• Agile Leadership

How do I organize a PI Planning?

Another popular choice is to use only the PI planning – Program Increment Planning – from SAFe. In this article, I share what I’ve learned about quarterly planning. Whether you call them Big Room Planning, Q-planning, quarterly planning, Period Planning or Wave Planning. And nice and practical: at the bottom of this article you’ll find a sample schedule.

Dual payback

In a PI planning, you agree with multiple teams on what to do in the coming quarter. You seek synergy and resolve bottlenecks in advance. Of course, no one denies that’s a smart thing to do. What is less common is to do that planning with everyone involved from all teams. Yet the complexity of the plans is so great that it is valuable to look ahead a quarter with a large group, all team members together. When discussing with such a large group of people, I always see that structure and facilitation is extremely important. Why? With a clear structure, you keep energy and productivity high. Besides, a meeting with so many people at once has a huge hourly rate. So a good PI facilitator pays for itself in double and multiple ways.

The 3 biggest gainers

1. Smart people tell you what you want to accomplish, not how to do their jobs

Too often I notice that goals are taken lightly. To avoid this, it’s best to start with yourself. Make sure the quarter’s goal, teams, and PI planning are at least clear to yourself. How do you know that goals are clear? When you can confidently pitch them to a group of colleagues. So not if you feel that’s okay. But practice it in front of the mirror. Or even better: with a few colleagues. Make sure you have the story all the way down so you can check with your audience to see if they are on to the goals. Want more tools for formulating inspiring goals? The book Sturen op Result is full of practical tips.

2. Don’t waste anyone’s time, but pause long enough

Everyone is busy and is bound to have multiple commitments. Think of people pulling at you and wanting to know things, or the mountains of work on your plate. The fact that you get attention from so many people is a gift. You can thank people for that. How? By naming it. But also by being careful with their time. So you start on time, stop on time and ignore latecomers. What you can prepare, you prepare. That way you can really use the time together for work you can only do together. Going into PI planning with draft roadmaps for the next quarter is not crazy at all. This is a popular form of making planning insightful; a block diagram of sequential goals over time. But ideally, those roadmaps aren’t new to anyone either.

There is a balance. I have noticed that the agenda should not be too tight. The best conversations take place during breaks. That’s when people really connect and philosophize about the biggest problems.

Example: For example, at a marketing organization I was coaching, a conversation arose during the break about campaign templates for the website. These turned out not to exist and were making it much harder for teams to do experiments. When the importance of this became clear in the break, it came to an appropriate place in the planning.

3. Use the processing power of everyone in the group, in parallel

I think of a group of people during PI planning as a computer with as many computational cores as there are people. Then I make it my challenge to put all the compute cores into full use. I survey the group and fantasize what the CPU monitor would look like.

My Mac’s CPU monitor as I type a blog. The 16 computing cores are barely in use:

When I type a blog on my Mac, the utilization is very low. It is comparable to a group of people listening to one person. I get higher utilization the moment I give people their own challenge in groups. Utilization is even maximum when I do an individual work form in silence! For example, you can put up a flip sheet for each sprint, showing the sprint goals of all the teams. Then you can ask all participants to think broadly about the expected activities of the sprints. The bottlenecks in collaboration become immediately clear. You can now solve them together. In sub-teams, of course, so that you keep utilization high.

Conclusion

You can make very good arrangements in a PI planning for mutual cooperation between teams. It seems like an expensive meeting, but if you structure it well, you are guaranteed to win the time back during the next quarter. The tips in this article will help you structure it. Would you like to exchange thoughts about the approach in your organization? Please feel free to get in touch.

Sample Agenda