The Benefits Of PI Planning For Your Business

Whether you’re doing PI Planning for a while or just thinking of starting, bringing together multiple agile teams in one room is daunting but beneficial.

Agility brings improved visibility, alignment, and collaboration, leading to better results, greater productivity, and faster delivery.

And without foundation (AKA PI Planning), agility is incomplete; Scaled Agile says,

“If you are not doing it, you are not doing SAFe.”

Today, we will discuss all the benefits you can reap from your PI Planning. And the end, we will also prepare you for your next PI. So keep reading!

Why PI Planning Is Best For Your Business?

PI Planning refers to a year-long itinerary of frequently planned activities where teams from a similar Agile Release Train (ART) discuss a shared mission and vision.

The event includes the discussions of features, planning the roadmap, and identifying cross-team inter-dependencies.

Agile Pi planning is the duration of an ART delivering incremental value, whether working or testing software/systems produced in each iteration or sprint.

Facilitated by the release train engineer (RTE), it is the most efficient and effective communication method.

In essence, it is used for implementing and developing agile practices within the development team —where all the teams make and break their Iteration plans and objectives for their upcoming Program Increment (PI).

Ins and Outs of PI Planning

Inputs to PI planning Include:

• Business briefings – Executive, Product, Program Backlog Architecture, Product Management, Enterprise Architect, and other relevant briefings
• Roadmap and vision of the project and the enterprise
• Top features and capabilities of the program backlog

A successful PI planning event yield two results:

• PI objectives – A set of objectives created by each team with the business value
• Program board – Highlighting the product or new feature delivery dates, the dependencies among teams, plan of iterations, backlog plan, and relevant Milestones.

Business Benefits of PI Planning?

To understand this, let’s think about some larger organizations that might have 200-300 teams and 500-10,000 developers.

Previously, these teams would never have spoken to one another (until something critical happened that forced them to talk).

Due to this, the viability and the success rate were limited; you may ask why?

Speaking of projects, especially those that require efforts of multiple teams, tend to have conflicts – one team would release something, which would negatively impact another team’s efforts, be it of the same project or another.

So, what have we learned? First, – before touching a system or a code repository, one must know how it will impact another team of the same or different project; maybe you need to do some work that enables another team to work on that first (and vice versa).

PI planning offers many business benefits, to name a few:

• It aids businesses in coordinating goals based on the company’s requirements, objectives, and vision
• Creates a social network among teams – to enable cooperation, foster cross-team relations, and raise team spirit
• Identifies cross-team dependencies
• Also, Establishing face-to-face communication across all the members and stakeholders working for a project
• Provides a platform to learn Lean User Experience (UX) and the opportunity to work on just the right amount of architecture needed for a development process
• Also, Eliminate excess Work in Process (WIP) by matching demand to capacity
• Speeds up the decision-making

How To Plan For Your Upcoming PI Plan

Every PI Planning requires adequate preparation, coordination, and communication, facilitated by the RTE and other attendees.

Also, This includes business owners, agile teams, product management, system and solution architects/engineering, the system team, and other stakeholders.

However, Make sure you’ve notified all the attendees in advance to be well prepared; to make your PI Planning successful, focus on three major areas:

• Organization – it includes strategic alignment (vision, aligning strategy, critical roles assigning. Etc.) .and setups for teams and trains.
• Logistics – It includes all the elements (location, accommodation, communication channels, catering, etc.) that run the event
• Content – It includes management and development aspects of the event

Wrapping up

Agile PI Planning is a powerful yet effective mechanism for achieving business development goals and targets.

Also, It promotes harmony and integrity among the agile team members, bringing the business owner and other project stakeholders closer and helping them understand the project’s vision.

In short, PI Planning is getting all your cross-dependent teams in the ART –to collaborate, synchronize, and align on objectives, workflows, releases, and more.

As a result, teams can accomplish milestones more effectively, work more in less time, and stay on budget.

However, Flip the coin, without this epic-driven approach for product development, teams don’t have structured communication, creating chaos among them, as they don’t know what other teams are up to.