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Once, I had an opportunity to present about the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) to a few leaders whose understanding of SAFe ranged from ‘just heard the name’ to ‘attended some training in the past’. During the presentation, we covered a spectrum of topics, varying from the pervasive impact of digital transformation on various industries to how the high business agility in the market has rendered methodologies like waterfall less effective. While we delved into the SAFe ceremonies and cadences during the session, an interesting question arose — so many people spending two full days planning together, isn’t it overkill?
This is a reasonable doubt for anyone caught up in day-to-day operational tasks, which is like most people in an organization. To such busy minds, activities like planning seem either like a luxury they can’t afford or a waste of time with little or no relevance to their work. However, out of the many things amiss, it majorly signifies the lack of understanding of the relationship between the business strategy and the deliverables. Without this understanding, the indifference of the workforce towards planning would always be conspicuous.

Successful organizations have learned the value of System Thinking — that a quality outcome for the customer is a result of many smaller quality outcomes from various teams integrated together, or that an organization-wide innovative culture is a combination of small innovation initiatives in every team of the organization. Planning is the most important candidate for ‘System Thinking’ because business strategies can’t be executed without a comprehensive plan covering every relevant team. When done top-down, planning is just a set of instructions destined to lose a significant amount of context before reaching the last person. Unfortunately, that last person is the one responsible for delivering that plan. No wonder there is a lack of appreciation for planning from the very people who need to align with it the most. The only way to make people appreciate and commit to planning is by making them do it for themselves, which means that that last person, along with every other stakeholder of the strategy, must be a part of the planning exercise. However, the big question arises: even if it’s important, is it possible for so many people to plan together? PI Planning in SAFe has emerged as a promising solution for an all-inclusive planning, providing the much-needed template for people of different backgrounds — ranging from executives to developers — to plan together as one team.

However, before we delve deeper into PI Planning, it’s important to understand the ‘why it’s so important’ part a bit more.

With the digital transformation and the advancement of innovative technologies, the market has shifted a great deal in the way it operates. Customer centricity is no longer just about merely fulfilling the needs of customers with great products and services. Digital transformation has empowered customers with great awareness, a sea of choices, and real-time feedback to the market — everything at the tips of their thumbs, just waiting to be unraveled by a small swipe. Thus, customer centricity is more about continuously elevating the bar of customer expectations by augmenting core products with innovative features, something unprecedented to customers. Apart from this, technological advancements and competition are the other two major factors that keep organizations on a constant lookout for market changes and emerging opportunities. Business agility holds the key for enterprises not just to stay competitive and grow but even to sustain themselves in such a market of ever-evolving demands and continuous innovations. The window of opportunity — i.e., from the time an enterprise senses an opportunity to the time it turns it into a viable product — is getting shorter. To keep up with such a fast-paced, agile market, the biggest challenge an enterprise can address is to find a way to achieve continuous internal alignment around emerging opportunities in the shortest time possible. A cadence facilitating such alignment among all relevant stakeholders can incredibly empower organizations to cash in on these opportunities. For enterprises following SAFe, PI Planning is that cadence.

PI Planning is the soul of SAFe, bringing together every stakeholder in an Agile Release Train — the business owners, product managers, architects, product owners, coaches, developers, testers, SMEs, and more — who then, in the most structured way possible, plan to work on the opportunities aligned with the strategy. The outcome of PI Planning ensures that every individual in the ART has complete transparency and clarity on the strategy, goals, and actions to deliver the shortlisted opportunities. PI Planning, commencing every eight to twelve weeks, provides an opportunity for the ART to continuously align and realign based on market changes and emerging opportunities.

The PI Planning event kickstarts with the business context shared by a leader of the organization, who lays out the strategy and the big picture, including the agreed big initiatives to tap the shortlisted opportunities. This is followed by the vision and roadmap shared by the Product Manager, encompassing the scope of the solution planned to be delivered in the next eight to twelve weeks (PI), addressing the strategic, architectural, and business aspects. This helps bring everybody in the ART onto the same page, leaving little room for assumptions, and aligning the leaders, teams, and individuals with a common goal. PI Planning provides autonomy to individuals by letting them plan for themselves in alignment with the larger strategy and roadmap shared by the leadership, thus decentralizing decision-making and empowering the knowledge workers responsible for execution. These knowledge workers are best suited to identify the dependencies and risks linked to the deliverables, thus providing an opportunity to proactively strategize the resolutions.
This may include proactively discussing risks and dependencies with concerned stakeholders and agreeing on specific actions and timelines. Business owners remain constantly engaged with the teams throughout PI Planning, always guiding the teams with the right inputs, including the prioritization of deliverables aligned with business objectives. By the end of PI Planning, the ART has a comprehensive plan depicting – What needs to be delivered and by whom; When it will be delivered; How the dependencies and risks are going to be addressed — all aligned with the business strategy, which in turn is driven by market changes and emerging opportunities. PI Planning is a cadence recurring every eight to twelve weeks, thus providing the flexibility for the ART to continuously explore and deliver new business opportunities, keeping agility at the core of its operations.

Looking back at the question from that presentation — “so many people spending two full days planning together, isn’t it overkill?” — well, not if you are looking for fifty to a hundred people to align on the same strategy, follow the same plan, and work as one team while minimizing uncertainties. Teams, and even individuals, working in silos is one of the biggest challenges that most organizations face. The reason is that it’s difficult to translate vision and strategy into tangible deliverables — and even more difficult to realign the strategy based on the learnings from outcomes. PI Planning presents an incredible opportunity to the ART to plan with complete transparency on expectations.

At the end, the big question should be – how can we align individuals, teams, departments, and the whole organization to work as one big team so that the opportunities presented by this dynamic market are not lost because of the inherent slow responsiveness of traditional organizational hierarchies?

The simple answer is — make all the relevant stakeholders plan together.