A live update from a PI session
PI = program increment; a SAFe term.
I woke up to a nice surprise in my inbox.
So, a big welcome, and a huge Thank You! 📢 to all the new subscribers. Since the newsletter is so new, with only one live post prior to this one, I’d love to hear from you. Why did you subscribe? What are you hoping to get out of reading these posts? Shoot me a message over on Twitter. I’d love to connect with some of you.
Today’s Highlight: Getting to see people in person. 👋
Today’s Biggest Challenge: Not waking up in my own bed. 🛌
Current Topic I’m Studying: Becoming more fluent at using Postman. 💻
Now, on to today’s post.
My company has always leveraged a remote workforce. Before COVID about 40% of the staff was remote. Post-COVID it’s closer to 75% that are remote. Which means I don’t get to see my team or peers in person regularly.
However, this week we are all together for PI Planning. It has been moving to get to see the campus at our headquarters. When I say campus, I mean campus.
If you aren’t familiar with the Scaled Agile, or SaFE, framework, this is an event where all the teams meet to plan out the next increment of work. In our case, our increments run in 3-month cycles. Each increment is divided up into two-week sprints.
There is a ton of activity that occurs during the PI Planning timeframe.
A typical PI Planning session
To give you a high-level sense of what our PI Planning sessions look like, below is a typical two-day agenda:
Day One
Vision casting and mission setting by the CTO
Review of last PI results and accomplishments
Demos
Lunch
Breakouts
Reconvene for a temperature check on how planning is progressing
Day Two
Presentations from other teams, often those we have dependencies on
More breakouts
Review commitments for the current increment
Confidence vote
The benefits of in-person planning
This PI Planning session is the first one that also includes inviting customers to participate. It may sound a little strange to include customers in a SaFE ceremony. But, we have always been a very transparent organization. Even going so far as to allow competitors to sit in on our monthly meetups with customers.
Why I believe inviting customers is going to be impactful for the teams is that many of them don’t get much interaction directly with customers. For example, our engineers are invited to customer meetups but they don’t get to interact with customers. At PI Planning they will get to do some live and in-person. This helps build deeper relationships and hopefully allows all of us to better be the “voice of the customer.”
Besides the team-building aspects, another reason these in-person planning sessions are so important is they create proximity to adjacent teams that our teams have dependencies on. It’s a lot more impactful to tell another team that you need a feature from them in the next three months when you are face-to-face.
The challenges
Having this many people, upwards of 150, in a large meeting isn’t perfect. Some challenges come with it.
For starters, it isn’t easy on our budget. While we try to pick locations where our staff is centralized, there are still plenty of people who have to travel in for the meetings. Your’s truly included. By the way, if you are curious, I live in Eastern Tennessee. If you haven’t been before and you love the outdoors, visit the Smoky Mountains in the middle to late part of October. The trees will be all shades of red, orange, and yellow.
The biggest challenge, that I have noticed, is that you get the same folks who tend to dominate most of the speaking. I’m not talking about the various presenters, I’m talking about the people who interject questions and the like. For us, this tends to be the leaders of various teams. I’ve personally taken a different approach, that mirrors my overall leadership approach, and that is to push my team out in front. If I have something that I think needs to be said I’ll often pull a team member in based on the appropriate expertise. For example, I might say something like, “I wonder if XYZ, hey <insert team member’s name> what do you think?” You don’t have to be a leader to leverage that type of handoff. You can use it with peers or even supervisors.
While this type of ceremony is part of a SaFE practice, you don’t have to be using the Scaled Agile framework to implement a similar practice for your organization.
It may feel a bit waterfall-ish, but remember, we aren’t planning out everything down to the sprint level. We are organizing the overarching work that needs to be accomplished in the next 3-months. And, candidly, there are plenty of times that teams come back to us and they have re-prioritized things with the current increment.
Well, for being a subscriber, and thanks again for starting your morning with me. I’ve got to go get ready.