PI Planing 101

What is PI planning?

Pretend for a moment you’re in charge of planning and launching a massive festival. You’ve got to coordinate food, logistics, hotel rooms, marketing efforts, parking, and dozens of high-profile celebrities. How would you go about making sure the event goes off without a hitch? Perfect planning.

Launching a software product isn’t much different. There is quite a bit of money riding on a successful launch, and there are many teams that must be managed and coordinated to make sure everything’s cohesive. That’s where PI planning really shines. Here are the details of PI planning so you get started throwing a successful software release. Or music festival: your choice.

PI Planning vs. Sprint Planning. What’s the difference?

It’s simple: PI Planning happens between teams. Meanwhile, Sprint Planning is an event for team members. The main difference is the scale and hierarchy – Sprints are a subset of PI Planning. Also, Sprints are made for a single Sprint. On the other hand, PI Planning is done for four Sprints together for every 8 to 12 weeks, and its purpose is to get a vision of business value.?

What is PI planning?

It’s difficult to describe PI planning without defining terms around it. Here’s what you need to know before we dive in.

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe):?This is a type of organization used in Lean-Agile software development. These principles try to make large teams and organizations as nimble as their smaller counterparts, so they can deliver high-quality products at a fast pace.

Agile Release Train (ART) or Tribe :?Not an actual train. The ART is a group of several Agile teams who combine to develop and deliver specific solutions. The train usually contains between 50–125 people who all work together to develop and deploy specific solutions.?

Program Increment (PI):?A set of time for planning, building, testing, and getting feedback on a solution. This set of time is normally between 4 and 8 weeks long. During this time period, the ART will complete the following four steps:

1. Plan: This is where PI planning comes in.
2. Do: Execute the PI plan.
3. Check: Check the solution with a system demo.
4. Adjust: Inspect and adapt.

PI planning is the first step in determining what will be completed during the program increment by the ART.

When to use PI planning?

Simply use?PI Planning when you want to implement and use?SAFe or Quarterly based planing. PI Planning is needed to establish effective communication between the teams and stakeholders and to create a social network. PI Planning helps to adjust the goals and visions to teams’ capacities, and narrow down the possible outcomes and methods to achieve the business value. Typically, PI Planning starts when the previous PI ends.

How to prepare for this event?

• Organizational readiness
• Content readiness
• Logistics readiness

Let’s briefly check each step.?

Organizational readiness?is about vision, aligning strategy within interested parties, and assigning critical roles. Also, it’s checking on priorities, and if they are similarly understood by business owners. Lastly, to make sure we have Agile teams, and then we can assign proper roles.

Content readiness?brings specific business context to the table by creating proper briefings that include features in the Program Backlog and presentations from management.?

Logistics readiness,?in contemporary times, is mostly about preparing channels of communication for dispersed teams. Before the COVID-19 days, it also meant choosing a location and coordinating an event for several dozen people, including catering and accommodation.?

What are the essential elements of PI planning?

As with everything else in the LEAN methodology, PI planning has a very specific set of criteria to guide ART through their PI.

The essential elements of PI planning are:

1. Business context:?Where the enterprise currently stands and how effective the business’s solutions are at meeting customer needs.

2. Product vision:?A proposed solution.

3. Architecture vision and development practice:?How the system architect sees the vision from an engineering perspective.

4. Draft plan review:?Outfits that need to fit within the PI. This should include dependencies and risks as well as objectives and capacity.

5. Management review:?The management team will need to meet to address challenges in the draft plan and may propose scope changes or other solutions to problems.

6. Final plan review:?Teams present their portion of the plan to the entire group and the Business Owners sign off on plans.

7. Risks:?Each team is responsible for identifying risks and blockers. Each risk is addressed.

8. Plan rework:?Teams rework their plans to address risks and blockers, if necessary.

9. Moving forward:?This should be a brief recap of the planning event itself to determine how to improve the next PI planning. Then, teams move forward with their objectives.

How often is PI planning held?

PI planning is a two-day event that contains 8-12 weeks of PI. At the end of the designated PI, another PI planning event will be held and the process repeats itself.This can be also considered as quarterly planning and budgeting for Non-SAFe framework.

Who is involved in PI planning?

The great thing about PI planning is how collaborative it is. During the PI planning event, every single person on the ART is involved. There are typically between 5-10 Agile trains and everyone participates. In fact, participation is of paramount importance so that all viewpoints can be considered.

What does each team do?

Teams are responsible for defining their roles in the vision and presenting any blockers or issues that could prevent them for achieving their output. Teams also need to determine?how much?they can achieve during the PI and then present their draft plan to the entire ART.

What is the goal of the PI planning event?

The PI planning event should yield two specific things:

• Agreed-upon PI objectives:?Each team should present their individual objectives that contribute to the overall business value. There should be no confusion about what the goals are for each team.
• Program board:?A program board breaks down deadlines, deliverables, and milestones that need to be met throughout the PI.

PI Outputs

Committed PI Objectives

• SMART ? SMART objectives that are created by each team

1. Specific?– target a specific area for improvement.
2. Measurable?– quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress.
3. Assignable?– specify who will do it.
4. Realistic?– state what results can realistically be achieved, given available resources.
5. Time-related?– specify when the result(s) can be achieved.

• Program Managers will use these to update the Program Board

Program Board

• Accepted Features
• New Feature Delivery Dates
• Feature dependencies (between teams and other ARTs)
• Milestones

What are the benefits of PI planning?

PI planning takes quite a bit of work and commitment, but it’s all worth it when you consider the benefits:

• Increased communication: Collaborative magic is in full force during PI planning. Teams come together and are more comfortable with communicating with each other throughout the PI.
• Making sure outputs enhance the business: Each team’s goal should enhance the business’s value. It’s a way of separating “nice to have” versus “important to have.”
• Establishing dependencies: If one team is waiting on another team to complete a deliverable, that’s time wasted. PI planning ensures an order of operations to maximize each team’s workflow.
• Working with practical capacity: Teams know what they’re capable of doing given their available work hours and limitations. During PI Planning, the ART can define feasible output based on capacity.
• Gain consensus: It’s easier and faster to get all teams and stakeholders to agree when they’re in the same meeting.?

3 steps for PI planning?

Believe it or not, the most successful PI?Planning involves pre-planning. Here’s how to do it:

1. Pre-PI planning?

Before the PI planning event, you should consider the scope of the meeting, the teams that will need to attend, and the outcomes you wish to achieve. You’ll also need to consider things like which rooms to use, who will facilitate the meeting, and meeting timing.?

2. Create an agenda

You must keep to a strict agenda during the PI planning event, or it will quickly degrade into chaos. Consider an hour meeting for each essential element of PI planning and about six hours of breakout time for teams to meet together. You should also identify and meet with owners of specific sessions to make sure they understand what they’re expected to present during their timeslot. For instance, the System Architect will need to come prepared with an architecture vision. The agenda should be shared prior to the PI planning event.

3. Determine what will happen post-PI planning

You’ll need to establish the program board and its components and inform attendees what else you expect after PI planning. Teams should know which backlog items they’ll be working on and have their team’s objectives and timeline. The easiest way to do this is to keep a cloud-based record of the meeting that can be accessed by everyone.

What are the business benefits of PI Planning?

1. Coordinating business goals based on business requirements and company objectives and vision.
2. Identifying cross-team dependencies.
3. Creating a social network by fostering cross-team relations, raising team spirit, and enabling cooperation.
4. Coordinating demand with capacity by safeguarding against excess.?

Who should be involved in PI Planning?

As mentioned above, PI Planning requires all teams, stakeholders, product owners, and managers to be involved. Another crucial technical role is System Architects.?According to SAFe? , they are responsible for?defining and communicating a shared technical and architectural vision for an ART to help ensure the system or Solution under development is fit for its intended purpose.

How to do PI Planning effectively?

All interested parties must understand the vision, goals, objectives, and business value that must be achieved. It can be executed via good communication, putting doubts and questions before the discourse, and addressing it properly. “Yes-man” attitude can be the worst enemy, as it does not help. It only serves to feel good about ourselves for a brief time, but in hindsight, it can be catastrophic. Remember, there is nothing wrong with hesitations about plan or execution. Communication is the key to the most effective PI Planning.?

What are the most common mistakes and challenges?

In the contemporary remote landscape, the challenges to prepare fruitful PI Planning are even more significant. Let’s point out some of the most important:?

• a vast amount of upfront work and preparation dedicated for this event
• trying to save time and money on the event
• syncing in the entire company with goals and objectives?
• transparent work and communication within and between teams?
• synchronizing the product delivery by teams?
• team members localization?
• syncing between different time zones?
• potential connectivity issues?
• sticking to a day plan?
• explaining the?Definition of Done ?(agreed-upon set of items that must be completed before a project or user story can be considered complete).?

Before the pandemic, the main mistakes were mainly about communication and proper preparation of the event itself. If people felt they were in an unwelcoming, hostile environment that served only as a way to confirm stakeholders about their goals without challenging them, then that was a big red flag. The same goes with poor or no preparation – pre-planning was crucial to point out and address critical goals that the company wanted to achieve.

Now, members must take care of communicating online. This can create distance between people, as meeting face-to-face was always at the heart of PI Planning. It takes a good speaker and organizer to overcome this obstacle, but it’s not impossible to achieve similar goals via remote work.?

Distributed PI Planning – what is the answer to the pandemic???

To address the problem of dispersed teams, caused by many factors like COVID, budgeting, lack of office space,?SAFe? prepared a quick guide for companies . Let’s see the six areas SAFe? has highlighted:?

1. Planning Locations: where the distributed event will take place.
2. PI Planning Agenda – include different time zones preparing this agenda.
3. Facilities – places where participants will be during the event.
4. Working Agreements – establish what are the member’s needs and how to meet them.
5. Tooling – software and technology to effectively use.
6. – set and execute PI Planning event.