Program Increment (PI) Planning Meeting

PI Planning is essential to implement SAFe, in case you are not doing this meeting, you are not following Scaled Agile in your project. Scaled Agile implementation in your project could be very different from what you were taught in the certification course. I would like to describe the process from a practical experience of working in SAFe.

Do you really need SAFe ?

Evaluate the cost of conducting a PI Planning meeting. If you are calling a 100 members team for 2 days, then you are spending 10 PMs. And hence it is very important to assess the cost for things like the following:

a) How to structure Release Trains and hence define the right group of people for PI?

b) Do you really need all teams to be present when other teams present the plan? Optimize the teams.

c) Extremely meticulous preparation to have the most, optimized schedule and most effective outcome.

d) In case you decide to implement SAFe,?RTE should prepare accordingly and inform all stakeholders about the cost of running the PI meeting.

PI planning meeting is done once every three months, or we can say once every quarter. We need some prerequisites for conducting this meeting which are as follows: -

Pre-requisites for PI-Planning

• Prioritized backlog for all the teams participating in the PI planning.
• Preplanning becomes extremely important to keep the cost of the meeting in control.
• The teams have a high-level idea of all the features to be implemented and LOE (Level of Effort) has been done for those features. Prior to PI Planning meeting, Product owner and scrum master define the backlog for those stories in tools like JIRA or Rally and spread over a period of six sprints.
• The capacity of the team members is also required like their planned leaves for that PI so that work can be planned accordingly.
• Scrum Master should conduct backlog refinement meetings with team and the Product Owner to have understanding on the features and to have the risk and dependencies identified for the features.
• We can come up with the delivery dates of the Epics as well after this exercise.

?Preparing for the PI Planning Meeting

• Circulate a PI Planning power point presentation among the Business Team, Product team, Scrum Master, Engineering Managers and Leads.
• Each function calls out their own achievement of the previous PI and the impact on end customers.
• Product Owner talks about road map for the previous and the current PI and shares the Business Context
• Presentation usually also talks about the team structure and role for each team member.
• Meeting agenda to be updated with breakout room information for Day 1 and Day 2
• Lunch food coupons are given out to the teams in case the meeting is conducted remotely. Lunch is arranged for face-to-face meetings.

Execution of the PI Planning Meeting

?Day 1

1.?The meeting is kicked off by RTE/Program Manager who calls out the speaker names and they continue with their slides.

2.?The slides start with the business context, Product roadmap updates, followed by Engineering Updates

3.?Respective Scrum teams' breakout in their meeting rooms with their Scrum Master/TPM.

4.Teams call out their capacity and discuss each Epic one by one and asks questions to the Product owner (if any).

5.They call out dependencies with the internal as well as external teams.

6.?User stories are spread across each sprint, and a possible delivery date is called out for each Epic.

7.?All this information is usually kept on a confluence page for reference.

8.The breakout sessions are around 3 to 4 hours long considering the cross functional teams are spread across continents. The idea is to spend a lot of time in pre-planning so that the time spent is reduced in these meetings.

9.For teams who are done with their planning, scrum master start with the presentation of the team plan to the wider forum.

10.?Each team comes with their PI Objectives aligned to each of the sprints.

11.Queries are answered, and the team gets to vote by fist of 5 for the vote of confidence.

12.?Teams who do not get a good vote usually have to do follow ups for the questions ask due to low lack of confidence.

Day 2

1.?Day 2 is considerably shorter one.

2.?Again, start with breakout rooms and teams discuss more Epics and dependencies are raised and shared across.

3.?Once the teams are ready, they come up with the presentation of the plan, followed by voting using fist of five on a scale from 1 to 5.

4.Few games are planned to be played in between as ICE Breakers to keep the meeting fresh.

5.?Some teams get into the celebration mood, and they come up with songs or dance.

6.?Retrospective is conducted for the PI Planning meeting and actions are noted for the next PI meeting

?Pitfalls/Insights

1.?PI Planning is not a mini waterfall. Planning helps everyone to focus and come up with some plan for execution for next 3 months.

2.?Looking ahead and planning for further sprints, gives us enough time for Planning.

3.?Scaled Agile Framework will not work for everyday changing requirements. It needs some sort of stability and visibility into a roadmap.

4.??There is room for new Business requirements to come in and few features may get de-prioritized.