Search
Close this search box.
Search
Close this search box.
Search
Close this search box.

PI Planning Magic!

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest
WhatsApp

Intro

Earlier this month I was helping a software organization in an Israeli defense organization (that’s why there are no pictures) run their first PI Planning event. The day after I told my colleagues at Agilesparks that this is one event I will try to remember whenever I get into difficult times doing coaching, something that happens from time to time, coaching being what it is. I will try to remember that day because of the magic that happened somewhere around noon. And I want to tell you all about it.

If you aren’t familiar with it, PI Planning is an event where the entire (yes, entire) organization (or part of the organization, if it is big, up to around 125 people) convenes for 2 days to plan the next 4 to 6 iterations (sprints). Most people, hearing about it for the first time, respond in the exact way you did just now – incredulity. Yet, at the end of the event people are just talking about how will they make the next time even better. Having said that, the event we did this time was one day only – you need to choose your battles. As you will see, we needed that extra time.

Warm-up

The main purpose of the PI Planning event is to align and synchronize the organization and so the first day opens with overviews by various stakeholders, product managers and architects, all bringing concise messages and information – we don’t want all the people sitting there getting too bored, a challenging task. Immediately following this the teams break out for planning. Everyone stays in the same venue, huddling around tables, trying to come up with content for each of the PI’s iterations (leaving the last iteration for other things.) And here things start to warm up.

At the beginning the teams will usually stay together, calculating their capacity for each iteration and better understanding the required features to develop. However, after an hour or so it starts to be evident that there are dependencies on other teams, and this is exactly what happened at the mentioned event. One of the reasons the organization went into this in the first place is that coordination and alignment between teams did not fare so well. Yet, even though it was obvious the dependencies should be discussed, teams preferred to continue and look at their own plans, keeping to their tables, exactly like other teams in other organizations do.

Enter the program board

This is a good time to mention that another output of the event, in addition to the team’s plan, is the program board on which we clearly see dependencies between the teams. At this point of the event, the board was empty. Seeing the situation for what it was, the RTE, a sort of a scrum master of the scrum teams, started going around the tables, prompting people to start placing dependencies on the board, assertively. And so they did. And then magic happened.

We asked teams that placed dependencies on the board to make sure they talk about it with the relevant teams (people and interactions over processes and tools, right?) and this started an interaction across the teams. While at the beginning the noticeable huddle was around the program board, soon you started to see people from different teams at other teams’ tables. It was not just scrum master to scrum master but any representative with any other team members. People were thinking about where should they move this story and whether they could split that feature to accommodate for the dependencies. Suddenly you saw how decision-making went down to the ranks, how they took ownership of the big plan.

Self Organization Magic

That magic of self-organization was happening right before our eyes. Instead of some managers making all the decisions and being the pipelines for messages, people were interacting directly. Later the RTE said that while she felt she was a bit losing control of the happenings, the volume of interactions and decisions was something that couldn’t be tracked by one person. She was happy.

At some point it seemed as though energy is starting to go down and that we can start to wrap up. The RTE called for a scrum of scrum meeting around the program board where some dependencies were not handled. We gave the teams another 45 minutes.

The Confidence Vote

Once we had everyone’s attention – it was not an easy task – we asked the people to raise their hands in the air and indicate with the number of fingers what is their level of confidence in the plan. One means no confidence at all, and five means excellent. As hands went up in the air we saw one One and a few Twos. Most were from one team. We asked the people what was the issue and the response we got was that everything got into the plan because this is what they were asked to do. Not good.

What the RTE did at this point was to allocate another 30 minutes for the teams to change their plans so they will believe in them. Stories were moved, features got a bit thinner and when we had the vote again, we had a few Threes and the rest were Fours and Fives. The number of Threes was small enough for us to decide to handle these issues during execution.

Retrospective

At the very end of the day, we asked the teams to present the main findings of their retrospective. The feedback was good, mainly that teams agreed on them when and who will do what is something that so far they couldn’t manage to do. This fast coordination loop is making things that would usually take weeks or months to happen in one day. And that’s magic!

Subscribe for Email Updates:

Categories:

Tags:

Agile Outsourcing
Kanban
Agile Community
Frameworks
Agile Exercises
Development Value Streams
Continuous Delivery
Agile Testing Practices
Agile Marketing
Pomodoro Technique
Lean Risk Management
Artificial Intelligence
Engineering Practices
RTE Role
Change Management
SAFe DevOps
Continuous Integration
Release Train Engineer
Sprint Planning
ATDD
Acceptance Test-Driven Development
Achieve Business Agility
Scrum
System Integration Environments
Agile Delivery
Atlassian
Operational Value Stream
Lean Budgeting
ART Success
Continuous Planning
Lean Agile Management
Agile Development
Slides
Agile and DevOps Journey
Agility
Lean Software Development
predictability
What Is Kanban
Manage Budget Creation
Legacy Enterprise
Limiting Work in Progress
Sprint Retrospectives
AgileSparks
SAFe Release Planning
Entrepreneurial Operating System®
Covid19
WIP
Presentation
SA
Systems Thinking
Nexus vs SAFe
Self-organization
Risk Management on Agile Projects
ARTs
Jira Cloud
QA
Business Agility
Nexus and SAFe
Kanban Game
Value Streams
AI Artificial Intelligence
Nexus
Kanban Kickstart Example
Agile Games
RTE
Planning
Kaizen Workshop
Lean and Agile Techniques
Introduction to Test Driven Development
Games and Exercises
Agile Games and Exercises
Agile Basics
Introduction to ATDD
ALM Tools
Professional Scrum Product Owner
Large Scale Scrum
Built-In Quality
Agile Risk Management
Amdocs
Lean Agile Basics
Software Development Estimation
Quality Assurance
PI Planning
Professional Scrum with Kanban
Lean Agile Organization
Lean Agile
Scrum Master Role
Elastic Leadership
The Agile Coach
Kaizen
Scrum With Kanban
ScrumMaster Tales
Principles of Lean-Agile Leadership
Agile Techniques
GanttBan
LPM
Spotify
speed @ scale
Jira admin
Implementing SAFe
Applying Agile Methodology
Agile Contracts Best Practices
Managing Projects
Coaching Agile Teams
An Appreciative Retrospective
Advanced Roadmaps
Kanban 101
Program Increment
Agile Israel
NIT
Portfolio for Jira
The Kanban Method
Jira
SAFe
Daily Scrum
Scrum Guide
Iterative Incremental Development
Atlaassian
RSA
Accelerate Value Delivery At Scale
Enterprise DevOps
Effective Agile Retrospectives
agileisrael
Product Management
Agile Product Development
Agile Release Planning
Product Ownership
TDD
Webinar
Tips
Agile in the Enterprise
speed at scale
IT Operations
Tools
Story Slicing
BDD
Risk-aware Product Development
Lean Agile Leadership
Legacy Code
Agile Project
Professional Scrum Master
Lean Startup
Agile for Embedded Systems
Test Driven Development
Scrum Values
Reading List
SPC
Risk Management in Kanban
A Kanban System for Software Engineering
Nexus and Kanban
Hybrid Work
POPM
Rapid RTC
Sprint Iteration
Releases Using Lean
Lean and Agile Principles and Practices
Agile Mindset
Software Development
System Archetypes
lean agile change management
Certified SAFe
Agile Assembly Architecture
Managing Risk on Agile Projects
Video
LeSS
ROI
Process Improvement
System Team
Lean-Agile Budgeting
Agile Product Ownership
Jira Plans
Continuous Improvement
Scrum Master
Scrum.org
Agile Program
ATDD vs. BDD
Agile
Continuous Deployment
Perfection Game
Certification
Nexus Integration Team
AI
Agile Project Management
Lean-Agile Software Development
Agile Israel Events
Scaled Agile Framework
Scrum Primer
Implementation of Lean and Agile
Kanban Basics
LAB
PI Objectives
EOS®
Code
Agile Release Management
Agile India
Scrum and XP
AgileSparks
Logo
Enable registration in settings - general

Contact Us

Request for additional information and prices

AgileSparks Newsletter

Subscribe to our newsletter, and stay updated on the latest Agile news and events

This website uses Cookies to provide a better experience
Shopping cart