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PI planning: in person, hybrid, or remote?
What is PI Planning?
Program increment (PI) planning is part of SAFe (Scaled Agile Frameworks). It's a regularly scheduled event that occurs with a planning agenda for Agile release train teams to align on a shared mission and vision, and to iterate on the next PI.
PI Planning Pros and Cons: In Person vs Hybrid vs Remote
Historically, PI planning is typically completed in person on whiteboards with A LOT of stickies and red yarn or remotely with a digital collaboration platform suited for PI Planning.
Imagine a team of about 300 PI planners (engineers, scrum masters, release train engineers, Agile coaches, leadership, etc.) from a large Fortune 500 company team. Every quarter, hundreds of international colleagues are flown to one location in the United States and grouped into about 25 teams. Each team has a scrum master and their own PI planning board. The scrum master leads the team to discuss the priorities for the quarter (or given timeframe), the effort required to achieve objectives and any dependencies between working groups, using their planning board as a visual.
That’s quite a large investment in travel, plus a lot of pressure for scrum masters and their participating PI planners to make the most out of the few days they have together. Is this really the best way to maximize results?
The team in this story realized no, it wasn’t the best way. They sought out MURAL's digital workspace to help them create a digital source of truth for their PI planning boards, and then moved over to a fully remote PI Planning methodology.
They designed a pilot program and partnered with MURAL on custom PI Planning templates and facilitator training. The team then flew all colleagues to one location, one last time, for a stress test.
Scrum masters were asked to be each team's canvas scribe on a 55-inch monitor while the important session was underway, and the teams completed their PI planning directly in MURAL while speaking face to face. MURAL experts were on-hand for product and technical coaching, but it wasn’t needed. The transition was seamless and the hybrid session was a success, leading this customer to complete every subsequent quarterly PI planning remotely in MURAL, saving them upwards of $60,000 per quarter.
There are many other teams like this one paving their way to 21st century Agile work using MURAL. Read on for more of our tips and learnings.👇
How to perform PI Planning in MURAL
PI Planning Program Board
Create a visual summary of the goals, features, risks, dependencies, and timelines defined in the program increment plan.
PI Planning Team Board
Estimate the capacity of each team to accomplish the tasks in each iteration. You'll need one per team who participate in the planning.
Paste from (and to) spreadsheets
Turn planning into trackable Jira tickets
How to get Jira content into MURAL
Use the PI Planning Templates above for this exercise, or create your own. To get Jira content into MURAL, each cell from a Jira export can be copied to a canvas as an individual sticky.
Getting started
Copy all cells that include feature or story descriptions. Return to your MURAL canvas, and use Cmd (or Ctrl)+V to paste them. They will render as 3x3 stickies. Note that if you are pasting 150+ characters of text, cells will render as text boxes instead of stickies.
Matching legend formatting
Multi select all of these new stickies. Using the 'Switch Type' option in your formatting toolbar (second to last icon), convert the stickies to 3x5. From the formatting toolbar you may also change the sticky note color.
Adding feature #, story #, and size
Using the Alt key+clicking and dragging, duplicate the appropriate sticky note header from the Legend. (You may also use Cmd+D, or simple Copy/Paste.) Group the text box to the existing sticky note using Cmd (or Ctrl)+G, and include as much existing information as you can. Decrease the font size as needed to keep the header one line.
To get MURAL stickies into Jira, each sticky or text box from a MURAL canvas can be copied to a spreadsheet as a cell. Before you start, determine what upload spreadsheet format you will need to use with Jira.
Copying stickies
Multi-select a group of sticky notes. Right click on them, & select 'copy as text'.
Completing your final data sort
Return to your spreadsheet. Use cmd (or ctrl) + V to paste your stickies. Click and drag each respective cell (description and it's header), dragging it to its appropriate position in the upload spreadsheet.
Separating feature #, story #, and size into separate cells
Select the column of data that includes sticky note header content (ex. "Feat. #34891 , Story #, Size 5"). Click your spreadsheet program's data menu. Select "Split Text to Columns", and use comma as the delimiter. This will result in 3 cells, "Feat. #34891" "Story #" "Size 5".
✋ But wait, there’s more! Check out the following templates for Agile and scrum ceremonies that MURAL supports.
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