Last week I helped facilitate Program Increment (PI) Planning for an Agile Release Train (ART) practicing the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). One impediment for this ART was that although the leadership team ROAMed risks in PI Planning as well as continued to manage the flow of risks/issues using a ROAMing Kanban Board throughout PI execution, there wasn’t enough clarity and alignment around what exactly would Owning a risk look like and what are the expected deliverables/objectives.

One experiment we tried this time around was to ask the ART Leadership Team to plan their quarter/PI very similarly to the other teams on the ART. Their source of “Features” was the list of risks/issues identified beforehand (during the last PI as well as during the Inspect and Adapt / Retrospective workshop) as well as those emerging throughout the PI Planning event. They took their features and broke them into specific deliverables and then came up with PI objectives related to those areas. They presented them to their stakeholders – the entire ART – heard their feedback and adjusted the course.