Agile Manifesto states in most clear terms:

• The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

Contrary to popular belief, the core strength of PI Planning is not rooted in the co-location of your teams. It is in structuring and empowering the driving mechanism to an extent that physical proximity, or lack thereof, is no longer a factor in carrying out a fluid, transparent communication.

Among the strategic challenges faced by teams participating in the Program Increment Planning, the significant ones are the following:

• Transparency and alignment across the ART,
• Effective collaboration,
• Efficient and impactful decision making,
• Meaningful communication,
• Purposeful engagement.

In terms of execution, these challenges translate as:

• Poor data assimilation,
• Manual collection of information with time costs and error proneness,
• Losing track of business objectives,
• Ill-timed sessions,
• Long heavy session,
• Technical failures,
• Ill prepared session management.

For an RTE with Jira teams, the biggest challenge for conducting an in-person and/or remote PI Planning, is to ensure a smooth, hassle-free, real-time, bi-directional integration between their planning board and Jira.

Some organizations employ a visualization tool for their planning board. At the onset, this may seem to be an easy way out for conducting PI Planning, but can result in serious implications during the PI Planning event and the post PI Planning scenario.
The most common hiccups faced are:

• Jira performance

  During the PI Planning, when groups of people access a visualization board with many connected cards, the SAFe community has documented cases of Jira performance becoming remarkably compromised.

• Limited edit allowances

  Since the visualization tools are not inherently designed for the purpose of PI Planning, there are certain limitations; one of them being the number of users allowed to edit the board.

• Manual transfer of data

  Data from, and to, the ALM tool has to be backed up and transferred manually, which has time and accuracy costs.

When scaling agile, there are heavy price tags attached to these challenges. Time lost and financial cost are only the measurable ones among these. The disappointment/demotivation of the team members and the trust deficit among the ART teams is often an unrecognized and mostly an irrecoverable damage. Thankfully, with Kendis these challenges can be taken care of effortlessly.

Everyone and their dog can brief you about all that you need to prepare for the success of your PI Planning. The art lies in structuring the entire preparation process into systemized chunks, as is befitting for any organization adhering to scaling agile.

According to the guidance provided by SAFe, there are three major areas of PI Planning preparation that require deliberation:

• Organizational readiness: Strategic alignment and teams and trains setup
• Content readiness: Management and development preparedness
• Logistics readiness: Considerations for running a successful event

Based on these three themes, here is the list of considerations you should be particular about:

• Planning scope and context: Has the scope (product, system, technology domain) of the planning process been identified? Do we know which teams need to plan together?
• Business alignment: Has there been a common understanding of the priorities among the Business Owners?
• Agile teams: Do all our Agile teams have dedicated team members, and an identified Scrum Master and Product Owner for each team?
• Executive briefing: A briefing that establishes the current business context for all the participants
• Product vision briefing: Is the Product Management briefing about the top 10 features in the Program Backlog?
• Architecture vision briefing: Has the CTO/Enterprise Architect/System Architect briefed about the new Enablers, features, and Non-functional Requirements (NFRs)?
• Locations: How many planning location do we need to maintain?
• Technology and tooling: Coupled with our ALM tool, Kendis will take care of our real-time PI Program Board, PI Objectives, ROAMing Risks, Dependency Management and PI Planning ceremonies, including: Scrum of Scrums, Confidence Vote and Inspect and Adapt. What other tools do we need to support distributed planning or remote attendees? (Hint: The answer is none. You’re good to go!)
• Communication channels: Primary and secondary audio, video, and presentation and conversation channels for an effective personal experience.

You must have noticed that the checklist heavily relies on contributions from all participants of the ART, as reflected in the section above documenting the PI Planning Participants and their roles.

Whether your teams use Jira or Azure DevOps/TFS as their ALM tool, Kendis enables you to conduct your PI Planning with the finesse which can not be offered by any other solution in the market. Try it for yourself!

To help you prepare better for your PI planning, we have prepared a step-by-step guide that you can use to set up your boards, invite users and make sure all the important steps are done before the actual planning event.

This guide helps you get an overview of all the ways Kendis facilitates you during your PI Planning, irrespective of your and your Teams’ locations.