What is PI Planning?
How did the need for PI Planning start?
PI Planning helps brilliantly bring together all the members of the team under one room where all the dependencies and potential risks can be discussed. This creates a culture of increased visibility and to promote communication and clarity into what will be done.
What is needed for the preparation of the PI Planning Session?
Who are the participants of PI Planning?
- All the teams of the Agile Release Train
- Scrum Masters
- Product Owners
- Developers
- Stakeholders
- Business owners
- Suppliers
- Users
- Customers
Who conducts the PI Planning session?
Who is the Release Train Engineer?
Why is Servant Leadership so important for the Release Train Engineer?
When is PI Planning held?
What are the events of PI Planning and how long does PI Planning last?
On Day 1
- Business Context
- Product Solution Vision
- Architecture vision
- Planning context and lunch
- Draft Plans
- Review by management and problem solving
On Day 2
- Planning adjustments
- Final Plan review and lunch
- Planning risks of the program
- Confidence Vote
- Rework if needed
- Retrospective
What are the Challenges of PI Planning?
- PI Planning is long and can become boring at times so it is better to find creative and innovative ways to make it a little engaging.
- Trusting can be difficult and may appear as a challenge to them.
- Maintaining collaboration and synergy of multiple Agile Teams in the Agile Release Train, is vital towards achieving the objectives in the Program Increment.
- When doing the vote of the confidence, many people can feel pressured to vote.
What are the outcomes of PI Planning?
What is Distributed PI Planning?
In a situation where teams are not located in one location or can not be brought together, then Distributed PI Planning can be done. In order to make this happen, there are a few factors that have to be considered to make the PI Planning session as smooth and engaging as it can be.
- Try and bring the teams to one location as much as possible to one location.
- If the teams are spread across in different countries, then you need to make sure that the time zones are kept in mind and that the PI Planning session is done on a time that is suitable for everyone. The time for PI Planning should be kept in a way that it respects people and their culture and it does not affect their daily routine.
- The PI Planning can last for 2.5 or 3 days
- Use the latest communication, collaboration and ALM tools.
Why need a Pre and Post PI Planning session?
What is Pre PI Planning?
The Pre Planning session helps aligning the tasks to create realistic objectives by looking at the target milestone dates before executing a Program Increment planning session.
The progress of the previous Program Increment is reviewed and the current state is discussed. The business context and the vision are set. This creates a road map for the Program increments to come and their dependencies which is reviewed by the Solution and Program Management.
Respectively, the Agile teams or Agile Release Trains prepare their program backlogs that contain the features and then discussed.
A successful pre-planning session will achieve ranked features which are prioritized and set for each team of the release train. This list of features can be used for feature briefing, synchronization between product owners and product managers.
What is needed for a Pre Planning session?
- Program Increment summary which has the progress from the previous Program Increment
- Business context, vision and milestone presentation
- Solution board with upcoming capabilities and features list
- The features of the next Program Increment that presents the backlog items, dependencies and risks
What is Post PI Planning?
The Release Train Engineer explains and discusses the objectives, dependencies, impediments and the risks of the PI. Risks are identified and mitigated, using the ROAM technique. If there are any aspects of the planning session that are left or not clearly understood, then a Rework Session is held to review the plan with the Agile Release Train.
What is needed for a Post PI Planning session?
- Solution Roadmap
- Solution Vision
- Solution Backlog
- Milestone Definition
Participants of the Pre and Post PI Planning?
The need of having Inspect and Adapt
Kendis offers the complete solution for your scaling agile needs


Program Boards
Collaboration, communication and transparency lie at the heart of Kendis. It brilliantly reduces all the painful efforts and makes the entire process of planning your Program Increment a very easy task.

Dependencies Management
Dependencies are essential in recognizing, identifying and correctly mapping factors that are affecting your progress. In Kendis you can create multiple dependencies across your Program board and track them.

Risks Management
With Kendis you can transparently address and visualize the present and upcoming risks of your Program Increment, sprint or iteration in a way that makes it painless to identify and analyze.

PI Objectives
Create objectives for each team or for your Program and link those with any item present your board. This allows you to choose precisely what features and stories are contributing to the objective.

Program Reports and Analytics
An extremely vital and powerful feature that gives an overview of all the recent activities that are being done. Presented in graphical or tabulated formats, you obtain all the necessary information in just a glance.