program board is simultaneously the facilitator of planning as well as the plan itself.

To understand how program boards help with the planning process, let’s go over the different components found on them.

How to set up your SAFe program board for successful PI planning

According to Scaled Agile, there are two primary outputs of PI Planning:

1. Committed PI Objectives
2. Program board - with new feature delivery dates, dependencies among teams and relevant Milestones

So if you’re following SAFe and doing PI Planning you should finish PI Planning with a program board.

During PI Planning, not only do teams discuss and define the features and dependencies, but they also establish milestones across the PI.

This is where a digitised PI Planning tool can really benefit remote or hybrid teams doing PI Planning - the same information is planned in the same place.

Here are a few tips to help you create a SAFe program board.

1. Setting up the board itself

Not to be underestimated, the bare bones of the program board need to be set up.

There are two key elements here:

• Sprint or iteration columns:
  • The right number based on how many iterations/sprints will be in your PI, including a final one for iteration planning
• Rows or swimlanes:
  • One for milestones/events - typically the first
  • One for each team
  • May also have a swimlane for shared services, suppliers or other teams not in the Agile Release Train (ART)

Here is what this may look like:

If you were at this stage of your program board in Easy Agile Programs, your board would look like this:

In Easy Agile Programs, each team represented in a dedicated swimlane represents an agile board in Jira. So the issues that you will be scheduling for this team in sprints during PI Planning and beyond, will be reflected on their agile board and vice versa.

The start and end date for the PI and the number and length of your sprints can all be edited to suit your organisation’s workflows.

When you are in editing mode and are ready to schedule features, the shared team features swimlane also appears at the top to visually indicate if there is work to be scheduled across multiple teams.

2. Start with features and milestones

During PI Planning, Product Management shares the product/solution vision and this commonly also means the next top 10 upcoming features for the teams to take into the PI from the backlog. (We know from our customers that sometimes this can be a lot more!)

We also want to start by knowing which milestones we are working towards. Often these can represent product release dates, external deliverables or deadlines like preparing a demo or showcase for a trade show, marketing launches or events. Having these visualized on the program board helps teams to easily see what they are working towards, but also to inform prioritization of the specific features needed to help meet delivery of that milestone.

If you are working with a physical or simple digital program board, features and Milestones are represented by ‘sticky notes’ - placed in the appropriate swimlane and/or colour to indicate this information as well as the team responsible for it and the time frame:

So what does this look like in Easy Agile Programs at this point?

Milestones are highly visual

• Milestones can be customised to indicate start/end date and colour. They run across all team swimlanes so teams can easily see how their work relates to an upcoming deliverable or event.
• Milestones still have a dedicated place at the top of the program board but this can be collapsed if desired

Features are native Jira issues

• Features in Easy Agile Programs are native Jira issues, commonly epics. You can easily click on the issue key from the program board to see more information via the issue view.
• Features can be easily scheduled from the backlog into a swimlane through drag and drop, or created via the program board. To indicate when a feature is intended to start and be completed, simply drag and drop the edge of the issue:

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3. Identify dependencies

With the features done, the next thing that teams should look for is dependencies. Remember the strings we mentioned before?

Dependencies between features and teams are represented with string on a program board when it’s on a wall or lines between those features in a digital tool.

Sticky notes in a different colour, like red, indicate a significant dependency. For example that feature may have more than one feature relying on it to go to schedule.

To explain this, let’s consider an example.

Imagine Team X realizes they cannot develop a feature until Team Y develops an API thanks to the program board. So, what both teams can do is talk to each other and come up with a solution that works for everybody, leading to better collaboration among the teams.

After an agreement is reached, a dependency will then be placed on the board so everyone has the same understanding about the dependency, and how it’ll be resolved. A piece of string will be attached to each card to demonstrate this:

The nature of dependencies mean that something is required to be completed in order for something else to be done.

To be able to more easily see when dependencies are scheduled, Easy Agile Programs has a traffic light system of red, orange and green dependencies to indicate dependency health.

Dependency health is represented as follows:

• A red line indicates the dependant issue is scheduled in a sprint after the dependency (conflict)
• An orange line indicates the dependant and dependency are scheduled in the same sprint (a risk)
• A green line indicates the dependant issue is scheduled in a sprint before its dependency (healthy)
• A black line indicates the dependency exists with issues outside of the current view. Whether this is the current Agile Release Train / Program, or with a future or past increment.

This easily indicates to a Release Train Engineer or a Program Manager where they ought to focus and to be able to address any scheduling issues during planning.

Easy Agile Programs also allows you to visualize dependencies between issues within and across teams from the Team Planning Board. This provides a really focussed view of the work for a particular team for the PI, and how that work relates to other teams:

Program boards are needed for better collaboration

The power of the program board lies in having a single view of what a collection of teams are committing to - together - and exactly how that work relates to each other. It helps organize planning sessions by summarizing future dependencies across all teams and sprints. As a result, scrum masters, release train engineers, product managers and business owners can easily identify and prioritize cross-team conversations that matter the most.

Running a scaled planning session or PI Planning ceremony, especially for the first time, can be daunting.

But if you’re successful in developing a solid program board as part of your PI planning process, you won't have to worry about chasing down your co-worker or team member to meet deadlines. The key here is to make sure you’ve scheduled the most important features to take into the PI, identified cross-team dependencies, and have visualised any milestones or deadlines to ensure they can be realistically achieved.

The program board can become more impactful though, when it is more than just a plan. Building a program board in an online tool with the added capability of it representing the actual work that’s planned to be done means that it has a life beyond PI Planning; it becomes the living document of the teams progress and a means to identify when there are any blockers to that progress.

In order for agile teams to be agile and continuously and iteratively deliver value, they need to be equipped with a program board that can help them respond to any changes so that they can plan for success but also progress towards it.

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The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversations.

Agile Manifesto, 2001

As true as this statement was when it was written, the Covid-19 pandemic irrevocably changed the way we work, live and communicate.

As organisations and individuals we found ourselves quickly needing to adapt to an ever-changing environment. Now that we have survived, we have to lean into this new way of doing things in the workplace so that we can thrive.

But what about our agile ceremonies?

One of the main reasons companies transition to agile is to make business processes and outcomes more efficient. So how do we take those principles and practices and preserve their integrity in a remote environment?

If you’re familiar with the Scaled Agile Framework, you’ll know that PI Planning is an agile ceremony that is at the heart of implementing SAFe.

Traditionally a face-to-face event, PI Planning is a scaled cross-team planning ceremony that aims to bring together multiple teams to plan - aligning them around a shared mission and vision for the upcoming quarter or increment.

SAFe still advises that PI Planning is still collocated where possible, and it does have its benefits.

However many teams, even before the pandemic, used PI Planning software to run their planning process and to make it more efficient and accessible to distributed PI Planning. But as with most things we have taken online since Covid, we are at the mercy of the tools we use to determine how effective we can be.

The truth is, unless you can get all members within an Agile Release Train - Business Owners, stakeholders, product management, Release Train Engineers, Scrum Masters, and teams - physically in the one room at the one time, considering alternatives is necessary.

It’s important that everyone is present during PI Planning, but that doesn’t mean they have to be physically present to make PI Planning a success

Remote PI Planning with Easy Agile Programs

We are now beyond the period where we needed to adapt to remote work. Our own business agility has been tested and we have needed to evolve.

Since we first launched Easy Agile Programs, we have continued to build on the capabilities it has to help teams and organizations around the world thrive in a remote environment.

With a simple but powerful tool seamlessly integrated with Jira, the latest version of Easy Agile Programs has a range of features aimed at helping distributed teams through the PI Planning ceremony and to build out a long-lived but flexible digital Program board in Jira.

Moving to remote or hybrid PI Planning doesn’t need to jeopardize yours or your customer’s success. In fact with the right tool, it can enhance it by saving time on context switching, complex configurations and double-handling.

The PI Planning Agenda

Regardless of whether you are following a more traditional 2-day PI Planning agenda, or need to accommodate a split agenda in a distributed environment, the core agenda items are the same. We’ll walk you through each of those and how Easy Agile Programs supports these key features.

Source: Scaled Agile

Setting the business context

PI Planning kicks off with the Business Owner(s) or senior executives giving a presentation where they describe “the current state of the business, share the Portfolio Vision, and present perspective on how effectively existing solutions are addressing customer needs” (Scaled Agile - PI Planning).

In the Program details section of Easy Agile Programs, Business Owners can share a recorded video presentation with all members of the ART, or a Zoom or video conferencing link.

As a result, the presentation isn’t restricted to team members being physically present for this agenda item, and can be referred to throughout the PI Planning session and beyond.

Setting the Product/Solution Vision

Next in the agenda, Product Management will present the current vision, typically in the form of the top 10 upcoming features.

Rather than presenting the top 10 features in a list on a slide or document, Program Managers can access Jira Features (Epics) right within Easy Agile Programs and can schedule them onto a visual timeline for the duration of the Program Increment (PI).

The Program Roadmap ensures all teams are aligned on the committed features for a PI and provides visibility into the direction of the Program for all stakeholders.

It’s at this point in the PI Planning ceremony that Product Managers may also call out any upcoming milestones.

According to Scaled Agile, ‘Milestones mark specific points on the development timeline, and they can be invaluable in measuring and monitoring the product evolution and risk.’

Easy Agile Programs enable you to create highly visible milestones on the Program Roadmap to highlight key delivery dates, external events, or business milestones. These can also be created on the Program Board, or at the team level on the Team Planning Board. They are represented by colored flags at the top of the Roadmap that spans the team swimlanes that make up the Program.

Team Breakout Sessions

In the team breakout, teams work individually to estimate the capacity for each Sprint in the PI. Teams create new or identify existing issues from their backlog that will help achieve the set features. The draft team plans are visible to all members of the ART.

To make this easier, Easy Agile Programs has dedicated Team Planning Boards accessible to all who have access to the Program. Simply clicking on a team’s name will take you to their team Planning Board where they are able to set capacity for each sprint within the PI:

Teams have the context of their committed features at the top of their Team Planning Board, both those that are shared by more than one team in the ART or are specific to their team.

To plan the work needed to achieve these features, teams are able to drag and drop existing issues from their backlog or quick create new issues right within the planning board.

During this session, teams also create draft PI Objectives. These are a critical part of linking what the team is working on to broader business objectives, and you don’t need to leave the Team Planning Board to create them.

In Easy Agile Programs you can indicate whether the objective is committed or uncommitted, provide a description, and directly link the Jira issues scheduled to achieve this objective with the objective itself:

During PI Planning, Business Owners will have a discussion with teams about their PI Objectives which provides an invaluable opportunity to align. The Team Planning provides the artefact to facilitate those conversations, and allows Business Owners or stakeholders to assign a business value directly within the tool.

An important part of the team breakout sessions is identifying any dependencies or potential risks to scheduling work. Through drag and drop or create dependencies mode, it is very easy to create and visualize dependencies across teams in the Team Planning Board.

Aside from highly visible dependency lines, our customers also appreciate being able to see the health of those dependencies. If a dependency line is green it means the dependency is healthy, if it’s orange it is at risk, and if it is red it means we are blocked i.e. the work needed to be done to achieve an earlier piece of work is scheduled after it.

And the best bit of all? This is visible to all in the ART in a digitized SAFe Program Board.

On the Program Board, we have the option to have a detailed view with team-level issues visible or to hide them so we can just see features.

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Program Risks

During PI Planning, we need to be able to identify risks and dependencies to assess whether teams in the Agile Release Train are set up for success to reach their PI Objectives.

A digital Program Board provides transparency to all members of the ART during PI Planning and acts as a single source of truth during and beyond planning. A digital artefact enables the Program Board to become more than a plan, and lives longer than the strings and post-it notes on a physical wall.

We know that visualizing feature-level dependencies is crucial to not only understanding but also troubleshooting the health or status of a PI. Not just during PI Planning itself, but also throughout the PI during execution.

The Program Board in Easy Agile Programs is highly visual and also filterable. Colored lines that indicate the health of the dependency ensure we have an at-a-glance view of significant dependencies that pose a risk to our PI.

Additionally, our scheduling conflicts feature surfaces when there is work scheduled outside of its associated feature, to immediately and clearly indicate where there is a risk.

The ability to filter by dependency health and team in Easy Agile Programs helps to focus conversations around risks during PI Planning.

Plan rework

After presenting plans to the ART and discussing scope, cross-team dependencies, required resources, and risks, teams then proceed to a confidence vote.

If needed, a closing part of planning is to rework any plans so that all teams within the Agile Release Train are confident in what they are committing to.

This may involve rescheduling to address dependencies, breaking work down further, adjusting estimations, etc.

Reworking is simple and streamlined within Easy Agile Programs. The ability to inline edit issue estimates and summaries in real time makes any rework fast and simple. Dragging and dropping an issue easily reschedules it and any impact on associated dependencies can be seen all at once.

All changes made to issues in Easy Agile Programs are automatically reflected in Jira.

Find out how Easy Agile Programs can make PI Planning easy for your collocated, hybrid or remote teams.

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What about beyond planning?

We’ve examined the merits of remote PI Planning using a digital tool like Easy Agile Programs but something that so often gets overlooked is - what happens after planning?

A plan remains just that if it’s not translated into action. A plan isn’t made not to be fulfilled, and this is where a distributed or hybrid environment can be challenging.

Your Program Board may set you up for success, but ask yourself - how will you know if you’re on track to achieve it?

This is where having a digital, user-friendly tool that uses native Jira issues helps. At the end of PI Planning, teams have created a plan in the form of a Program Board in Jira, but they are also ready for sprint one as soon as PI Planning is done.

From there, the Program Board is set up and capable of evolving, not rolled up and stored away. This is what Easy Agile Programs is designed to do - to provide transparency but also flexibility so that the plan can necessarily adapt and be agile while maintaining momentum towards progress.

So what’s up next for Easy Agile Programs? Can you help us improve it? Check out our product roadmap and if there is something missing let us know.

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You may be just starting out, or you may have worked with agile methodologies for a while, but we’re sure you can agree that scaling agile in a large organization can be daunting. PI Planning is key to scaling agile, so we’ve developed this guide to help you run successful planning sessions, and build your confidence for your next scaled planning event.

We'll cover:

• What is PI Planning?
• Why do PI Planning?
• What is the goal of PI Planning?
• What should be included in the PI Planning agenda?
• What happens in the first part of the PI Planning meeting?
• Why is a confidence vote held at the end of PI Planning?
• When is PI Planning held?
• What is a pre-PI Planning event and when is it needed?
• PI Planning in SAFe
• PI Planning in Scrum
• What is the difference between a PI Roadmap and a Solution Roadmap?
• What is a program?
• What is a program board?
• Who should be involved in PI Planning?
• How to prepare for PI Planning
• What happens after PI Planning?
• What is a post-PI Planning event?
• Remote or hybrid PI Planning
• Common PI Planning mistakes
• Using Jira for PI Planning

Let’s start with the basics…

What is PI Planning?

PI Planning stands for Program Increment Planning.

PI Planning sessions are regularly scheduled events where teams within the same Agile Release Train (ART) meet to align and agree on what comes next. Teams will aim to align on goals and priorities, discuss features, plan the roadmap, and identify cross-team dependencies.

The goal is to align the teams to the mission and each other. Here are the essential elements of PI Planning:

• 2 full day events run every 8-12 weeks (depending on the length of your increments)
• Product Managers work to prioritize the planned features for the increment beforehand
• Development teams own user story planning and estimation
• Engineers and UX teams work to validate the planning

Why do PI Planning?

PI Planning is incredibly beneficial for large-scale agile organizations. PI Planning enables:

• Communication
• Visibility
• Collaboration

To understand the impact, let’s look at an example of a large organization that hasn’t yet implemented PI Planning. This organization has 250 teams and 6,500 team members. These teams rarely speak to each other, outside of dealing with a critical issue that has forced them to collaborate.

Alignment across these teams happens at the leadership team level, and they have multiple levels of managers in between who cascade information down with varying success. There is a constant battle for resources, budget, and opportunities to work on the most exciting projects.

Their projects have a habit of conflicting - one team would release something and then it would break something in another team’s project.

PI Planning is the first time many big companies get their teams together in a room or on the same call to talk to each other. This is a chance to have important conversations about who is working on what.

Why is this important?

1. When you’re touching a system or a code repository, you need to know how it’s going to impact another team
2. You might need to do some work to enable another team to work on their feature first (and vice versa)

With proper planning and collaboration, teams can get things done more effectively, release with more predictability, and stay on budget.

All very good reasons to do PI Planning.

What is the goal of PI Planning?

PI Planning is an essential part of the Scaled Agile Framework, a framework that’s designed to bring agile to large companies with multiple teams.

SAFe PI Planning helps teams in the Agile Release Train (ART) synchronize, collaborate, and align on workflows, objectives, releases, and more.

Without PI Planning, teams don’t have structured communication. They may not know what the other teams are working on, which can cause a lot of problems. For example, two teams might be working on different features without realizing there’s a dependency, which could hold up the release or require a significant rework of the code.

The goal of PI Planning is to have all your teams aligned strategically and enable cross-team collaboration to avoid these potential problems.

Now that we’ve covered off the “why”, let’s dig a bit deeper into the “what”. The best way to get a picture of what happens during PI Planning is to take a look at an agenda.

What should be included in the PI Planning agenda?

Here’s a standard PI Planning agenda template:

Day 1 AgendaDay 2 Agenda8:00 - 9:00 | Business Context8:00 - 9:00 | Planning Adjustments9:00 - 10:30 | Product/Solution Vision9:00 - 11:00 | Team Breakouts10:30 - 11:30 | Architecture Vision and Development Practices11:00 - 13:00 | Final Plan Review and Lunch11:30 - 13:00 | Planning Context and Lunch13:00 - 14:00 | ART Risks13:00 - 16:00 | Team Breakouts14:00 - 14:15 | Confidence Vote16:00 - 17:00 | Draft Plan Review14:15 - ??  |Plan Rework?17:00 - 18:00 | Management Review and Problem Solving?? | Planning Retrospective and Moving Forward

Source: scaledagileframework.com/pi-planning

This agenda might be perfect for you, or you might make changes based on the needs of your teams.

Distributed teams, very large ARTs, and other factors might require you to be creative with the schedule. Some sessions may need more time, while others can be shortened. If you have teams in multiple time zones, your PI Planning agenda may need to go over 3-4 days. If it’s your first PI Planning event, try the standard agenda, get feedback from your teams, and experiment with different formats next time.

What happens in the first part of the PI Planning meeting?

The first part of the PI Planning meeting is designed to set the context for the planning that happen next.

Day 1 usually kicks off with a presentation from a Senior Executive or Business Owner. The agenda allows an hour to talk about the current state of the business. They highlight specific customer needs, how the current products address these needs, and potential gaps.

After that, the Product Management team will share the current vision for your product or solution. They’ll talk about any changes that have occurred since the last PI Planning session (usually around 3 months prior). They’ll describe what’s coming up, including milestones and the next 10 features that are planned. This session should take around 1.5 hours.

Why is a confidence vote held at the end of PI Planning?

The confidence vote is a seemingly small but very important part of PI Planning towards the end of the event.

It is important the team is confident in committing to the objectives and work that is planned. The Release Train Engineer will ask teams to vote on this.

Everyone participating in planning needs to vote. This could be via a raise of hands (and fingers) or it could be via the tool you’re using. For example, the Team Planning board in Easy Agile Programs allows each team member to enter their confidence vote.

If the average vote across the room is at least three out of five, the plan is a go-ahead. If it’s less it’ll need reworking (until it reaches a high confidence level). If anyone votes just one or two, they’ll have the chance to share their reasoning.

The confidence vote is all about making sure that the attendees are in alignment and that they agree that the plan in its current form is possible within the given timeframe. Speaking of timing, let’s talk about how and where PI Planning actually fits into your company calendar.

When is PI Planning held?

Many companies find that 8-12 weeks (which adds up to 4-6 x 2-week iterations) is the right amount of time for an increment.

Some companies hold quarterly PI Planning, for example:

• Q1 PI Planning: December
• Q2 PI Planning: March
• Q3 PI Planning: June
• Q4 PI Planning: September

However, the timing and frequency will depend on how long each program increment is scheduled to last and may need to accommodate holidays.

The good thing about PI Planning events is that they happen regularly on a fixed schedule, which means you can plan for them well ahead of time. That means teams and Business Owners have plenty of notice to ensure they can show up for the event.

This means that what happens in preparation for PI Planning can be just as important as the event itself.

What is a pre-PI Planning event and when is it needed?

A pre-planning event - separate to PI Planning - is to make sure that the ART is aligned within the broader Solution Train before they do PI Planning. It’s all about synchronizing with the other ARTs to ensure the solution and organization are heading in the right direction, together.

You’ll need to organize a pre-PI Planning event if you’re operating at the Large Solution, Portfolio, or Full SAFe levels. Essential SAFe is more basic and does not have a Solution Train, so if you’re operating at this level, you won’t need pre-PI Planning so formally.

Here are a few of the roles that should be invited to the pre-planning event:

• Solution Train Engineer
• Solution Management
• Solution Architect/Engineering
• Solution System Team
• Release Train Engineers
• Product Management
• System Architects/Engineers
• Customers

They’ll look at the top capabilities from the Solution Backlog, Solution Intent, Vision, and Solution Roadmap. It’s really a lot like PI Planning but at a higher level, across the overall solution and not just the individual ART.

The event starts with each ART summing up their previous program increment and accomplishments to set the context. Next, a senior executive will brief the attendees on the current situation before Solution Management discusses the current solution vision and any changes from what was shared previously. Other things that are often discussed or finalized include:

• Roadmaps
• Milestones
• Solution backlogs
• Upcoming PI features from the Program Backlog

In the next section, we'll help to define a few key terms that have been touched on.

PI Planning in SAFe

If you’re adopting SAFe for the first time, chances are it will start with PI Planning. That’s because it forms the foundation of the Scaled Agile Framework.

As Scaled Agile says, "if you are not doing it, you are not doing SAFe."

Definition:

SAFe or the Scaled Agile Framework™ is a series of guidelines and practices designed to help bring agility into larger organizations, across all teams and levels of the business. The framework is geared at improving visibility, alignment, and collaboration and should lead to greater productivity, better results, and faster delivery.

Whether you’re adopting all 5 levels or just essential SAFe, the foundation of your transformation and the driver for everything is the PI Planning ceremony.

Scrum and Kanban are also agile frameworks (that you may be more familiar with), and these have historically been very effective at the individual team level. SAFe helps to scale agility across teams; to have multiple teams come together to work on the same products, objectives, and outcomes. It goes beyond the team level to include every stakeholder, outlining what should happen at each level of the organization to ensure that scaled planning is successful.

The purpose of SAFe is to improve the visibility of work and alignment across teams, which will lead to more predictable business results.

This is increasingly important for organizations as they respond to changing circumstances and customer expectations. The traditional waterfall approaches fall short because they’re slow and inefficient.

Bigger companies (often with thousands of developers) can’t keep up with the innovation of smaller, more nimble startups. Along with bigger teams, larger organizations often have stricter requirements around governance and compliance, making it more complex to launch a new feature and deliver new value to customers.

These companies are looking for new ways to organize people into projects and introduce more effective ways of working that use resources more effectively and provide more predictable delivery. If they don’t, they may not survive.

SAFe is a way for these companies to start moving in a more agile direction.

PI Planning is a vital element of SAFe. It’s a ceremony that brings together representatives from every team to help them work together, decide on top features to work on next, identify dependencies, and make a plan for the next Program Increment. As a result, there’s greater visibility across all the teams, changes are made more frequently, and teams work with each other - not against each other. From there, these massive companies can speed up their processes, work more efficiently, compete with newer and more nimble companies, and stay viable.

SAFe and PI Planning are powerful enablers for organizational agility.

While SAFe is a framework designed for larger organizations, there isn't a reason stopping smaller companies from doing a version of PI Planning, too. All you need is more than one agile team to make it worthwhile.

PI Planning in Scrum

You can also use PI Planning as part of a simple Scrum approach.

Scrum Framework diagram shows when and how scrum teams can implement PI Planning

Source: Scrum.org

Scrum is an agile framework that helps teams get things done. It’s a way for teams to plan and organize their own work and tackle user stories and tasks in smaller time boxes. This is often referred to as a sprint.

If multiple scrum teams want to work better together (but aren’t necessarily operating within SAFe), they could adopt a version of PI Planning.

For example, these scrum teams could:

• Meet every 10 weeks and discuss the features they are planning to work on
• Get product managers to combine backlogs and prioritize together
• Share resources across the teams, as needed
• Map dependencies and coordinate joint releases

The good news here is that there’s no “one size fits all” approach to PI Planning, so think about how you could adopt the ideas and principles and make it work for your organization and context.

What is the difference between a PI Roadmap and a Solution Roadmap?

There are different types of roadmaps in SAFe, so it’s important to understand the differences and what each roadmap is meant to do.

PI Roadmap

A PI Roadmap is created before your PI Planning event and also reviewed and updated by Product Management after the event is finished. It will usually cover three Program Increments:

1. The current increment (work that’s committed)
2. The next forecasted increment (planned work based on forecasted objectives)
3. The increment after that (further planned work based on forecasted objectives)

Quarterly PI Planning will outline around 9 months of work. The second and third increments on your PI Roadmap will likely change as priorities shift, but they’re still an important part of the roadmap as they forecast where the product is headed next.

Solution Roadmap

The Solution Roadmap is a longer-term forecasting and planning tool for a specific product or service.

It will usually cover a few years at a time, with more specific details available for year one (like quarterly features and capabilities), and more general information (like objectives) for year two and beyond.

What is a program?

A program is where agile teams are grouped together to form a larger group. This is often referred to as the “team-of-teams” level. In simple terms, a program is a group of agile teams.

When you hear people talking about “team-of-teams” or “scaled agile”, they mean taking agile beyond a single team, and asking more teams to join in.

For example, there might be 4 teams working on a NASA spaceship mission to Mars.

NASA decides they want to see if agile can help these teams do better work. So, to start with, the Oxygen team switches from working with traditional Waterfall project management methods to embracing agile principles.

1. Launch team
2. Food team
3. Oxygen team (Agile)
4. Landing team

After a few months, NASA decides that the way the oxygen team is working is going well, so the remaining three teams similarly adopt more agile methodologies:

1. Launch team (Agile)
2. Food team (Agile)
3. Oxygen team (Agile)
4. Landing team (Agile)

Each of these 4 teams are self-organizing, meaning they’re responsible for their own work.

However, now that these teams are all working in the same way, they can be grouped together as a program.

Once you add in the business owners, product management team, systems architect/engineer, and release train engineer, you have all the roles needed to continuously deliver systems or solutions through the Agile Release Train (ART).

What is a program board?

Program Boards are a key output of PI Planning.

Traditionally, they’re a physical board that’s mounted on the wall, with columns drawn up to mark the iterations for the increment, and a row for each team. Teams add sticky notes that describe features they’ll be working on.

• Feature 1
• Feature 2
• Feature 3

Once all the features are added, they work to identify dependencies (features that’ll affect other features) and mark this up by connecting them with red string.

SAFe program boards don’t have to be physical, though. There are a lot of advantages to using a digital program board like Easy Agile Programs, which integrates directly with Jira. We’ll talk more about how you can use Jira for PI Planning towards the end of this guide.

Equip your remote, distributed or co-located teams for success with a digital tool for PI Planning.

Easy Agile Programs

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Who is involved in PI Planning?

There are 5 key roles in a PI Planning event:

1. Release Train Engineers
2. Product Managers
3. Product Owners
4. Scrum Masters
5. Developers

Here are the responsibilities for each of these roles during PI Planning:

Release Train Engineer

The Release Train Engineer is a servant leader and coach for the ART. Their role focuses mainly on planning and facilitating the PI Planning event. This means they help:

• Establish and communicate the annual calendars
• Get everything ready (including pre and post-PI Planning meetings)
• Manage risks and dependencies
• Create Program PI Objectives from Team PI Objectives and publish them
• Track progress towards expected goals
• Ensure strategy and execution alignment
• Facilitate System Demos

As the facilitator for the 2-day event, the Release Train Engineer presents the planning process and expected outcomes for the event, plus facilitates the Management Review and Problem Solving session and retrospective.

Product Manager

A Product Manager’s job is to understand the customers’ needs and validate solutions, while understanding and supporting portfolio work.

Before PI Planning happens, Product Managers take part in the pre-PI Planning meeting, where they discuss and define inputs, objectives, and milestones for their next PI Planning events.

In PI Planning, the Product Managers present the Program vision and upcoming milestones. So that they can manage and prioritize the flow of work, they review the Draft plan and describe any changes to the planning and scope based on the Management Review & Problem Solving session. Once the PI Planning event is over, they use the Program Objectives from the Release Train Engineer to update the roadmap.

Following PI Planning, Product Managers play a critical role in communicating findings and creating Solution PI Objectives.

Product Owner

The Product Owners are responsible for maintaining and prioritizing the Team Backlog, as well as Iteration Planning. They have content authority to make decisions at the User Story level during PI Planning Team Breakout sessions.

Product Owners help the Team with defining stories, estimating, and sequencing, as well as drafting the Team’s PI Objectives and participating in the Team Confidence Vote. They’re also responsible for conveying visions and goals from upper management to the team, as well as:

• Reporting on key performance metrics
• Evaluating progress, and
• Communicating the status to stakeholders

Scrum Master

The Scrum Master is a servant leader to the Product Owner and Development team, which means they manage and lead processes while helping the team in practical ways to get things done.

They facilitate preparation for events (including PI Planning) and prepare System Demos. They help the team estimate their capacity for Iterations, finalize Team PI Objectives, and manage the timebox, dependencies, and ambiguities during Team Breakout sessions. The Scrum Master also participates in the Confidence Vote to help the team reach a consensus.

Developer

Developers are responsible for researching, designing, implementing, testing, maintaining, and managing software systems.

During PI Planning, they participate in Breakout sessions to create and refine user stories and acceptance criteria (alongside their Product Owner) and adjust the working plan. Developers help to identify risks and dependencies and to support the team in drafting and finalizing Team PI Objectives, before participating in the Team Confidence Vote.

Do you have a key role in PI Planning? See how the right tool can help you manage your release train or program better.

Watch an Easy Agile Programs product demo

How to prepare for PI Planning

If you want to succeed at PI Planning, you need to prepare.

Every PI Planning event relies on good preparation so that your organization and attendees get the most out of the event and achieve your planning objectives.

The first step is to ensure that everyone involved properly understands the planning process. All people participating in PI Planning (along with key stakeholders and Business Owners) must be clear on their role and aligned on strategy.

Any presenters will also need to get content ready for their presentations.

To ensure that the PI Planning event runs smoothly, make sure that the tools you need to facilitate planning are available and working properly. Be sure to test any tech that you are relying on ahead of time (including audio, video, internet connectivity, and access to PI Planning applications), to ensure that your distributed teams can participate in the PI Planning event. Don’t forget to plan for enough food for everyone, too (planning is hungry work).

What happens after PI Planning?

After PI Planning, teams do a planning retrospective to discuss:

• What went well
• What went not-so-well
• What could be better for next time
• There will also be a discussion of what happens next, which can include things like:
• Transcribing the objectives, user stories, and program board into your work management tool (like Jira)
• Agreeing on meeting times and locations for daily stand-ups and iteration planning
• Making sure that everyone has their belongings and leaves the event rooms clean when they go

The other thing that usually happens after PI Planning events is a post-PI Planning event.

What is a post-PI Planning event?

These are similar to the pre-PI Planning events we looked at earlier. A post-PI Planning event brings together stakeholders from all ARTs within the Solution Train to ensure they’re synchronized and aligned.

Post-PI Planning happens after all the ARTs have completed their PI Planning for the next increment. They present the plans, explain their objectives, and share milestones and expected timelines.

Like PI Planning events, post-PI Planning involves using a planning board, but rather than features, it outlines capabilities, dependencies, and milestones for each iteration and ART. Potential issues and risks are identified, discussed, and either owned, resolved, accepted, or mitigated. And similar to regular PI Planning events, plans go through a confidence vote to ensure they meet the solution’s objectives, and are reworked until the attendees average a vote of 3 or more.

Remote or hybrid PI Planning

PI Planning in person was once standard, but with teams more likely to be distributed, gathering everyone at the office isn't always feasible. This doesn't have to be a barrier.

The most important principle is to ensure that the teams who are doing the work are able to be 'present' in the planning in real-time, if not in person.

This may require some adjustments to the agenda and timing of your planning, but with forethought and support from the right technology, your PI Planning will still be effective.

Tips for remote PI Planning

Remote PI Planning is ideal for organizations with distributed teams or flexible work arrangements. It’s also a lot cheaper and less disruptive than flying folks in to do PI Planning every few months. If you have the right tools and technology, you can run PI Planning and allow everyone to participate, whether they’re in the same room or on the other side of the world.

Here are a few tips for remote PI Planning:

Embrace the cloud

Use online shared planning tools to allow your team to access and interact with information as soon as possible - ideally in real-time. Ensuring that all participants have instant access to the information simplifies the process of identifying dependencies and maintaining a centralized point of reference for your planning. This helps prevent errors that arise from working with different versions and transferring data between sources.

Livestream the event

Live-streaming audio and video from the PI Planning event is a viable alternative to in-person planning. Actively encourage your remote team members to use their cameras and microphones during the event. While it may not fully replicate the experience of having them physically present, it does come remarkably close.

Record the PI Planning event

Ideally, everyone will participate in the PI Planning live. But if your teams are distributed across multiple time zones or some team members are ill, it’s a good idea to record the event. Having a recording to refer back to could also be useful for attendees who want a refresher on anything that has been discussed.

Be ready to adapt

Some teams will change the standard PI Planning agenda to fit multiple time zones, which could mean starting the event earlier or later for some, or even running it across 3 days instead of 2.

Set expectations

A common issue that can arise from having distributed teams tune in remotely is too much noise and interference. Before your first session kicks off, communicate about when it’s acceptable to talk and when teams need to use the mute button. That way, your teams will avoid getting distracted, while still ensuring everyone can participate.

For more tips, check out our blog on how to prepare for distributed PI Planning.

Whether distributed or in person, if your team gets PI Planning right, it makes everything in the upcoming increment so much easier.

📣 Hear how PNI media have embraced virtual PI planning

Common PI Planning mistakes

PI Planning doesn’t always run smoothly, especially the first time. And the framework itself may present a challenge to some organizations. Here are some common mistakes and challenges to keep in mind (and avoid):

Long, boring sessions

Avoid starting your PI Planning event with long sessions filled with dense content. Think of creative ways to make these sessions more engaging, or break them into shorter sessions. Consider different formats that help to involve and engage participants. And be sure to make room for team planning and collaboration.

Tech issues

Any event is vulnerable to technical mishaps, but if you’re streaming audio and video to a distributed team, this can really impact the flow of the event. It’s a good idea to carefully test all the equipment and connections ahead of time to minimize potential problems.

Confidence vote

Some PI Planning participants struggle with the confidence vote concept. People may feel pressure from the room to vote for a plan to go ahead, rather than speaking up about their concerns. Failing to address issues early only increases the risk of something going wrong during the increment.

Time constraints

When you have a large ART of 10 or more teams, there are a lot of draft plans to present and review, so less time is allocated to each team. Chances are that the feedback will be of poorer quality than a smaller ART with 8 teams.

Not committing to the process

PI Planning isn’t perfect and neither is SAFe. However, the process has been proven to work for many organizations, when the organization is committed. Start with the full framework as recommended; you can adapt the framework and your PI Planning event to suit your organization, but be sure to commit to the process that follows. Anything that is half-done will not deliver full results.

Sticking with the same old tools

If something is not working, fix it. For example, too many teams stick with traditional SAFe Program Boards even though they’re not always practical. If the post-it notes keep escaping, the data entered into Jira seems incorrect, or you have a distributed team who want a digital way to be part of your PI Planning event… it’s time to upgrade to a digital program board like Easy Agile Programs.

Using Jira for PI Planning

Jira is the most popular project management tool for agile teams, so chances are you're already using it at the team level.

When you need to scale team agility as part of an ART, it can be difficult to properly visualize the work of multiple teams in Jira. The only way you can do that in the native app is by creating a multi-project board, which is rather clunky.

Traditional PI Planning on a physical board using sticky notes and string may achieve planning objectives for co-located teams, but what happens next? After the session is over, the notes and string need to be recreated in Jira for the whole team so that work can be tracked throughout the increment. This is a cumbersome and time-consuming process that is open to error as sticky notes are transcribed incorrectly, or go missing.

The best way to use Jira for PI Planning is to use an app like Easy Agile Programs to help you run your PI Planning sessions. The integrated features mean you can:

• Set up a digital Program Board (no more string and sticky notes!)
• Do cross-team planning
• Visualize and manage cross-team dependencies, create milestones
• Identify scheduling conflicts to mitigate risks
• Get aligned on committed objectives for the Program Increment
• Visualize an Increment Feature Roadmap
• Conduct confidence voting
• Transform Jira from a team-level tool to something that’s useful for the whole ART

Join companies like Bell, Cisco, and Deutsche Bahn who use Jira to do PI Planning with Easy Agile Programs (from the Atlassian Marketplace).

Looking for a PI Planning tool for Jira?

We’ll continue to revisit this guide in the future. If you have any questions about PI Planning or you notice there’s an aspect we haven’t covered yet, send us an email 📫

Do your teams have a clear understanding of what needs to be done – and why?

One of the keys to being agile is to focus on the work that matters. This means working on projects that add value to the business and contribute to performance. But for many organizations, teams can get caught up on the latest feature or development, without understanding how that relates to the bigger picture of what the business cares about.

To keep your team focused on what they have set out to achieve in order to deliver value and achieve business outcomes, setting smart PI Objectives is essential. We look at why they’re so important, what makes a good PI objective, and how you can use them in your organization.

At a glance:

• PI objectives help teams understand how what they’re doing matters to the business.
• Good PI objectives are SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timebound.
• Linking features to PI objectives within the same tool makes it easier for teams and stakeholders to see how work is achieving business objectives.

What are PI objectives?

When an agile team gets together for a PI planning session, there are two key outputs:

1. The Program Board (ART Planning Board in SAFe 6.0) covers big picture information such as features, dependencies between teams, and milestones. A feature is an agreed upon piece of work identified as being important to meeting business needs. For software development teams, this might be a new product feature. For marketing teams, it might be a website refresh or an advertising campaign.
2. PI objectives link the scheduled features to broader business objectives and value. This helps align work that needs to be done with broader business goals. They are then broken down into committed and uncommitted objectives.
   1. Committed objectives are those the team is confident they can deliver within the Program Increment. These objectives have been committed by the team through a confidence vote.
   2. Uncommitted objectives are those the team have low confidence in delivering but can help to build a buffer into the PI. This is because while the outcome of these objectives may not be certain, they are included in the teams capacity and plan for the PI should capacity remain after delivering on committed objectives.

The benefits of having smart PI objectives

PI objectives link what teams are working on to what the business cares about. They create alignment with business objectives by clearly connecting features to business value. As a result, teams know how their work is adding value.

Smart PI objectives provide a framework for this. They help build trust, create a shared language, and provide a clear direction. Everyone in the team can then understand what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and why it’s important.

Without smart PI objectives in place, teams can spend time on tasks that aren’t adding value to the business and impact agility.

PI objectives are essential to your ability to measure success. Completing features alone isn't enough - they must drive a business outcome. They help get teams clear on why the work they do matters and define what success looks like.

What makes a good PI objective?

We’ve talked about why PI objectives are so critical, and now we’ll explain what makes a good PI objective.

Good PI objectives:

• Allow the business to see deliverables in a set timeframe
• Provide clarity on how scheduled work  fits into the big picture
• Enhance communication between teams and stakeholders
• Include no more than 7 to 10 objectives in total
• Aligns with what the business cares about
• Are clear on why it’s important and what it will deliver
• Are understood by anyone who picks them up

Are SMART – that is, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timebound

PI objectives need to be SMART

Using the SMART goal-setting framework to write your PI objectives helps keep your objectives clear and concise. Under this framework, your PI objective needs to be:

• Specific – Clearly and explicitly state the intended outcome of your objective.
• Measurable – Describe what your team needs to do to achieve the objective and how they will quantify success. Stakeholder feedback should form part of this.
• Achievable – Ensure the objective is realistic and within your team’s control and influence.
• Relevant – Align the objective with overall business objectives.
• Timebound – Set an appropriate timeframe to achieve the objective within the PI.

Team PI objectiveEnsure Easy Agile server customers have a seamless option to migrate to cloud by implementing JCMA and site import/export by the end of Q3.

Tips for writing SMART (and smart) PI objectives

Typically, many teams will run PI planning sessions in one tool, and then use another tool (like Confluence) to record PI objectives.

But separating PI objectives from the planning sessions makes it hard for the team and stakeholders to see how the work is shifting the dial for the business.

With the Easy Agile Programs, you can directly link your features to your objectives within the same tool. You're also able to describe the objective within Easy Agile Programs and assign business value:

By connecting features to PI objectives within the same tool, teams and business stakeholders gain clear visibility of work. They can see how their work is helping to achieve business objectives.

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Using the SMART framework to define PI objectives helps your teams focus on the right work. They align projects with broader business goals while providing a shared understanding across teams. By working towards the same purpose, they help keep your teams and organization productive and agile.

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Agile is about being flexible and always getting better—essential for delivering great software. But when scaling agile across teams in a program, being adaptable and flexible is easier said than done. In this post, we'll dig into the ins and outs of agile program management to help you:

• Tackle common challenges
• Use metrics and feedback loops to keep improving
• Leverage leadership for the best chance of success

By identifying some clear and actionable steps that you can start implementing now, you’ll improve your approach to program management and make your software delivery smoother and more efficient.

Overcoming Common Challenges in Agile Program Management

From dealing with dependencies to managing stakeholder expectations and balancing speed with quality, here are some challenges you might face now.

Dealing with Dependencies

Dependencies are a necessary part of working on complex software, and they need to be managed carefully to avoid disrupting delivery schedules.

Identifying dependencies early is key to keeping things running smoothly. By spotting potential bottlenecks early, like during PI Planning, we can nip them in the bud before they turn into major headaches, and:

• allocate resources more effectively
• streamline communication across teams
• keep everyone on the same page with a shared timeline.

Maintain clear communication channels and regular alignment meetings to address dependencies swiftly and efficiently. This helps everything stay in sync, and hopefully avoids last-minute 'surprises', for a more reliable delivery.

Managing Stakeholder Expectations

We can't deliver complex software on our own, so ensuring that our colleagues are informed and onboard is critical. Managing expectations across a large program is a complex challenge, but you'll be off to a great start if you are able to keep communication consistent:

• Regular Updates: Keep the lines of communication open and honest, and provide frequent updates to keep everyone in the loop.
• Be Transparent: Maintain a central source of truth for project information that everyone has access to, ensuring that objectives, milestones and priorities are clear.
• Set Realistic Expectations: Avoid over-promising and stay realistic about what can be achieved.
• Prioritize and Manage Feedback: Inevitably, there will be changes in priorities or feedback from stakeholders. It's important to have a process for managing these requests and ensuring they align with the program goals.

Agile tools that offer clear visibility into objectives, dependencies, and progress, can be the bridge between your development teams and stakeholders in leadership and other parts of the business.

By focusing on these areas, you’re not just managing expectations—you’re making sure everyone is part of the process.

The bridge between development teams and leadership, with objectives, milestones and dependencies all in one. Watch a demo or try for yourself.

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Balancing Speed with Quality

In a perfect world, we would all deliver amazing software that our customers love, at lightning speed. But the reality is that balancing time-to-market with quality is an ongoing challenge.

Agile practices like organizing work to deliver incrementally are part of the solution; they help identify problems early and deliver in a way that makes more sense than following a Gantt chart until the timelines blow out and it all falls over.

So while agile won’t make your development teams type faster, it can help them, as well as your colleagues in Product, and QA, learn what works faster, and how they can collaborate better to deliver work with quality.

Metrics and Feedback Loops

Metrics can be a powerful tool in agile program management. Velocity, burn-down charts, cycle time, lead time, and dependency reports can give valuable insights into how our teams are performing and how our projects are progressing.

• Velocity: Long-term trends help us understand team commitment over time, and estimate what can be achieved going into a sprint.
• Burn-down charts: Valuable for gauging progress throughout execution and spotting barriers to delivery.
• Cycle time: Uncover inefficiencies or bottlenecks where tasks are likely to get delayed or stuck.
• Lead time: Use the difference between an expected lead time and the actual lead time, as a starting point for understanding where delivery is being held up.
• Dependency reports: Use a snapshot of dependencies in your program to understand how teams are dependent on each other and where the biggest risks are.

Monitoring these metrics will give you a clearer picture of where work is progressing well and where you might need to make adjustments. Think of them as your project’s health check-up; a temperature check that can improve the predictability of your release.

With powerful dependency reports, you can identify bottlenecks, streamline communication, and keep your projects on track.

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Establishing Effective Feedback Loops

Feedback loops are integral to delivering software with market fit. Sprint reviews and retrospectives offer teams the opportunity to reflect on their performance, identify areas for improvement, and make necessary adjustments. DevOps practices like continuous integration further ensure that the code is consistently tested and integrated, reducing the risk of significant issues going unnoticed.

Using metrics and feedback loops allows teams to deliver software with greater predictability and transparency. Applying these practices consistently across a program means that you're better able to manage the planning and execution of work to deliver complex software to your customers in a predictable way.

The Role of Leadership in Agile Program Management

Great leadership is key to building an agile culture. It's not just about making decisions from the top; it's understanding team needs and clearing the way for them to be effective. But old 'command and control' habits are difficult to break.

As a program manager, you're the glue that connects the strategic vision of leadership with the hands-on work of development teams. Keep those communication lines open and reciprocal, so everyone understands the business goals and the strategic importance of their tasks, as well as progress and barriers to execution.

• Use agile tools to maintain a central source of truth, to give everyone a clear view of project progress and potential roadblocks.
• Foster a culture of regular feedback and continuous improvement. This proactive approach helps tackle challenges head-on and keeps everyone aligned with business objectives.
• Promote transparency and adaptability to help teams quickly adjust to changing priorities.

Keep these things in mind to help you plan and deliver with confidence. You may be the glue that holds it all together, but you can't be everything for everyone. Enlist help where you need it, and encourage an open and transparent culture where strategic priorities are understood, and everyone can see how the focus of their work contributes to the bigger picture.

An Agile Approach to Change

Taking a new approach to program management doesn’t need to be daunting. Once you’ve identified the changes that make sense for you, take an agile approach and implement incrementally. Every small change you make adds up over time and can lead to measurable improvement.

How Easy Agile Programs Can Help

Easy Agile Programs is a Jira integration that supports agile program management. It is a central source of truth for the issues, milestones, team objectives, and dependencies that make up a program of work.

Dependency maps and reports help you see the nature of cross-team dependencies clearly, so you and your teams can reorganize to avoid roadblocks that would otherwise blow out timelines with unexpected delays.

Easy to set up and tightly integrated with Jira, Easy Agile Programs supports scaled team planning and execution so you have greater confidence in delivering great software as each program increment begins.

Simply developing a product doesn’t mean it’ll be a success. Plenty of elements determine how well a product is received — and a lot of that begins with product launch planning.

How will you unveil your product to the world? Who will be able to access your product when it first launches? What features do you need for the product's initial development, and what features should be saved for further down the road? How do you make sure everything is ready in time for the launch date you’re hoping for?

Product launch planning melds your development strategy and your sales and marketing strategy to ensure every department works together and aligns on key goals. It’s a whirlwind of a race to the finish line, but it’s also an exciting time for product developers. How will your product be received? What will customers and stakeholders think?

In this post, we discuss seven key strategies for successful product launch planning. Time for takeoff! 🚀

1. Set clear goals and define what success looks like

Set clear objectives and be realistic about what you hope to accomplish. Setting lofty, unattainable goals will distract from what matters most, and it can lead to disappointment, lack of motivation, and reduced morale.

Be clear about who on the product team is responsible for what and ensure team members outside of product development, including sales teams and marketing teams, are involved in product launch planning.

How will you go to market? What do you hope to accomplish with your launch? What product launch planning needs to happen before you can move forward? What pre-launch deliverables are critical to moving development forward? What roadblocks could prevent your success?

When you understand what you are trying to accomplish, it’s easier to tell when you’re successful. Don’t leave anything open-ended so that everyone on the team knows what you’re working toward and how to get there.

2. Get to know your audience

Great products are developed when customer needs are at the forefront of decision making. No matter what stage of product launch planning you’re in, you should always keep the customer journey top of mind. Consider how each decision you make brings value to your customers.

Customer personas describe important details about a target audience, such as pain points, behavioral patterns, demographics, goals, and buying habits. Deeply understanding who you are building a product for and what they need is vital to a successful product and a successful product launch.

Easy Agile TeamRhythm supports user story mapping, helping teams empathize with customers so that development and launch decisions can be made based on what will provide the most value to your target market.

3. Gather feedback and test, test, test

Test, test, test! We can’t say this enough. You need to continually test, ask questions, and gather market research.

Get your product in front of stakeholders and customers frequently to gather feedback along the way. The more you learn as you develop your product, the more issues you will sort out as you go, and the better the project will be in the end.

The testing process will also give you a deeper insight into what your users are looking for, so you can better meet customer needs. How do they interact with the product? What issues arise? What questions do they have? Do they understand how to use it? What features are they looking for?

Gather as much feedback as possible so you can continually improve the product leading up to the launch. Bring your stakeholders and customers into your process to better understand their needs and how you can provide consistent value.

4. Use comprehensive tools to track product launch planning

Product launch planning is a complex process with many moving parts, team members, and deadlines. Having the right tools is essential to the success of the launch. The whole team needs to be able to see what is planned, what is expected, and how each piece leading up to the launch is connected.

Establish a clear product launch plan template that guides the team forward. Backtrack from the desired launch date to create a launch timeline that recognizes everything that needs to get done before the product is put out into the world.

A product launch roadmap is an effective tool for tracking your progress. Roadmaps help teams align their vision, keep track of specific product launch dates, and provide a clear visual of the most critical prioritizations.

Learn how to create a product roadmap template with Easy Agile Roadmaps for Jira. They help teams align around a product vision and launch strategy to continually bring value to customers.

5. Focus on an initial great product, not features

Focus on your minimum viable product first. This is your top development priority before launching — no matter how tempting other fancy features may be.

Fancy features may be appealing, but they could slow down development, add unnecessary stress on the team, and cause unwelcome issues right before you’re supposed to launch your product. Put in the work to develop a product that meets stakeholder needs and delights customers. If this goes well, there will be plenty of opportunities to zero in on other features down the road.

6. Expect the unexpected

No matter how much feedback you gather and how many tests you run, there are always surprises when it comes to launching a new product. Launch day may not go as smoothly as you hoped. It’s okay if things don’t go exactly as you expected, so long as you’ve prepared for these possibilities and can adjust.

Extensive product launch planning will help you navigate surprises. It also helps to practice the motions beforehand. Give yourself time before the new product launch to review and practice the steps that need to play out. Rehearse your process to smooth out as many possible hiccups as you can. The extra time you spend running through the motions will also help ease the nerves of the team members involved in the launch process.

7. Hold a retrospective after the launch

After all is said and done, there’s still one more important step to your product launch planning. A retrospective helps teams examine the launch strategy and how everything played out. What went well? What didn’t go so well? And what can be learned from the process?

Even if you won’t launch another product any time soon, a post-launch retrospective is a great opportunity to learn from your experience. You can take these insights and success metrics into account when launching future features or other products down the road. Plus, it gives the team a chance to debrief after launch activities conclude.

Let’s recap those strategies one more time:

1. Set clear goals and define what success looks like.

2. Get to know your audience.

3. Gather feedback and test, test, test.

4. Use comprehensive tools to track product launch planning.

5. Focus on an initial great product, not features.

6. Expect the unexpected.

7. Hold a retrospective after the launch.

Learn more on the Easy Agile blog

There’s more where this came from. We’re dedicated to helping teams work better using agile tools and practices. We make simple, collaborative, customer-focused plugins for Jira, and we regularly publish articles on strategies, agile information, and how-to guides for product managers and agile teams.

Follow us on LinkedIn for the latest agile resources, guides, and product news.

When it comes to SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), PI planning is a critical first step in preparing a team. The gathering, often held quarterly, brings together a team, including software developers, team leaders, stakeholders, and everyone in between. Together, they complete essential planning.

While most PI planning used to occur in one big room, today’s remote and distributed teams have paved the way for online and hybrid PI planning events. It doesn’t matter so much where the session takes place, so long as it continually occurs with advance planning, team buy-in, and event execution.

We created an ultimate guide to PI Planning, which we continue to update with the latest trends, planning questions, resources, and tools. But in the post, we’ll focus on one specific aspect of PI planning — the mistakes you should avoid. ❌

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What is PI Planning, and why is it so important?

PI Planning is Program Increment Planning, which is a recurring session for teams within the same Agile Release Train (ART) to meet, align, and plan what comes next.

The planning session provides time for teams and stakeholders to align on a shared vision, discuss features, identify cross-team dependencies, and plan the roadmap that will move everything forward. Adopting SAFe begins with PI Planning, and that solid starting point is critical to the success of SAFe.

PI Planning events form the foundation of how your team works together and how a product/project develops. It’s a real-time event that typically brings a team together under one roof, which is why it’s also called big room planning. However, it doesn’t matter if your team plans together in person or if you use online tools to run remote PI Planning. The important part is making sure teams can plan in real-time and that the PI Planning session results in critical PI objectives that will set the team up for success.

If your team is successful at the PI Planning process, you will:

✅ Build trust, rapport, and collaboration between team members, product managers, different business teams, and stakeholders

✅ Align on key business values, objectives, and goals

✅ Spot dependencies and other issues before they disrupt workflow

✅ Enhance problem solving and decision making

✅ Understand what’s expected of each team member going into the next sprint

✅ Gain valuable insight from key stakeholders and business owners

✅ Ground the team in reality with expectations, timelines, and clear goals

Easy Agile Programs: Equip your remote, distributed or co-located teams for success with a digital tool for PI Planning.

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PI Planning mistakes to avoid

If you can identify the potential pitfalls of PI planning, you have a better chance of avoiding them. Don’t fall prey to these common mistakes:

1. Skipping or not prioritizing PI Planning

2. Failing to thoroughly plan in advance

3. Running long or boring sessions

4. Allowing remote restraints to stand in your way

5. Missing out on retrospective insights

1. Skipping or not prioritizing PI Planning

Scaled Agile, Inc. says that “PI Planning is essential to SAFe: If you are not doing it, you are not doing SAFe.” This couldn’t be more true!

PI Planning is an absolutely essential aspect of SAFe, and there’s no scenario in which it should be skipped or undervalued. Failing to effectively run a PI Planning meeting can have dire consequences for product development.

Work inevitably gets busy, and when product development falls behind or roadblocks come up, something has to give. However, no matter how tempting it may be, never allow your PI Planning to get pushed, delayed, scaled back, or skipped altogether.

Set your PI Planning date well in advance and stick to that date to ensure everyone can be available and prepared.

2. Failing to thoroughly plan in advance

Pre-PI planning is essential to the success of your event. You’ll have limited time as a group, so it’s essential that you use it wisely once the time comes.

Plan the date well in advance to ensure everyone can attend and access planning materials. Before your upcoming PI, make sure your backlog items are refined and ready so precious time isn’t wasted during the PI event.

3. Running long or boring sessions

PI Planning often includes long and heavy sessions, which can kill the vibe and stifle creativity and problem solving. 😴

Do all that you can to engage the team and keep sessions short. This can help a team participate more, invest in the session, and problem solve more effectively. Look for creative ways of running sessions that engage more than just the energetic few. Carefully consider timelines, and ensure no session runs too long to prevent boredom or wasted time.

4. Allowing remote restraints to stand in your way

There may be different challenges with running PI Planning remotely. But with advanced planning and the right tools, you can run a successful planning session no matter where your team is located.

Don’t neglect your PI Planning because your team is remote or temporarily working remotely. There are plenty of tools that can help remote teams engage online with team breakouts, video conferencing, online sticky notes, and PI Planning plugins.

Virtual breakout sessions are essential to ensuring the right people can engage at any given time and that no time is wasted. Carefully plan your remote PI Planning to ensure everyone is prepared and knows where and when they need to participate online.

5. Missing out on retrospective insights

Not to sound like a broken record, but retrospective 👏🏿 insights 👏🏻 are 👏🏾 important 👏🏽.

We know there’s only so much time allocated for PI Planning and so much to get done, but you need to make time for a short retrospective. Otherwise, you’ll never truly learn how to improve. A post-PI Planning session will allow your team to discuss the planning event, including what went well, what didn’t go well, and what could be improved for next time.

Make sure you record retrospective insights and implement important ideas into the next PI planning meeting. After all, it wouldn’t be agile if you didn’t continually try to improve your systems.

Level up your PI Planning with Easy Agile Programs

Effective planning begins with using the right tools, which is all the more important as teams do PI Planning remotely or with distributed teams.

Easy Agile builds products designed to help agile teams plan efficiently and effectively. Easy Agile Programs for Jira is ideal for helping teams effectively manage programs with streamlined visibility. It’s a complete PI Planning solution for all types of Jira users — including distributed, remote, or face-to-face.

What are the benefits of Easy Agile Programs?

With Easy Agile Programs, you can:

• Build a program board in Jira
• Effectively manage programs with streamlined visibility
• Understand the health of your program backlog/program increments
• Make real-time iterations
• Rework and adapt your PI Planning to the needs of your team.
• Spot feature level dependencies
• Deliver alignment at a large scale
• Create milestones and team swimlanes
• Align development teams or multiple different teams on goals and timelines

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Learn more about the benefits of Easy Agile Programs and try it free for 30 days. We believe in being transparent about our product vision, which means you can follow our product journey, including new features, what we’re working on, and what we hope to accomplish in the future.

Teams who are building products or completing projects necessarily rely on each other. Identifying and keeping track of dependencies can be difficult, particularly across multiple teams or external or shared teams. Dependencies management is often something that can be taken for granted as part of a standard operating procedure. In this article, we will look more closely at the process of identifying, troubleshooting and resolving any dependencies that prevent work from being delivered.

A common example is if one piece of working software depends on an external plugin or third party tool. If that plugin fails to operate, then the working software may fail as well. Similarly, large organizations working on multiple pieces of software at once may have habitual or recurring dependencies between different teams in order to operate. This is why agile teams need processes to monitor dependencies so they won’t disrupt development or inhibit flow.

The more complex dependencies become, ironically, the more simple a process you need to manage them at scale. Complexity compounds complexity, so finding an approach whether it is a tool or a framework that works within the context of your teams and your organization is the key to unlocking dependency management in a sustainable way.

Let’s take a closer look at how you may approach managing dependencies within your organization.

Similarly, agile frameworks such as LeSS and SAFe can help with dependencies management in large organizations. Finally, finding ways to visualize the dependencies in an organization is a highly effective way to mitigate the risks of delaying projects.

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Now, close your eyes and imagine the rest. Just kidding, read on...as if your agility depends on it. 😂

Types of dependencies in project management

Before we discuss tools and frameworks, let's outline a few different types of dependencies:

• Direct dependency: This common dependency type is one where one project or feature depends on the delivery of another.
• Transitive dependencies: This is where we have an indirect connection between two projects, usually by way of a connecting project. For example, Feature A depends on Feature B, and Feature B depends on Feature C. Therefore, Feature A indirectly depends on Feature C.
• External dependencies: These dependencies can be out of the remit of your team, group of teams or organization. It helps to be aware of them and it is worth identifying them separately as the addressing of these dependencies may be outside of the scope of the team or group level ceremonies.

Let’s dive in now to some frameworks for a blueprint of how to approach this.

Agile frameworks for organizations to improve dependency management

You're probably familiar with the most common agile frameworks for software development — Kanban and Scrum. These frameworks are mostly suited for individual team organizations. But what about frameworks for cross-functional agile teams in a large organization who need help with dependencies management?

LeSS for dependency management

LeSS is a framework that helps multiple Scrum teams who are working together on a single project to scale. Think of LeSS as Scrum at a large enterprise scale — you still have a single product backlog, a product owner, a Scrum master, and software developers. But the key difference is that there are many teams working towards the same goal and the same definition of done (rather than a single team).

One of the most important tasks for the product owner role in the LeSS framework is making sure that dependency information is provided across teams. In LeSS, product backlog refinement (PBR) is an organized event that makes sure dependency risks are consistently identified. PBR allows multiple teams to plan sprints in parallel and to identify if there are any cross-team dependencies that risk project completion.

SAFe approach to managing dependencies

The SAFe (Scaled Agile framework) provides principles and workflow patterns to guide organizations through their dependencies. SAFe promotes transparency and alignment across large organizations so they can be more nimble in meeting their business objectives. Being able to respond to changes quickly can be hindered by size and scale. Dependencies can often tangle work and trip up teams due to the inability to see and appreciate cross-functional team dependencies.

Just as scrum has ceremonies to keep a single agile team aligned, an essential ceremony to keep multiple teams aligned and communicating with each other according to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is Program Increment / Planning Interval Planning - better known as PI Planning. During PI Planning, teams create their dependencies and through cross-functional collaboration can adjust their plans to manage these dependencies.

Unlike startups, who are small and can typically make organizational changes quickly, large organizations often become too big to make rapid changes. One common cause of this is the inability to manage dependency resolution because dependencies are less visible for cross-functional teams.

Just as Scrum has ceremonies to keep a single agile team aligned, an essential ceremony to keep multiple teams in the Scaled Agile Framework communicating with each other is Program Increment (PI) Planning. It’s a way to keep even the largest organizations nimble.

One key output of PI Planning is the program (dependency) board or ART planning board (SAFe 6.0).

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PI Planning for large organizations

PI Planning is a periodic ceremony that happens throughout the year. Teams within an organization gather to compile their thoughts on product features and the product roadmap, and to discover any dependencies that exist between them.

One key feature of PI Planning is an ART planning board (program board). ART planning boards help give Agile Release Trains (ART) — a group of agile teams working together on a common goal — a visual representation of what the teams have planned to complete from their PI Planning.

Visualize your dependencies

Easy Agile Programs for Jira is a complete tool for dependencies management at a program level. By utilizing visualizations and by providing transparency across projects, teams can confidently scale without the risk of unforeseen dependencies and disruptions. It does this by providing three views:

• Program roadmap: an overview of all of the scheduled increments or iterations for a program or group of teams
• Program Board (ART Planning Board): an at-a-glance visualization of all of the teams within a program, including all of their cross-team dependencies
• Team planning board: where teams break down committed features for the upcoming increment, create dependencies with other teams, estimate and schedule their work.

Visualise dependencies with Easy Agile Programs: Filter the Program Board by at risk, healthy or blocked dependencies for effective conversations.

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Unlock your organization's common dependencies

Managing dependencies comes first from being able to see what you need to manage and then to be able to focus where is needed. As a highly visual and filterable tool, Easy Agile Programs can support in many ways:

• Highly visual dependencies: The color of the dependency lines reflects their health status. A red dependency represents a conflict, yellow indicates at risk, green signifies a healthy state and black indicates external dependencies outside the current view, such as work in the backlog or in an other Program Increments. The colours support product managers, release train engineers or scrum masters to know where to focus. To avoid bottlenecks, you need to address the red dependencies and the yellow where possible.
• Team alignment to each other and business outcomes: Adding in third level hierarchy issues to capture and communicate higher level business initiative or priorities helps teams to understand the context of the bigger picture and why they are delivering what is scheduled. Making sure that all of your ART or group of teams work is represented and visible on a board that is always up to date helps keep teams aligned.
• Focus mode: Alignment needs to be maintained beyond planning. With a number of filters applicable to the program board to focus on teams, epic or issue status, dependency health or initiative, it is easy to focus the work - and conversations - on what is most important.

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Is agile now distributed?

It’s no secret that our work has completely changed in the last two years. Today’s work environment has seen companies embracing a hybrid or fully remote business model, with studies showing that only 4% of workplaces are going back into the office full-time.

In the Agile Manifesto, one of the original principles states, “individuals and interactions over processes and tools.” While this may still ring true, we know now more than ever that our tools empower our interactions and facilitate our processes.

Multiple industries that have adopted the agile framework have shown an increase in distributed agile teams. In fact, according to the 15th State of Agile Report, 89% of agile teams are distributed. Only 3% of these teams will return to the office full-time post-Covid. This is because remote workers have better focus and productivity, are less likely to leave their job, and cost the business less.

Distributed agile is no longer a new concept but our lived reality.

How do we prepare for agile ceremonies such as PI Planning, initially designed to happen face-to-face? How do we retain the most valuable element of face-to-face communication without collocating?

The challenges of PI Planning with a distributed team

Traditionally, activities like PI Planning in agile are designed for team members in the same room to interact in person.

PI Planning is a 2-day event that brings all members of an Agile Release Train (ART) together to plan their next Program Increment (PI).

As the 15th State of Agile Report showed, 89% of agile teams are now distributed. For a distributed team, your options are to fly in employees for each PI Planning session or to support a distributed PI Planning session.

While this is nice, it can be a pricey (and disruptive) exercise for any organization, especially if you need to do it 4 or 5 times a year.

Performing distributed PI Planning also brings up a challenge with using a physical program board. Those at home cannot access or contribute to the physical PI Planning board in the same way as their collocated colleagues. As a result, their ideas can go unheard, and their ability to contribute to the program board is limited.

Distributed PI Planning - Best Practice

Instead of flying your remote team to a central location to run PI Planning in person, distributed PI Planning involves using cloud-based tools to plan and run your next Program Increment virtually.

Even if the methods are a little different from distributed PI Planning, the process and desired outcomes are the same:

• A senior representative discusses the current state of the business
• Product Management presents the current program vision
• Product Owners and teams breakout separately to discuss how they’ll achieve desired outcomes
• Teams identify and visualize cross-team dependencies and work to remove blockers
• Everyone comes together to agree on a committed plan via your Program Board

6 tips for setting up distributed PI Planning

Distributed PI Planning is no longer a temporary exception. Whether PI Planning is distributed or not, we need to ensure we maintain the same quality and outcomes that PI Planning aims to achieve - to align all teams within the Agile Release Train.

To help you through this, we’ve prepared the following 6 tips to help you prepare for distributed PI Planning.

These tips aren’t things that we’ve just brainstormed. We’ve learned these things from speaking to our customers by trawling the forums and talking to experts in the field.

1. Get the basics right

The three basics are communication, preparation, and execution.

Let’s start by talking about communication and preparation. It is essential to provide appropriate tools for online interactions for each stage of the PI Planning process: for product managers to collaborate and facilitators to manage the process-both leading up to and during the event. We also need to ensure team members can access all relevant current information, collaborate effortlessly, and access support.

Scaled Agile recommends having pre-PI Planning meetings scheduled anywhere from 2-6 weeks in advance, depending on the complexity of your solution train.

Lastly, let’s talk about execution. The execution should flow if we are communicating well and are prepared. But we need to be prepared that some things can still go wrong. Technology will fail us. People can still have problems accessing the tools we’ve set up. Execution won’t always be seamless, but iteration is a principle of agile.

2. Set the agenda early, as early as possible

Why is that? Well, think about your employees working from home. They’re working with their pets or family around, and if they know that they have PI Planning, they need to know what is expected of them.

This allows time for employees to inform their families of their commitments for that day, set up a space with no distractions, and be mentally prepared for a few days of planning.

Also, let’s not cram the agenda full of all the events we need to hold. Let’s make sure we have enough time to schedule multiple breaks throughout the day, as studies show that humans are more likely to experience mental exhaustion after a day of video conferencing.

While it’s essential to use the tech, it can get a little bit much. Set up rules about who can talk and when to use the mute button. This will avoid interference and background noise disrupting your team’s focus.

3. Choose your tools wisely

Distributed agile teams can simulate the best of the in-person experience by selecting tools built for distributed and hybrid teams: video conferencing platforms, team chat, virtual program boards, and interactive collaboration spaces.

Whatever tools you choose, the key is finding solutions for colleagues to connect in real-time, whether in the same room or on the other side of the world.

Set up the tools, test them, and introduce them to all participants before the PI Planning session. To avoid overload and confusion, select tools that work together seamlessly.

4. Practice

We’re not going to get this right the first time. We’re going to have to rehearse. We’ll have to work out how we do things like confidence votes. Will we use the poll function on Zoom, or will we use Slack?

Everyone prefers to finish early rather than run out of time. Let’s build some slack into the agenda.

Acknowledge that there’s always room for improvement and build that into our planning. Let’s give our people a chance to communicate back to us, whether by a retrospective or by opening up a channel for feedback. We’re not just getting feedback on how the last planning session went but also on how we are finding working together more generally.

5. Make it accessible

When dealing with different time zones, you should extend the PI Planning agenda from 2 days to 3-4 days to ensure all critical parts of the PI Planning session are placed at a reasonable time for all time zones.

Set up each meeting via Google Calendar or any calendar device your team may already be using. Ensure each meeting is named, followed by a description, so attendees know what to prepare and which tools are relevant for this meeting. Make sure the correct attendees have all been sent invitations to the forum before the event.

We’ll have trouble setting up people on new tools and getting them access to their needed resources. It will be great if tech support is available throughout PI Planning. That will be easier for some people than it is for others. But it’s crucial if things go wrong.

We’re going to need a backup in place. Your tools will need to be reliable, and you will need tech support to help fix them quickly.

We will need more facilitators than we usually do to be able to answer all of these questions throughout the week.

Some people may not be used to using the tools that we’re suggesting that they use. So is there training available to help them get up to speed?

6. Level up the human experience

Seize opportunities to ensure agile teams feel as if they are working together when they are actually apart so that members see themselves as part of a community with:

• Shared understanding – Clarity of vision, mission, purpose, and visibility into what team members are doing, facilitating learning loops among colleagues.
• Shared empathy – Forging human connections with our tribe creates the psychological safety to learn, grow and iterate.
• Shared experience – Creating a sense of team place, identity, and building together.

How to excel at distributed PI Planning with Easy Agile Programs and Welo

The most challenging part of distributed PI Planning is providing the positive aspects of the in-person experience to a distributed team: fluid movement around and between rooms to collaborate, easy ways to contribute to brainstorming sessions and keep whiteboards up to date and accessible, and natural social interactions that build trust and camaraderie.

Easy Agile Programs offers a complete PI Planning solution that makes scaled cross-team planning and execution easy. With a seamless Jira integration, it’s a powerful yet simple-to-use tool to scale planning and maintain alignment across distributed, hybrid, or remote teams during planning and throughout execution.

Welo offers interactive collaboration spaces that amp up the human experience for distributed and hybrid teams. It replicates the in-person experience of fluid interactions, effortless collaboration, and human connections among colleagues–beyond the isolated video. Welo’s visual orientation enables each person to be present in the context of space and to navigate to be with people and groups as they choose.

With these two tools, you can set your Agile Release Train up for success for PI Planning. Here’s how:

Select professionally-designed virtual spaces

Bring online the best of the brick-and-mortar spaces you used for in-person PI Planning–from plenary to break-out rooms to spots for casual socializing.

Rather than feel confined to a static rectangle, people see themselves and others in context, move themselves in and between spaces to connect with colleagues before, during, and after PI Planning events.

Welo spaces also provide PI participants ready access to up-to-date, relevant resources, such as Jira and Easy Agile apps used across all events.

Establish the Business Context

All Agile Release Train members can access information about the program in Easy Agile Programs. For example, in the objectives section below, you could link to a pre-recorded video of the business owner addressing the company-level objectives. Hence, teams know that their team-level objectives must ladder to this. This ensures that all members of the Agile Release Train see your business owner face to face in that distributed way and that they always have access to this video throughout PI Planning.

After viewing the information about the program, the Product Manager can create features in Jira ahead of the PI Planning event to be discussed and broken down in planning. Easy Agile Programs seamlessly integrates with Jira, so there's no need to double-handle the work. They are ready to schedule onto a visual timeline for everyone to see what the team has committed to during PI Planning.

Set up your SAFe Program Board

The SAFe Program Board is a critical tool and output of PI Planning; It is a visual summary of features or goals, cross-team dependencies, and other factors that impact their delivery. Not only does this help with transparency, but it also increases flexibility, which helps minimize delays and unhealthy dependencies.

Ensure you have a digitized SAFe Program Board set up before the PI Planning session. Easy Agile Programs replicates the physical program board. A board that everyone has the same view of and can access. Learn how to set up a SAFe Program Board with Easy Agile Programs here.

Prepare your Team Planning Board

The Team Planning Board represents a scrum or kanban board which is included in the Program. This is where the teams will plan their work in the team breakout sessions during PI Planning.

If you have set up your Program Board with Easy Agile Programs, prepare the team Planning Boards by adding each team to the Program ahead of PI Planning. Once teams are added, Planning Boards are automatically created and ready for team breakout sessions. Teams can create team-level PI objectives, break down features into user stories, estimate issues to understand capacity, and create dependencies with other teams.

Moving forward

With distributed PI Planning a reality for nearly 90% of agile teams, the good news is that new solutions are being developed to work with your current tools–powering employee engagement, fluid collaboration, and efficient processes critical to successful outcomes and career satisfaction.

Equip your remote, distributed or co-located teams for success with a digital tool for PI Planning.

Easy Agile Programs

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PI planning is a powerful event that helps teams align around goals, business objectives, and customer needs. Traditionally, this quarterly gathering brought together large teams of more than 100 people, including software developers and stakeholders, to complete essential planning.

However, in our new world of work, virtual PI planning has become necessary. This shift presents its own set of challenges, such as implementing virtual tools, overcoming time zone differences, and coordinating employees who are accustomed to working on their own schedules. Not to mention the occasional tech glitches that may arise.

In this blog, we will explore the information technology industry as an example and delve into how they can benefit from PI planning. Discover the critical benefits of PI planning and provide strategies for successfully conducting hybrid PI planning. Whether you're a newcomer or an experienced master in agile practices, there's always room for improvement in optimizing your systems.

What is PI planning?

PI planning, or Big Room Planning planning, is typically a two-day event that brings together all of the teams on an agile release train, including product owners, facilitators, developers, and outside stakeholders. It’s traditionally a face-to-face planning session that, for some teams, puts more than 100 people in the same room to align on goals, business objectives, and an overall direction moving forward.

It’s part of a scaled agile framework that implements agile practices for enterprises. Agile teams use repeated workflows for informed planning, efficient execution, and continual delivery of stakeholder value.

Although PI planning events often take place in person, the increased number of remote teams has forced businesses to find hybrid solutions for this large-scale event.

Equip your remote, distributed or co-located teams for success with a digital tool for PI Planning.

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The benefits PI planning

Whether PI planning occurs in-person, online, or hybrid, this two-day gathering provides a number of critical benefits. It’s an integral part of SAFe that keeps businesses aligned on common goals and objectives, and it sets various teams on a strong path for upcoming sprints.

The PI planning event can bring numerous benefits. Here's 5 potential advantages for the information technology (IT) industry:

• Collaborative Environment: The PI Planning event provides a space where IT professionals from various teams and departments can come together to collaborate, brainstorm, and share ideas in a face-to-face setting.
• Cross-Functional Communication: IT often involves multiple departments (development, operations, support, etc.). The PI Planning event facilitates better communication and alignment between these departments, leading to more cohesive strategies.
• Focused Decision-Making: A dedicated event allows for focused discussions and decisions, reducing distractions that might arise in regular office settings.
• Rapid Problem Resolution: Complex IT challenges can be addressed more efficiently when all relevant stakeholders are physically present to discuss issues and propose solutions.
• Knowledge Sharing: Experts from different IT domains can share their expertise, leading to increased learning and skill development across the organization.

8 PI planning strategies

In order to ensure a successful PI Planning event you need to have some strategies in place to help teams effectively collaborate and align their efforts, whether they are co-located or working remotely. Here are some strategies to consider:

1. Set the date and agenda early

It is imperative to schedule the session well in advance, allowing team members to allocate the necessary time and prioritize their participation amidst their busy schedules. It is of utmost importance to encourage widespread participation in this planning session.

Providing a comprehensive agenda for the event is crucial for ensuring effective collaboration and alignment within teams. The agenda serves as a roadmap, guiding participants through the planning session and helping them prioritize their contributions.

By setting a clear agenda, teams can establish a shared understanding of the objectives, topics, and activities to be covered during the PI Planning session.

2. Set Clear Objectives

Before the PI Planning event, establish clear objectives and goals that you want to achieve. Communicate these objectives to all participants so that everyone is aligned and understands what needs to be accomplished during the event. This will help keep the focus on the desired outcomes and ensure a successful planning session.

3. Choose stellar tools that aid collaboration

Utilise visual tools to encourage active participation and facilitate visual representation of ideas and plans. Choosing the right tools can make a significant difference in enhancing productivity and promoting effective teamwork. The chosen tools should aid in organizing and structuring information, making it easier for team members to comprehend the work and dependencies, allowing the teams to collaborate in real time. It is essential to choose visual collaboration tools that are user-friendly, intuitive, and accessible to all team members.

Virtual whiteboards, such as Miro, are also a huge asset, as well as tools designed for PI Planning. If your team uses Jira, we recommend Easy Agile Programs. It’s a complete solution designed for distributed, remote, or face-to-face PI Planning.

4. Go in with a refined backlog

Do as much advance planning as you can so you can make the most of this planning event. Ensure the backlog is thoroughly refined and ready to go so no time is wasted during PI planning.

It’s a big commitment for so many people available at once, and it uses up a lot of working hours. Plus, your stakeholders are setting aside time for this meeting. A refined backlog that’s organized with appropriate details will keep everything running as smoothly as possible.

5. Don’t have people waiting around

Do all you can to ensure there’s a clear schedule that doesn’t leave anyone hanging around. That last thing you want is to waste people’s time. Ensure people know “where” they need to be and when. Triple-check that the appropriate people are assigned to virtual meetings, breakouts, and tasks. Advance planning and transparency will help ensure no one is left waiting or underutilized.

6. Utilize team breakouts

It’s unrealistic to have 100+ people working together in the same room or virtual space for two days straight. Can you imagine? 🤯

Breakout meetings composed of smaller groups are essential to a productive and effective planning event. Once again, it all comes down to advance planning. Your game plan doesn’t need to be completely rigid, but you do need a clear schedule, and leaders need to effectively organize breakout groups in whatever way makes the most sense for your team and desired planning outcomes.

TIP: Your tools can come in handy here, set up dedicated team planning boards to help facilitate conversations and capture the work. Below is an example of a Team Planning Board in Easy Agile Programs. What you are seeing is an example of how a team can create issues on their board and create any dependencies they might have in their team and between teams.

7. Expect the unexpected and roll with the punches (aka tech issues)

As with any large-scale meeting, nothing is going to run perfectly. You are bound to run into hiccups and tech issues. Rolling with the punches is the best you can do.

Test technology in advance — schedule time when your main speakers can do a test call with you. Go over requirements, and have them silence notifications and devices in advance.

Make sure everyone has the information they need to operate their tools and tech effectively, and as the leader of the event or a breakout session, have tech contingencies in place. What happens if your conferencing tool stops working? Do you have a backup? What if their Wi-Fi slows or goes down? Can they switch to a hotspot or can someone else take over?

8. Hold a retrospective so you can improve the next time around

Retrospectives ensure your processes continually improve. They provide an opportunity for feedback that will help make the next big planning meeting better.

Make sure you collect feedback and hear people out after the session. Ask people what they thought went well, what didn’t go so well, and what could be improved for next time. Use this information to improve the process for your next big room planning meeting.

Explore Easy Agile TeamRhythm

By following these strategies, you can facilitate effective collaboration and alignment within your teams during the PI Planning event.

PI planning with Easy Agile

No matter the size of your team, effective planning begins with using the right tools. Easy Agile builds products specifically designed for Jira users to help agile teams plan efficiently and effectively.

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Easy Agile Programs for Jira is ideal for helping remote or distributed teams effectively manage programs with streamlined visibility to deliver alignment at scale. Set PI objectives, visualize dependencies, and align the entire team with a simple-to-use and virtually accessible tool.

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