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Key Highlights of PI Planning
- PI Planning is a timebox event within an Agile Release Train that delivers incremental value through working software, requiring meticulous, transparent, and proactive planning.
- The recommended mantra for effective PI planning is “Plan, Do, Check, Adjust, Communicate” which serves as the guiding principle throughout the planning process.
- Pre-PI preparation is critical and includes scheduling all ART and team events in advance, readying the program backlog with top ten features, and ensuring all logistics and collaboration tools are in place.
- Stakeholder alignment is non-negotiable. Product management, business owners, RTEs, architects, and all team members must actively participate and stay aligned on business context, vision, and key milestones.
- PI Objectives must be SMART, business-toned rather than technical, and made visible to all. Business value is assigned to objectives to encourage collaboration between business owners and teams.
- Dependency management is a key risk area. Dependencies should be planned earlier in the PI, kept simple, and never result in spaghetti-like connections on the program board.
- Team confidence drives commitment. Objectives with low confidence or unresolved external dependencies should be moved to an uncommitted bucket and capacity should not be planned against them.
- Continuous improvement is embedded through retrospectives, lessons from previous PIs, SOS events, and working agreements that promote discipline and availability.
“A timebox event within Agile Release Train (ART) which delivers incremental value in the form of a working software” is how SAFe defines a Program Increment (PI), and an effective PI requires work to be planned meticulously, transparently, and proactively.
Introduction to PI Planning
This article is an attempt to pen down a few hygiene elements to bear in mind while planning your PIs. Sort of a checklist that is drawn from our coaching experience and exposure to various pertinent best practices.
PI planning often sounds and feels humongous, almost intimidating! But with practice, rigor and iterations focusing on inspection, adaptation and improvement, the experience only gets smoother and easier.
Our go-to mantra for effective PI is “Plan, Do, Check, Adjust, Communicate”.
What is PI Planning – Depth of Explanation
PI Planning is a face-to-face or virtual event held at the start of every Program Increment, typically spanning two days. It brings the entire Agile Release Train together, including all teams, product management, business owners, and architects, to align on a shared mission and plan the work for the upcoming increment.
A Program Increment typically spans 8 to 12 weeks, consisting of 4 to 5 development iterations followed by an Innovation and Planning iteration. PI Planning sits at the heart of SAFe and is often described as the heartbeat of the ART. It is not just a planning session. It is a synchronization event that creates alignment, builds team confidence, and establishes a shared commitment to delivery.
The key outcomes of a PI Planning event are:
- A committed PI Backlog with stories planned for the first two iterations
- A Program Board showing features, dependencies, and milestones
- PI Objectives for each team and the ART as a whole
- Identified risks that are either resolved, owned, accepted, or mitigated
- A confidence vote from all teams on the overall plan
Without PI Planning, teams operate in silos, dependencies go unnoticed, and delivery becomes unpredictable. PI Planning is the single most powerful tool in SAFe to achieve alignment at scale.
Roles and Responsibilities of PI Planner
Clarity on roles is fundamental to a successful PI Planning event. Here is a breakdown of who owns what:
Release Train Engineer (RTE) The RTE is the chief facilitator of PI Planning. The RTE is responsible for scheduling and coordinating the event, ensuring logistics are in place, facilitating the two-day agenda, managing timelines, surfacing impediments, and driving the ART toward a confident and committed plan.
Product Management Product management owns the program backlog and is responsible for presenting the product vision, roadmap, and top ten features to the ART at the start of PI Planning. They prioritize features, clarify requirements, and make real-time decisions on scope during the planning sessions.
Product Owners Product Owners work closely with their teams to break features down into stories, refine the team backlog, and ensure the team’s plan aligns with the broader PI Objectives. They act as the bridge between product management and the development team.
Scrum Masters Scrum Masters support their teams during PI Planning by facilitating team breakout sessions, tracking capacity, identifying dependencies and risks, and ensuring the team produces a realistic and committed iteration plan.
Business Owners Business Owners participate actively in PI Planning by reviewing team PI Objectives, assigning business value scores, and providing real-time feedback to teams. Their engagement ensures the plan remains commercially relevant and strategically aligned.
System Architect and Enterprise Architect Architects present the architectural vision and runway needed to support upcoming features. They guide teams on technical decisions, ensure non-functional requirements are accounted for, and highlight any architectural risks.
Development Teams Development teams are the backbone of PI Planning. They participate in team breakout sessions, plan iteration by iteration, identify dependencies, raise risks, and ultimately vote on their confidence in the plan.
PI Planning Agenda Walkthrough
A standard PI Planning event runs over two days and follows a structured agenda. Here is a high-level walkthrough:
Day One
Business Context and Vision The event begins with senior leadership and business owners presenting the current state of the business, strategic themes, and organizational priorities. This sets the tone and ensures all participants understand the bigger picture before diving into planning.
Product Management Vision Product management follows with a presentation of the product vision, roadmap, and the top ten features planned for the PI. Each feature is explained in terms of its business value, acceptance criteria, and any known dependencies.
Architecture Vision and Development Practices The system architect presents the architectural vision, highlighting any new technical capabilities, infrastructure changes, or non-functional requirements that teams need to be aware of while planning.
Team Breakout Session One Teams break into their respective groups to begin planning. Each team works through the program backlog, selects features relevant to their work, breaks them into stories, assigns them to iterations, and identifies risks and dependencies. At the end of this session, teams draft their initial PI Objectives and present them to the ART along with their risks and dependencies.
Day Two
Team Breakout Session Two Teams refine their plans based on feedback received during the draft review. Dependencies are negotiated, risks are updated, and iteration plans are firmed up. Teams also finalize their committed and uncommitted PI Objectives during this session.
Final Plan Review and Risk Identification Each team presents their final plan to the ART. Business owners score the PI Objectives based on business value. Risks are reviewed and ROAMed. The program board is updated to reflect the final state of features, dependencies, and milestones.
PI Confidence Vote The event concludes with a confidence vote. Each team member holds up one to five fingers to indicate their confidence in the plan. A fist indicates a plan-stopper that must be addressed immediately. The RTE aggregates the votes and works to resolve any low-confidence concerns before the event closes.
Remote and Hybrid PI Planning
As organizations embrace distributed ways of working, conducting PI Planning across geographies and time zones has become a common challenge. Here are key best practices for running effective remote or hybrid PI Planning events:
Tool Setup and Readiness Ensure all collaboration tools are tested and ready well before the event. Commonly used tools include Miro or Mural for the virtual program board, Zoom or Microsoft Teams for video conferencing, and JIRA or Azure DevOps for backlog management. All participants should have access, familiarity, and a stable internet connection before the event begins.
Time Zone Management Where teams are spread across multiple time zones, plan the agenda to overlap during core working hours for the majority of participants. Consider splitting the event across three days with shorter daily sessions rather than two full days to reduce fatigue and improve engagement.
Breakout Room Strategy Use virtual breakout rooms to replicate the team breakout experience. Assign each team a dedicated virtual space with their team board, capacity spreadsheet, and iteration planning template. Scrum Masters should stay in their team’s breakout room throughout the session to facilitate effectively.
Engagement and Participation Remote PI Planning can suffer from disengagement if not managed carefully. Use interactive features such as polls, digital sticky notes, and collaborative boards to keep participants active. Assign a dedicated producer or co-facilitator to manage technical issues so the RTE can focus on facilitation.
Pre-PI Preparation for Remote Teams Remote PI Planning demands more thorough pre-PI preparation than in-person events. Backlog refinement, dependency mapping, and capacity planning should ideally be completed before the event begins so that team breakout time is used efficiently.
Communication Norms Establish clear communication norms at the start of the event. Define how teams should signal blockers, how decisions will be escalated, and how dependencies between teams will be negotiated virtually. Working agreements established upfront save significant time during the event itself.
PI Planning Checklist
Below is a ready checklist that has worked for us, please feel free to use it as appropriate, we will be glad to hear your feedback, suggestions & queries in the comments below.
- Schedule events of the calendar year in advance (SOS, POSync, PI Planning, Inspect & Adapt, System – ART events, DSM, Iteration Planning, Backlog refinement, Iteration review – Team events) and send the invites to all the stakeholders
- Ensure participation of all stakeholders like Product management, Business Owners, RTEs, Product Owners, Architects, Management etc.
- Focus on management alignment and readiness
- Refine and ready program backlog with top ten features.
- Align features on the program board, so they belong to single ART
- Ensure that logistics are in place, collaboration tools are checked and ready (Zoom, JIRA, Teams, Miro, Mural etc)
- Communicate the business context, key milestones, vision as part of the Pre PI
- Understand past velocity trends, so participating teams can balance demand and capacity.
- Ensure PI objectives are identified and Business value assigned.
- Note that the intent of business value is to increase collaboration and conversations between Business Owners, Product management and teams
- Ensure that PI Objectives are made visible
- Define PI objectives for a business tone – avoid getting too technical in nature
- Define SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timebound) PI objectives
- Ensure the team objectives are planned to roll up to deliver the PI objectives
- Define sprint goals for individual teams to measure on how teams are progressing towards PI goals
- Prioritize commitment on team objectives over mere commitment to stories
- Avoid breaking down stories and estimation to granular levels
- Avoid spaghetti like dependencies when capturing dependencies on program board
- Plan stories with dependencies earlier in PI than later
- Plan PI only up to planning horizon
- Avoid upfront detailed PI planning
- Move objectives to an “uncommitted” bucket in the face of low team confidence or external dependencies around them
- Don’t plan capacity for uncommitted objectives
- Ensure frequent refresher sessions for stakeholders new to PI planning – to increase collaboration levels!
- Religiously incorporate lessons and learnings from previous PI plannings – pay special attention to avoid the pitfalls from previous PI planning
- Use working agreements to instill discipline – ensure availability, buy-in and agreement across teams.
- Understand the progress and impediments faced by the individual teams by ensuring SOS events are held with RTE and all the scrum masters of the ART frequently during PI planning
- Ensure consensus of product management and architects around the architecture vision
- RTE and SM’s must participate rigorously to communicate anything that is added new to the Program Increment
- Treat visibility, availability, ease of access to program and team board, dependency map and risk board as matters of paramount importance.
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Program Board Explanation
The Program Board is one of the most important artifacts produced during PI Planning. It provides a visual representation of the work planned across the ART for the entire Program Increment.
What the Program Board Contains
- Features planned for each iteration across all teams in the ART
- Dependencies between teams, shown as connecting lines or arrows
- Key milestones such as system demos, releases, and external commitments
- Uncommitted objectives flagged separately from committed work
How to Use the Program Board
The program board is built during team breakout sessions as teams place their planned features onto the board iteration by iteration. Dependencies are drawn between features that have a sequencing relationship across teams. Milestones are marked to give everyone a shared view of critical dates.
The program board is a living artifact. It should be updated throughout the PI as work progresses, dependencies are resolved, and scope changes. During Scrum of Scrums events, the RTE uses the program board to track progress and surface dependency risks.
Common Program Board Mistakes to Avoid
- Overloading the board with stories instead of features, making it difficult to read
- Drawing dependencies that are not genuine, creating unnecessary noise
- Failing to update the board after PI Planning, rendering it irrelevant within weeks
- Not making the board visible and accessible to all ART members throughout the PI
PI Metrics and Success Criteria
Measuring the effectiveness of PI Planning and the PI itself is essential for continuous improvement. Here are the key metrics every ART should track:
PI Predictability PI Predictability measures the percentage of planned business value that was actually delivered at the end of the PI. It is calculated by dividing actual business value delivered by the planned business value and expressing it as a percentage. SAFe recommends a predictability target of 80 percent or above.
Team Confidence Vote Score The average confidence vote score at the end of PI Planning is a leading indicator of plan quality. A consistently low confidence vote signals that teams are being over-committed, dependencies are unresolved, or the backlog is not sufficiently refined.
Program Board Dependency Completion Rate Tracking how many planned dependencies were successfully met versus missed across the PI provides insight into the maturity of cross-team collaboration and dependency management practices.
Planned Velocity vs Actual Velocity Comparing each team’s planned velocity with their actual velocity across iterations highlights whether capacity planning during PI Planning is realistic and whether teams are improving in their estimation accuracy over time.
Feature Completion Rate The percentage of planned features that were completed by the end of the PI is a direct measure of planning effectiveness and ART throughput.
Inspect and Adapt Problem Statement Resolution Tracking the number of improvement items identified at Inspect and Adapt events that were successfully actioned in the following PI measures the ART’s commitment to continuous improvement.
Common PI Planning Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
Learning from common mistakes is one of the fastest ways to improve PI Planning maturity. Here are the most frequently observed pitfalls and practical ways to address them:
Pitfall 1: Insufficient Pre-PI Preparation Teams arrive at PI Planning without a refined backlog, unclear features, or missing capacity data. This wastes valuable planning time and results in a low-quality plan.
How to avoid it: Hold dedicated pre-PI preparation sessions at least two to three weeks before the event. Ensure the top ten features are refined, acceptance criteria are defined, and all teams have completed their capacity planning.
Pitfall 2: Over-committing Capacity Teams plan beyond their actual capacity in an attempt to please stakeholders, leading to incomplete work and missed PI Objectives.
How to avoid it: Use historical velocity data to set realistic capacity limits. Normalize capacity for planned leave, team events, and non-project activities before the event begins.
Pitfall 3: Passive Business Owner Participation Business owners attend PI Planning but do not actively engage with teams, missing the opportunity to provide real-time feedback and assign meaningful business value scores.
How to avoid it: Brief business owners before the event on their role and expectations. Schedule dedicated time for business owners to walk the team boards and engage in conversations about PI Objectives.
Pitfall 4: Ignoring Uncommitted Objectives Teams treat all objectives as equally committed, leaving no buffer for uncertainty or external dependencies.
How to avoid it: Actively encourage teams to move low-confidence objectives to the uncommitted bucket. Normalize this practice as responsible planning rather than underperformance.
Pitfall 5: Spaghetti Dependencies The program board becomes cluttered with excessive and often superficial dependencies that obscure genuine cross-team risks.
How to avoid it: Coach teams to capture only genuine dependencies that would cause a delay if not met. Facilitate dependency conversations between teams in real time rather than drawing connections after the fact.
Pitfall 6: No Follow-Through After PI Planning The program board and PI Objectives are created during the event but never revisited, making them irrelevant within the first iteration.
How to avoid it: Embed program board reviews into the Scrum of Scrums cadence. Make PI Objectives visible in team workspaces and reference them during iteration reviews and retrospectives.
PI Planning vs Iteration Planning
Many practitioners transitioning to SAFe from Scrum often conflate PI Planning with iteration planning. Understanding the distinction is important for setting the right expectations.
PI Planning is an ART-level event that occurs once per Program Increment, typically every 8 to 12 weeks. It focuses on features, dependencies, risks, and PI Objectives across all teams in the ART. The output is a high-level plan for the entire increment with stories planned in detail only for the first one or two iterations.
Iteration Planning is a team-level event that occurs at the start of every two-week sprint. It focuses on breaking down features and stories into tasks, assigning work to team members, and committing to an iteration goal. The output is a detailed iteration backlog with a clear sprint goal.
In simple terms, PI Planning answers the question of what the ART will deliver over the next three months and how teams will coordinate to get there. Iteration Planning answers the question of what a single team will deliver in the next two weeks and how they will accomplish it.
Both events are complementary and necessary. PI Planning without iteration planning results in a high-level plan that never gets executed with discipline. Iteration planning without PI Planning results in teams executing efficiently but without strategic alignment.
Post PI Planning Activities
PI Planning is just the beginning. What happens after the event is equally important in determining whether the ART delivers on its commitments.
Publish and Socialize the Plan Immediately after PI Planning, the RTE should ensure the program board, PI Objectives, and team iteration plans are published and accessible to all stakeholders. Transparency in the plan drives accountability throughout the PI.
Establish the Scrum of Scrums Cadence The RTE should confirm the Scrum of Scrums schedule for the PI. This event brings all Scrum Masters together on a regular cadence, typically twice a week, to track progress, surface impediments, and manage dependencies across teams.
Track PI Objectives Weekly Business owners and product management should review PI Objectives at regular intervals, ideally during the System Demo or PO Sync, to assess progress and make proactive decisions if objectives are at risk.
Manage the Program Board Actively The program board should be updated at least weekly to reflect the current state of features and dependencies. Color coding features as on track, at risk, or delayed gives the ART an instant visual signal of where attention is needed.
Prepare for the Inspect and Adapt Event From the very first iteration, the RTE and teams should be gathering data for the Inspect and Adapt event at the end of the PI. This includes tracking PI Predictability, feature completion rates, and team velocity trends so that the quantitative review at Inspect and Adapt is data-driven rather than anecdotal.
Feed Learnings into the Next PI Every PI generates lessons that should directly inform the preparation and execution of the next PI Planning event. Maintaining a living retrospective log and ensuring action items are tracked to completion is what separates high-performing ARTs from average ones.
We would use the above pointers right through the PI Planning process.
For the PI Planning event agenda please refer to – SAFe PI Planning
If you want to know more about PI planning, please refer – Introduction to PI Planning to SAFe
Recommended Read
ART – Agile Release Train
RTE – Release Train Engineer
SOS – Scrum of Scrums
PO Sync – Product Owner Sync
SM – Scrum Master
