I’m writing this around the time when businesses are essentially locked down by Covid-19 and everyone is working virtually. It remains to be seen what types of working habits and new norms will emerge and stick after we recover from this viral attack.
Here I’d like to explore SAFe PI Planning as a planning construct or pattern. Talk about the origination of the idea. Then explore remote PI planning as something that we could do virtually.
But what I really want to focus on is an extension to PI Planning that could nearly negate the need to do it either face-to-face or virtually.
PI Planning – The Intent
The intent of PI Planning is to get a number of teams together for face-to-face planning once a quarter to commit to a body of collaborative work. It’s a scaling tactic that has its roots well before agile hit the mainstream. For example, a similar pattern was shared by Dwayne Phillips in his book The Software Project Managers Handbook, published in 1998. Dwayne called it Cards-on-a-Wall planning. I’ve used the technique to plan larger-scale waterfall projects with 100+ participants.