In the second blog in this series we’re going to be talking about what is the goal of the PI planning event.

In the first blog we talked about what is PI Planning.

So, what is the goal of PI planning?

Well really it is to ensure that the agile release train has a clear high-level emergent plan for the upcoming program increment.

So what do I mean by an emergent plan?

When I say an emergent plan, what I mean is that the earliest sprints of time boxes, they have more detail, more of the capacity plan.

Then the latter sprints, the largest sprints may have less detail and they may keep additional capacity over there for additional variability and agility.

What we don’t want to do, is we don’t want to pack up our entire roadmap because otherwise that leads to a waterfall outcome which is exactly what we do not want.

The first outcome is we come up with a clear high-level emergent plan.

The second thing that we’re looking for is we need have really clear outcomes and objectives, and there needs to be a broad agreement on what they actually are as well.

So that’s very important.

So we want to have individuals in the teams that are clear on what they need to do as well as the overall program and agile release train.

In addition to that, we want to be clear on what are our risks and impediments, those risks that have been actualized they’re already there.

They’re already problems and issues that need to be resolved.

Those are referred to as impediments. We need to have clarity on what those are so that we can overcome them to increase the chances of achieving our objectives for that program increment.

Finally, what we want to be clear on is what are the cross team dependencies or we might even have cross-train dependencies?

So your agile release train may have dependency on other agile release trains, or even waterfall projects and programs we need to call all of those out so we can actually deal with all of those dependencies.

We want to have a clear highlight, emergent plan.

We want to make sure that our objectives are really clear and they’re agreed. We want to be clear on what are the likely risks and any impediments or issues that are related to that.

We need to have clarification of any dependencies that we have both internally within the agile release train and externally as well.

I hope you found that useful.

If you need any support or help with your upcoming PI planning, please reach out to me at www.sprint0.com, where we have a few slots which can become available if you do need any support.

I look forward to seeing you in the next blog.

Thank you very much.

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