Remote PI Planning with Targetprocess

Planning Interval (PI) planning is an event in which all teams and stakeholders of an Agile Release Train (ART) participate. When face-to-face events are not a possibility, using the Targetprocess solution can be the next best thing. It will help you to organize, plan and execute an online PI Planning event.

Visualizations and easy-to-understand dashboards help the teams and leaders with insights and overview. The teams can create and coordinate their plans visually and online. All SAFe configurations are supported online. Continue reading for more information.

Targetprocess offers extensive features to execute remote Planning Interval (PI) planning in line with SAFe guidelines. The first step is to begin planning for your planning event. This means that all participants are informed about the agenda and the dates of the PI Planning event.

In addition, all elements are ready and set up in Targetprocess, enabling the teams and ART’s to collaborate and communicate while planning the next Planning Interval.

Organizational readiness means that all the relevant components needed for your remote planning are ready. Think of the division of Teams, ARTs and Solutions Trains, but also of Objectives and Key Results, Products, Planning Intervals and Iterations. These last 2 are easy to define in Targetprocess. By entering the Planning Interval start date, followed by the number of iterations (5) and the length of an iteration in days (14), Targetprocess automatically generates this information for all teams and products they work on – see the figure on the left.

The various business and product vision presentations can be included in Targetprocess as a description or attached as a document. Or be referenced as part of the Objectives and Key Results.

The top 10 Features have entered the backlog via the funnel and WSJF prioritization and are part of the context.

With the vision and top the 10 Features as input, PI Planning is ready to go. With Targetprocess, this can be done remotely as a 2 or 3 day event, depending on the time zones that your teams operate in.

The output of the PI Planning event includes the Team and Program Objectives, the Program Board showing the dependencies between the different teams and the Team commitment to the plan.

The Executive and Product Vision Briefing(s) can be delivered from the Program Dashboard or using shared presentation software.

Each team has its own folder in Targetprocess in which it can include the relevant information of its plan.

Teams can manage their Stories, Features, Bugs and dependencies from multiple Boards and Lists. On the team’s detail page, the capacity/velocity are visible.

Teams can also do their breakout planning on the Team PI Planning Board. This board allows the team to easily move, sort and edit the items on the board. In addition, dependencies and blockers can be assigned.

On the remote Program Board, you can see which features are delivered and when, and which dependencies the teams have. Multiple kinds of relations can easily be added on this board. The board highlights blockers with red lines, and planning issues with bold dotted lines. Teams can easily filter on the planning issues to quickly resolve potential problems.

ART and Team PI Objectives help summarize the objectives of the upcoming Planning Interval. They can be mapped to features or user stories in the backlog. The Objectives can be presented as a List, and will be used to visualize the ART Predictability. The Planned Business Value (BV) is entered during the PI Planning, while the Actual BV is entered after the Planning Interval.

Team Level Retrospectives and Inspect & Adapt are SAFe ceremonies performed in a Planning Interval. The details for this inspect and adapt ceremony can be displayed as a board in Targetprocess, or integrated with a Miro board, an agile white board platform.

It is all configurable in line with your requirements.

Lots of discussions and collaboration takes place within the team and between teams, but also with Scrum Masters, Release Train Engineering and Stakeholders. All entities in Targetprocess have a comments box that allows teams to capture and share information with people and teams.

Remote program teams need to be able to participate in Confidence voting. Through a standard functionality, which can be installed very easily, confidence voting can take place online. The Release Train Engineer can easily collect the answers and show the result in a dashboard.

During the execution of the Planning Interval, the team and program dashboards provide insight and overview regarding the progress of the work: is everything going according to plan or do we need to adjust something. Various graphs are available for this in Targetprocess, such as burn up and burn down, the number of planned story points per iteration and cumulative flow diagrams (CFD).

Teams can track and manage their DevOps processes, source code repositories and tracking builds and releases using Targetprocess to provide the complete end-to-end visualization of all the work from the first funnel inception to the final delivery.

The DevOps Dashboard allows you to see Velocity by Environment, Health Radars links from spreadsheets, Release Packages and bottlenecks with regards to Time to Market efficiency reporting.