- Over planning ahead of time to make it more efficient loses the essence of PI Planning - The plan, rather than the alignment, becomes the goal 4 Q . Developers are responsible for researching, designing, implementing, testing, maintaining, and managing software systems. The agenda allows an hour to talk about the current state of the business. Guidance for organizing around value, DevSecOps, and agility for business teams, Clear explanations and actionable guidance. Or maybe youve been doing PI Planning for a while now, but its not running too well and you have room to improve but not sure where. What is the purpose of Iterations and Program Increments? The process is visible to all stakeholders. Facilitating an effective team breakout session. The most common pattern for a PI is four development Iterations, followed by one Innovation and Planning (IP) Iteration. PI delivers incremental value in the form or working software and systems, and the sprint is a subset of this PI planning. In order for PI planning to be successful, input from team members and participants is required. The Solution Roadmap is a longer term forecasting and planning tool for a specific product or service. How can a Scrum Master support a Problem-Solving Workshop? Post author: Post published: 23 May 2022 Post category: marc smith osu Post comments: lord and lady masham felicity and mark lord and lady masham felicity and mark Program Increment (PI) Planning is a cadence-based, face-to-face event that serves as the heartbeat of the Agile Release Train (ART), aligning all the teams on the ART to a shared mission and Vision. A better way to look at this plan is as a set of objectives that the teams are committing to. During PI planning, what are two key purposes of the hourly Scrum of Scrums checkpoint meeting? SAFe DevOps. Typically a discussion about the next steps, along with final instructions to the teams, follows. Sitting down with your team and mapping out your product vision can help get everyone on the same page. What is the difference between a PI Roadmap and a Solution Roadmap? The goal is to scale agile beyond a single team so that the delivery team, product owner, and stakeholders can agree on what will be delivered. After the session is over, the notes and string are recreated in Jira for the whole team. SAFe isnt perfect and neither is PI Planning. The traditional waterfall approaches fall short because theyre slow and inefficient. Thats because it forms the foundation of the Scaled Agile Framework. Program increment (PI) planning is an event that creates a shared vision among Agile teams. It can take 3-4 years for these bigger, more complex companies to launch a new feature, which slows down customer delivery. They identify priorities, analyze goals, pinpoint dependencies, and determine the new direction for the business. Plus, its a lot cheaper than flying folks in to do PI Planning every few months. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. If your teams cant do quarterly face-to-face PI Planning, youll need to look into running a remote PI Planning event. This means they help: 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. All you need is more than one agile team to make it worthwhile. Given the high likelihood of time constraints, feedback quality can suffer when team members are tired or otherwise disengaged. Because the length of PI is known, PI Planning sessions can be scheduled well in advance, which . Its a good idea to carefully test all the equipment and connections ahead of time to minimise potential problems. To review the Agile Release Train's progress toward its PI Objectives. In a PI planning event, teams, stakeholders, and project owners are assembled to review a program backlog and determine what direction the business will take next. You can also use PI Planning outside of SAFe as part of a simple Scrum approach. There are a lot of advantages to using a digital program board like Easy Agile Programs, which integrates directly with Jira. Day 1 usually kicks off with a presentation from a Senior Executive or Business Owner. Cookie Policy And while SAFe is a framework for larger organizations, theres also no reason why smaller companies cant do a version of PI Planning, too. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads. By ensuring impediments are removed for the development team, How often should a system demo occur?-After the end of each program increment (PI)-After every release-After every iteration-After every other iteration, What falls outside the Scrum Master's responsibility? Anything else youd like to know about PI Planning? Facilitate the coordination with other teams for dependencies. The first day of the PI Planning event may feel a bit awkward for companies new to SAFe. Or, perhaps more accurately, it lays down the tracks for the train to make sure all the train cars go in the same direction. When is PI Planning held? PI Planning is incredibly beneficial for large scale agile organizations. Post-PI Planning happens after all the ARTs have completed their PI Planning for the next increment. Provides transparency into PI Objectives for all members of the ART. That way, theres more time for team planning and collaboration. During this process, teams identify risks and dependencies and draft their initial team PI objectives. Question everything you have done in your previous PI planning. This is often referred to as a sprint. Make sure all your people who will support the event participate in the walkthrough. Even more precisely, it sets the tracks for the train to ensure that all rail cars (scrum teams that are a part of ART) travel in the same direction. Introduction to PI Planning: A Quick Overview. Instead, they increase the reliability of the plan and give management an early warning of goals that the ART may not be able to deliver. Please visit. When you have a large ART of, say, 12 teams, thats a lot of draft plans to present and review. 3. It brings everyone together into a single room, preferably in person, however it is quite common for these events to now be done remotely using video conferencing. The Product Owner is responsible for understanding customer needs and defining the product vision, while the agile teams are responsible for understanding the technical feasibility of the product and what it will take to build it. Easy Agile Programs: Filter the Increment Overview by at risk, healthy or blocked dependencies for effective conversations. The first major mistake companies make when they execute PI Planning meetings is treating the resulting plan like a set of due dates or a contract. The other Agile Teams on the Agile release train (ART). But the process has been proven to work for many organizations. PI Planning is facilitated by the ARTs Release Train Engineer (RTE). Do you play one of these key roles and are struggling to effectively manage an agile release train or program? Descriptions of each item follow. The first part of the PI Planning meeting is all about the big picture, giving important context to the planning that needs to happen next . Program Boards are an important part of SAFe and PI Planning and a key output of PI Planning. How does the Scrum Master provide the most value to the team? Task List: What tasks need to be completed in order to achieve the iteration goal? Define the project scope and constraints. Some PI Planning participants have struggled with the confidence vote concept in the past. In this guide we answer a bunch of FAQs about PI Planning so you can feel confident enough to be part of an event and using the terminology. An iteration planning meeting agenda helps the team accomplish the meeting's objective within the timebox constraints. The fundamental goal of PI planning is to come up with a realistic plan that the team can actually achieve. This depends upon the Agile project management tooling in place and the needs of the ART. 13 Mins. Large-scale SAFe development is a finely tuned machine that must be maintained. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. However, now that these teams are all working in the same way, they can be grouped together as a program. Jira is the most popular project management tool for agile teams, so if youre agile, chances are you're already using it at the team level. Their role focuses mainly on planning and facilitating the PI Planning event. It's important to ensure that there is a good agreement on the priorities among the owners of the business or product. They review the Draft plan and describe any changes to the planning and scope based on the Management Review & Problem Solving session. As Scaled Agile says, "if you are not doing it, you are not doing SAFe.". Previously, alignment would have been at the leadership team level, and theyd have multiple levels of managers in between who cascade information down, but the people on the teams would never talk to one another. Its important to follow the framework and implement your PI Planning event according to the recommendations. The PI Planning meeting is a two-day event in SAFe methodology where proper planning is done. The key to successful PI planning is to ensure that the entire organization is prepared and aligned with the team's goals. Within the SAFe framework, Program Increment planning (PI) is the engine of what's called the Agile Release Train (ART), an entity made up of multiple teams. What is a pre-PI Planning event and when is it needed? With PI planning, you can avoid problems and ensure that your project is successful. It may not always be practical for the entire Agile Release Train (ART) to collocate however, and in our current times COVID-19 has created a situation where this isnt an option. Why is a confidence vote held at the end of PI Planning? Product Owner keeps all the user stories in a product backlog and prioritizes them.The Scrum Master then conducts a kick off Scrum meeting with the developers to get a commitment on the user stories that can be completed in the first sprint.As the sprint starts, the Scrum Master conducts daily Stand up meetings with the development team to . (Choose two). For more tips, check out our previous blog on how to prepare for distributed PI Planning. A Product Managers job is to understand the customers needs and validate solutions, while understanding and supporting portfolio work. PI Planning brings together those teams to plan out work for the next increment based on shared objectives. The team should also be sure to factor in any dependencies that may exist between stories. Program Increment. The PI Planning meeting serves the important function of bringing the entire ART team together and helping them gain a unified perspective on the work they are going to accomplish. The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The goal of Lean is to deliver the maximum customer value in the shortest sustainable lead time while providing what else? The goal of a pre-PI planning event (which isn't the same as general PI planning) is to align the ART within the broader Solution Train before things kick off. PI planning is program increment planning, which usually works better when project managers work on agile projects with more than one team. Cadence and Synchronization help reduce uncertainty and manage what? What is the function of the program counter How to approach? The Development Team decides how much work can be accomplished. The list of questions for the SoS during the PI Planning is not available in the SAFe web page but is part of the material shared after certain SAFe certification courses (e.g. PI Planning is a vital element of SAFe. 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