Remote PI Planning with Targetprocess

Program Increment (PI) Planning is an event in which all teams and stakeholders participate. When face-to-face meetings 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 teams and leaders make better decisions faster. The teams can visually make their plans enabling them to collaborate on-line. All SAFe configurations are supported on-line. Continue reading for more information.

Targetprocess offers extensive features to do remote Program Increment (PI) Planning in line with SAFe guidelines. The first step is to begin planning for your planning event. This includes ensuring Organizational and Context Readiness is complete, then being able to execute remote PI Planning and effectively communicate to all the relevant team members and stakeholders at the different levels of the company.

In addition all elements are ready and set up enabling the teams and ART’s to collaborate and communicate while planning the next Program Increment.

Organizational readiness means that all the relevant components needed for your remote planning are ready. This includes setting the calendar and dates for your planning, and creating the relevant containers (i.e. entities used to track and manage Agile Release Trains (ARTs), Objectives, Products, Program Increments, and Iterations) in Targetprocess. These last 2 are easy to configure in Targetprocess. Creating the Program Increment and the team iterations, or sprints, needed for the 10 to 12 week PI can be accomplished by adding the Program Increment, defining the start date and the number of team iterations. This will configure the iterations for all teams associated with the selected products.

The Executive Briefing and Product Vision Briefing(s) can be added at the Program Increment Level as a description or document. Or be referenced as part of the Objectives and Key Results.

The top Ten Features have progressed through the funnel and are included in this context definition.

With the Vision and top 10 features as the inputs the PI Planning is ready to begin. This can be done remotely as a 2 or 3 day event. Timing of the event should be made to accommodate the various time zones of your teams.

Outputs will include the Team and Program PI Objectives, Program Board and Team commitment to the plan.

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

Each team will have their own folder which includes their Objectives list, team iterations and Impediments and Risk list.

Teams can manage their Stories, Features, bugs and dependencies from multiple Boards and Lists. The full entity list and capacity / velocity can be viewed on the Team Iteration details page.

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

Feature delivery, dependencies and delivery milestones can be shown on the remote program board. Additional 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.

Program and Team PI Objectives help summarize what is being accomplished in the upcoming PI. 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 Program Predictability. The Planned Business Value (BV) will be added during the planning session, and the Actual BV will be added once the solution is delivered.

Retrospectives on team level and Inspect & Adapt on program level are SAFe ceremonies conducted in each Program Increment. 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 have a comments box that allows teams to memorialize and share information with people and teams.

Remote program teams need to find ways to do things like Confidence voting. One simple solution is to create a survey and include the form as a webpage on the dashboard This example lets the Release Train Engineer collect responses and displays the results in the dashboards.

During the Program Increment execution phase team and program dashboards give the team the visibility to know how things are progressing, if we are on track or need to course correct. This can be done with a number of different types of charts including burn ups and downs, allocation, and cumulative flow diagrams.

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 identify bottlenecks and backlogs with Time to Market efficiency reporting.