Master Agile Program Management and Deliver with Confidence

Being agile vs doing agile – what’s the difference?

Organizations around the world have recognized the need to respond rapidly to meet the challenges of constant change. As a result, they’re racing to adopt agile ways of working, with the pandemic accelerating agile adoption.

Those who get it right can make a powerful impact on their bottom line and their competitive edge. But for others, the benefits may yet to be seen.

This is where ‘doing agile’ versus ‘being agile’ can make all the difference. Because to truly reap the benefits of agile methodology, organizations need to shift from doing to being.

This article will explain the difference between being agile vs doing agile. Plus, we’ll take you through some of the common challenges many organizations face in their agile journey.

Key points

• To realize the full potential of agile ways of working, teams must cultivate an agile mindset as well as adopt agile processes.
• Moving from ‘doing agile’ to ‘being agile’ takes time, coaching, and a new approach to management.
• Done right, being agile can amplify customer satisfaction, employee engagement, growth, and profitability.

Why agile, and why now?

Agile had already been rising in popularity for over 20 years, but once the pandemic hit, this growth accelerated.

Across every industry, being able to deliver digital experiences is now crucial. Organizations now need to act and think like software companies, with a laser focus on the customer’s online experience. Together with an active approach to finding customers, you need to deliver real value to stand out from competitors.

For organizations looking to survive - and thrive - in this environment, many are turning to agile frameworks to rapidly add customer value and drive business results. Being agile allows teams to:

• Make the complex simple – by working within a clear, structured framework, chaos turns to order.
• Maintain a clear overview – agile teams have a shared understanding of their progress towards their goals.
• Replicate success – if a team finds an effective way to deliver results, they can repurpose and share solutions across the organization.
• Create an aligned, purposeful culture – when hundreds of people across one organization form dozens of agile teams, they build a stable backbone, walking the same path towards the same goal.

"Agile organizations, viewed as living systems, have evolved to thrive in an unpredictable, rapidly changing environment. These organizations are both stable and dynamic. They focus on customers, fluidly adapt to environmental changes, and are open, inclusive, and nonhierarchical; they evolve continually and embrace uncertainty and ambiguity. Such organizations, we believe, are far better equiped than traditional ones for future."

- McKinsey & Company

What does it mean to be agile?

Many organizations incorporate a few agile processes to manage projects. But that doesn’t mean teams have fully understood and embraced the agile methodology. It could be that they’re ‘doing agile’ rather than actually ‘being agile’.

Here’s the difference between the two:

Doing agile

‘Doing agile’ is the misconception that if you do agile things your company will become agile and responsive to change. Organizations that have fallen into this trap may go through the motions of some agile processes, such as daily stand-ups, sprints, and retrospectives. Teams are structured to be small, cross-functional, and collaborative. But by stopping there, those teams don’t become truly agile and they may struggle to see results.

While agile ceremonies, tools, and structures are critical in implementation, they are only part of what makes an organization agile.

Being agile

‘Being agile’ means you incorporate the above activities but go beyond the processes. This means applying an agile mindset and agile values to all areas of the organization. Teams will need training to master the agile mindset and push through any challenges along the way. It takes more time and effort than simply doing agile, but it’s critical if you want to reap the benefits.

What’s an agile mindset?

Embracing an agile mindset means understanding and living its four core values. To be agile, you need to:

1. Respect people - Recognize that people are critical to the success of your organization. Ensure people share common goals, feel safe and empowered to share ideas, and adopt a ‘we’ versus ‘I’ mentality.
2. Optimize flow - Build in quality at each increment so you can identify issues and course-correct early. This helps maximize value and minimize waste while creating a consistent, sustainable flow of work.
3. Encourage innovation - Foster experimentation with collaboration, constructive feedback, and autonomy. Schedule time and space for creativity and ideas to flow.
4. Relentlessly improve - Keep in mind that there is no endpoint with the agile mindset. It’s about continuous improvement, so you need to continually reflect and improve future processes as part of an ongoing practice.

To take these values and make them the foundation of working across your organization, you need to combine agile processes with an agile mindset. Without the agile mindset, you’re not ‘being agile’, and your processes won’t deliver your organization’s full potential.

"The agile mindset is a thought process that involves undersatdning, collaborating, learning, and staying flexible to achieve high-performing results. By combining the agile mindset with processes and tools, team can adapt to change and deliver incremental value to their customers."

- Atlassian

Agile processes and tools aren’t enough

Agile processes, including the ceremonies, tools, and apps, are there to support the mindset of the team. But without getting the mindset right across your organization, you won’t be truly agile.

Fostering the agile mindset gives an organization the ability to rapidly move in any given direction at any given time to deliver the best value to customers. Teams who’ve mastered agile are usually:

• Autonomous and empowered to make decisions around the product and customer experience.
• Able to adapt to change quickly.
• Always willing to learn something new.

Engaged with a shared purpose and collaborative culture.

"It's about being able to pivot to change. Whether that's in terms of people, or resources or budget - whatever that looks like for an organization. If you're able to quickly shift from one area of focus to another before your competitor does, then you have a competitive advantage in the market."

- Sean Blake, Head of Marketing, Easy Agile

Common challenges to look out for as you move from doing agile to being agile

The sooner you can act and move from doing agile towards being agile, the sooner your customers, employees, and your bottom line will benefit.

Here are a few common challenges and tips to overcome them.

• People might hold onto old habits
  People find change hard, especially when habits are ingrained. You might find some people dig their heels in, clinging to the old way of doing things. It’s important to remember it can take time, and people will need support to learn new ways of working. Be sure to bring in plenty of opportunities for feedback and discussion so you can reiterate as a team to find a process that works for your organization.
• It’s not just the team who needs to be coached
  Being agile is a mindset for the entire organization, including managers and executives. If your leaders don’t understand and support agile, it will be hard to get traction and shift old processes and hierarchies. Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches need to spend time coaching leaders to develop new agile mindsets and capabilities.
• For many organizations, being agile requires a new style of management
  The traditional command-and-control management style may have worked in the industrial age. But now it’s a mismatch for the way organizations and people need to work today, and it doesn’t support the agile mindset. To be agile, teams need the trust, autonomy, and ability to take an idea through to execution without any roadblocks. Senior executives must get behind this multifaceted cultural-transformation effort for this to happen.

Are you ready to be agile?

Moving beyond agile processes to scale an agile mindset across an organization isn’t something you can tackle overnight. It takes time, effort, training, and leadership support to internalize agile values and move beyond the command mindset of the past.

You may face challenges along the way, you’ll discover there’s always more to learn, and you must be agile in your adoption of agile.

But the prize for true agility is significant, including increasing customer satisfaction, boosting employee engagement, and improving productivity - making it well worth the investment.

Agility helps modern organizations thrive through change in an uncertain and unpredictable world. For most of us, it’s no longer a desirable way of working - it’s essential.

This guide looks at the four ceremonies that bring one of Agile’s most popular frameworks, Scrum, to life.

Learn how each agile ritual helps empower teams and drive performance while highlighting some tips to help your organization get the most from your ceremonies.

At a glance:

• The four agile ceremonies are Sprint Planning, Daily Stand-Up, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective
• Ceremonies in agile facilitate visibility, transparency, and collaboration.
• Each ceremony has a clear structure and objective.
• Clear communication, flexibility, and cultural alignment are the keys to successful ceremonies.

What are the main agile ceremonies?

Agile ceremonies refer to the four events that occur during a Scrum sprint. Other forms of agile development, such as Kanban and Lean, also have similar practices.

The agile ceremonies list includes:

1. Sprint Planning
2. Daily Stand-Up
3. Sprint Review
4. Sprint Retrospective

While each ceremony is different, they facilitate the same overall purpose. The ceremonies bring teams together with a common goal under a regular rhythm, and they help teams get things done.

"With today's enterprises under increased pressure to respond quickly to the needs of their customers and stakeholders, they must bring new products to market faster and accelerate improvements to existing solutions and services." - State of Agile Report

Why are agile ceremonies important?

Agile ceremonies help organizations adapt to change and succeed. With work planned in smaller portions and over shorter timeframes, they help teams quickly shift direction and course-correct when needed. They form a key part of the broader agile approach that’s now widely adopted in organizations worldwide.

With agile ceremonies, teams in your organization can benefit from:

• Enhanced ability to manage changing priorities
• Acceleration of software development
• Increase in team productivity
• Improved business and IT alignment

It’s important to remember that while ceremonies are an essential part of Scrum, they’re just one of many rituals that help create agile teams and workplaces. To realize the true benefits of agile, you’ll need to do more than include one or more of the ceremonies into your waterfall project.

1. Sprint Planning

The Sprint Planning ceremony sets teams up for success by ensuring everyone understands the sprint goals and how to achieve them.

StructureAttendeesTimingDurationAgile FrameworkThe Product Owner brings the product backlog to discuss with the Development Team. The Scrum Master facilitates.   Together, the Scrum Team does effort or story point estimations.   The product backlog must contain all the details necessary for estimation. The Product Owner should be able to clarify any doubts regarding the product backlog. The entire Scrum Team (the Development Team, Scrum Master, and Product Owner)At the beginning of each sprintOne to two hours per week of iteration. So, if you're planning a two-week sprint, your Sprint Planning should last two to four hours. Scrum. Although Kanban teams also plan, they do it less formally and per milestone, not iteration.

Outcomes

After some team negotiation and discussion, you should have a clear decision on the work that the Development Team can complete during the sprint by the end of Sprint Planning. This is known as the sprint goal.

The sprint goal is an increment of complete work, and everyone should feel confident about the commitment.

The product backlog defines priorities that affect the order of work. Then, the Scrum Master transforms that decision into the sprint backlog.

Top tips

• Focus on collaboration rather than competition.
• Break user stories into tasks to get things more operational for the Development Team. If there's time, assign those tasks during the event.
• Factor in public holidays and any team member’s time off or vacations.
• Keep your team’s pace in mind – a track record of the time it took to implement similar user stories would be helpful.
• Focus on the product backlog and nothing else in terms of work for the sprint.

2. Daily Stand-Up

The daily stand-up brings the team together and sets everyone up for the day. The team uses this time to identify blockers and share plans for the day.

StructureAttendeesTimingDurationAgile frameworkThis is an informal, standing meeting. All members of the Development Team inform everyone about what they did the day before and what they’re doing today. Members discuss any blockages they have and ask for help from the team if required.   Due to time restrictions, the updates should be brief.Development Team, Scrum Master, Product Owner (optional) Daily, usually in the morningShort and sharp. No longer than 15 minutesScrum and Kanban

Outcomes

The Scrum Master should clear all the blockages that slow down or prevent the Development Team from delivering. As a result, the development process might need to change.

This daily pulse check keeps the team in sync and helps build trust. Together, the group finds ways to support and help each other.

Top tips

• Use a timer to keep this meeting to 15 minutes.
• Hold your stand-up at the same time every day.
• Only discuss the work for the day ahead.
• If the team is distributed, use video conferencing with cameras on.
• Long discussions should happen after the event.
• As the stand-up encourages progress, everyone should provide an update, and everyone should feel accountable.

3. Sprint Review

The Sprint Review is the time to showcase the team’s completed work and gather feedback from stakeholders. A variety of attendees from outside the team offer valuable insights from different viewpoints. This event also helps build trust with both external and internal stakeholders.

StructureAttendeesTimingDurationAgile frameworkThe Scrum Master takes on the logistics of event preparation.   The Product Owner should ask stakeholders questions to gather as much feedback as possible. They should also answer any of their stakeholder’s questions.Development Team, Scrum Master, Product Owner. Optionally, management, customers, developers, and other stakeholders At the end of the sprintOne hour per week of the sprint. In a one-week sprint, the Sprint Review lasts one hour.Scrum and Kanban.   Kanban teams do these reviews after the team milestones, not sprints.

Outcomes

After this ceremony, the Product Owner might need to adjust or add to the product backlog. They might also release product functionality if it's already complete.

Top tips

• Schedule in time to rehearse before the meeting to help your team present with confidence, especially if external stakeholders are coming along.
• Don’t showcase incomplete work. Review your Sprint Planning and the original criteria if you’re not sure whether the work is complete.
• Besides product functionality, focus on user experience, customer value, and the delivered business value.
• Consider ways you can introduce a celebratory feel to acknowledge the team’s effort.

4. Sprint Retrospective

In this final scrum ceremony in the sequence, you look back on the work you’ve just done and identify ways to do things better next time. The Sprint Retrospective is a tool for risk mitigation in future sprints.

StructureAttendeesTimingDurationAgile frameworkThe teams discuss what went well throughout the sprint and what went wrong.   The Scrum Master should encourage the Development Team to speak up and share not only facts but also their feelings.   The goal is to gather rapid feedback for continuous improvement in terms of process.  It’s also an opportunity to emphasize good practices that the team adopted and should repeat.Development Team, Scrum Master, Product Owner (optional)At the end of the sprint45 minutes per sprint weekScrum and Kanban (occasionally)

Outcomes

After this session, the team should clearly understand the problems and the wins that happened throughout the iteration. Together, the group comes up with solutions and an action plan to prevent and identify process problems in the next sprint.

Top tips

• Focus on both facts and feelings
• Gather information that helps you focus on continuous improvement – this might include tools and relationships
• Be honest and encourage ideas that solve process-related problems
• Even if everything went well, have this meeting – retrospectives provide ongoing guidance for the next sprint.

"With the speed of change expected to continue, the need has never been greater for an operating model that keep up." - McKinsey

Agile lessons to live by

As a team of experienced agile practitioners, we’ve picked up some key learnings about what it takes to get the most out of your agile ceremonies and create the foundations of a truly agile organization.

Here are our top tips to make your ceremonies a success:

• Be deliberately present - During the ceremonies, remember to take moments to pause and remind yourself of why you’re there. Show others that you’re present by giving them full attention and using your body language. In a remote setting, angle your camera as though you’re sitting across from them, look into the lens regularly, and use a distraction-free background.
• Practice active listening - Think about what the person is saying, who they are, and what they need from you. Are they looking for a soundboard, do they need your help or opinion, or are they looking for an emotional connection?
• Understand motives - Understand the motivations of your teammates before speaking. Consider why they should care about what you’re saying by connecting your message with their own motivations. Provide context where possible to let them know why your message matters.
• Be flexible - It's important to remember that there is not a one size fits all approach to agile ways of working. What works for one team may not work for another, so you need to experiment to find out what works then tailor processes to suit your team's needs.
• Create cultural alignment - The best processes in the world won’t deliver what you need if you don’t have the culture to support their delivery. Agile ceremonies need to be supported by a culture where people are actively engaged, confident to raise issues, and value continuous improvement.

Agile ceremonies lead to better results

While it can take time for teams new to agile to adjust to agile ceremonies, they are worth the effort. By providing a clear structure and achievable outcomes, they help align everyone on the product, communication, and priorities.

The result? Agile teams that provide better quality products faster – and deliver real business outcomes.

Wherever your organization is on your agile journey, it’s worth keeping in mind that each team and each suite of products are different, so there’s no standard recipe for success. The good news is that by working within the continuous improvement mindset the agile framework promotes; you too can iterate and improve your agile ceremonies over time.

Ready to get started?

Easy Agile TeamRhythm supports your team's agile practices in Jira. Supporting your team from planning right through to retrospective, TeamRhythm helps you and your team work better together to deliver value to your customers.

Features include:

• Agile sprint and version planning tool - Planning is quick and easy when you create and estimate issues on the story map. View your work under initiatives and epics, and see swimlane stats at a glance, ensuring team capacity is filled but not overcommitted
• Agile story mapping - Map the customer journey using initiatives, epics, and stories alongside your agile Jira boards. Quickly and easily add new or existing stories inside the story map. Drag and drop to prioritize by value to the customer.
• Product backlog refinement - Escape your flat backlog and view your work on the story map matrix. Drag and drop issues to prioritize or schedule. Quickly update story summaries and story point estimates with inline editing for a better backlog.
• Team retrospectives - Celebrate success, gain insights, and share learnings with team retrospective boards for scrum and kanban, encouraging collaboration and transparency, so you and your team are continuously improving.

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.

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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.

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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 📫