PI planning is an event of product development that ensures all the team members in ART, including stakeholders and leaders, are working towards achieving shared goals. During PI planning, the ART team will work collaboratively and deliver the highest value in program increments. The problems in PI planning do not happen in the early stage. The problems happen when features are unclear, and teams don’t see any dependencies between them. Scrum masters will be asked to deliver unplanned work, and it could create a mess. The product owner should have sound preparation for PI planning to align business goals with the development strategy.
The need for PI Planning
PI planning is quite essential for large organisations to have effective communication among the team members. PI planning ensures teams from multiple departments get into the room to discuss the progress towards the shared objective. PI planning ensures proper collaboration between teams to release features with more predictability while staying on budget. Effective PI planning will help improve resource utilisation, enhance risk management, and align teams with business decision-making. PI planning also helps product owners to have enhanced predictability with structured planning. It can also help the product owners to reduce waste in development efforts and deliver new features at a greater speed. The product owner can enhance their skills by completing certifications like POPM, and there are many learning options for SAFe POPM Certification.
Key List for the Product Owners to Prepare for PI Planning
Build a Foundation for the Product Backlog
Before PI planning, the product owner should ensure that the product backlog has acceptance criteria for every user story and improves business value. They should confirm feature prioritisation with leaders and work on identifying early dependencies among the team members. Alongside, the product owner should walk through complex features and analyze the team’s velocity to achieve shared goals. These actions from the product owner help the teams to understand their goals and work collaboratively to achieve them.
Validate Technical Aspects
The product owner should validate the technical aspects of the product backlog and map team dependencies. They should review important features and create stories for complex features to manage uncertainty effectively. By building a system to track dependencies, the product owner can avoid future surprises and ensure smoother planning.
Preparation for PI Planning
Successful PI planning is more than an agenda. It includes implementing practices that improve collaboration, clarity, and commitment among the team members.
Before PI Planning
For successful PI planning, the product owner should ensure that all team members, along with leaders and stakeholders, are available for the PI meeting. Many companies conduct these meetings at the end of the event. The purpose and vision of the meeting will be communicated to leaders and stakeholders to start PI planning effectively. The product owner should arrange the meeting in a large room that is twice the size of the team so that they can easily move around and ask questions of other team members.
PI Planning Agenda
Explain the Business Context
The teams will be educated on the business context and informed about how the business is performing and how well it is meeting customer needs. The product owner will now present features that need to be developed to achieve these goals. The next step is to outline infrastructure improvements that need to be implemented to help the teams deliver faster to market and support development during the upcoming PI.
Set Expectations for Teams
The product owner should make sure that RTE outlines the process of PI planning and the expected outcomes of the team in the meeting so that teams can raise their concerns. The product owner will ask the teams to share their needs and estimate the velocity to deliver the feature outlined in the product vision. They encourage communication between the teams to identify risks and dependencies. The drafts presented by the team members are reviewed by stakeholders and product owners to give feedback so that teams can refine their drafts.
Review Meetings
The draft plans of the teams include issues related to architecture, scope, resources, and people. These review meetings will end up in stakeholders making necessary adjustments to set new priorities and features for the teams.
Day 2 of Program Increment Planning
Adjustments
During the second day of program increment planning, the teams will make necessary adjustments to their decisions. These changes will be posted on the program board for easy visibility of the team so that they can reorganise. The product owner will incorporate these adjustments in planning and designing new PI objectives. The business owner ranks the objectives for implementation after assigning business value.
Risks and reviews
During PI planning, the teams will present risks and dependencies before posting the objectives so that the risks can be resolved effectively. After discussion in the PI planning meeting, the presented issues are divided across different categories, where teams come to an agreement with the management about handling the issue.
Creating Psychological Safety for Technical Voices
The product owner should build psychological safety for teams and encourage teams to raise their concerns during the PI planning event. The product owner should allow anonymous concerns on sensitive topics.
Retrospective
At the end of PI planning, the product owner or RTE will conduct a retrospective on the event and get feedback to know the changes that have to be implemented.
Conclusion
Program increment planning is a key event in agile product development. The product owner should plan every step of PI planning effectively. Successful PI planning aims to create an environment for people to stay flexible and work together to deliver something better to meet customer needs.
