PI Planning in SAFe Agile

What is PI Planning ?

PI stands for Program Increment .Program Increment is a planning event which will occur in scaled agile with all the teams and it may be 2 or 3 days event and the Planning for next 10 to 12 weeks will be done.

What is SAFe Agile ?

SAFe Agile stands for scaled agile and it is for scrum of scrum .This is for program level agile and more than 5 scrum teams will be part of the scaled agile .

What is the agenda for PI planning ??

Agenda for the PI planning is to discuss what to do for next 8 to 10 weeks and what is the dependency within the teams and risks will be identified .

We had three days PI Planning session .

Lets talk about day 1 :

On the day one ,first few hours the business team and stake holders were started presenting about the below points.

• Why they are tying to do this project ?
• In our case ,the stakeholders want to redesign the system .So they explained why they want to redesign the system .
• The important point to redesign the system is to have improved customer experience and upgrading their system to the market competitive level .

Our PI planning includes more than 6 different teams and they all work with different streams to redesign the system and identify individual pieces of the puzzle .

Once they done with explaining about the business needs , expectation and timeline ,the video conferencing has been split into separate session for individual team .This is called breakout session .

During the breakout session ,the individual has to identify the epics ,features ,and user stories for the next 3 months. This 3 month period is for one PI .After 3 months next PI will happen.

After the short breakout period (may be 2 hours) ,all the teams will combined again as a one group and each team has to explain about what is the object for the next three months and what they are going to achieve to redesign the system within the specified timeline.

Lets talk about day 2

Day 2 starts with breakout session and the team has to groom their user stories further to next level and they can call any one person from other team to discuss about the dependency with that team.

During the breakout session ,scrum master will try to form or groom the user stories with the help of engineering team ,architects , business analysts and product owner .

Once the breakout session is over , all the teams will join together and each team will get few minutes to explain what are changes they have done to the user stories ,and what are the risks and dependencies they identified.

At the end of the day2 ,all the team members should leave the meeting and only the management and stake holders will discuss and review the progress.

What happened in day 3 :

Days 3 also starts with breakout session and the team has to discuss about their stories for the next three sprints (the PI includes ).Before the individual team breakout discussion ends ,the organizer will provide you the chart with all the teams user stories for the that PI. The team should map the individual user stories dependencies with other team user stories if their user story is dependent on other team’s user story. And then the chart will look like below image.

After the breakout session ,all the teams will join with main session and they will discuss about the dependencies with other teams .

And the Risks identified by the individual team will analyzed and It will be marked in below three ways :

• Accepted - Accepted as a risk for this PI by a team or person
• Owned - This Risk will be owned by a person (may be product owner of the team)
• Resolved - During the discussion ,if the team come up with a resolution then it will be marked as Resolved .
• Mitigate - If you found correct way to mitigate the risk ,then the risk will be marked as mitigate.

Finally ,

The organizer will ask all the team members about the confidence level to achieve the PI objective and he will ask all the team members to choose level 5 to level 1 .

• Level 5 - 100% confident
• Level 4 - 80% confident
• Level 3 - 60 % confident
• Level 2 - 40 % confident
• Level 1 - 20% confident.

Conclusion :

Scaled Agile - scrum of scrum

PI Planning - Program Increment Planning

During the PI planning , all the teams will gather and discuss about what they are going to do for next three month of their agile world .