Program Increment (PI) planning is an essential event in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) that allows Agile Release Train (ART) teams to align on a shared vision, discuss dependencies, and plan their work for the upcoming Program Increment.
For PI planning to be productive and efficient, selecting and implementing the right tools is critical.
This comprehensive guide explores various PI planning tools, their features, how to choose the optimal one for your team, and how these tools can enhance your PI planning events.
What is PI Planning?
PI planning typically occurs every 8 to 12 weeks and brings together all ART teams to determine key goals and plan the next Program Increment collaboratively.
The primary objectives of PI planning include:
•Establishing a mutually agreed upon vision and key results for the upcoming PI
•Identifying and mitigating risks and dependencies that could impact the team’s work
•Fostering cross-team collaboration and open communication
•Setting well-defined PI objectives and success metrics for each team
•Ensuring all teams have a clear understanding of priorities, accountabilities, and contributions
For PI planning to achieve these goals, selecting tools that facilitate productivity, transparency, and real-time visibility into work being planned is essential.
PI planning tools provide a centralized place for teams to visualize work, track progress, identify issues, and make informed decisions based on data – ultimately streamlining communication and alignment.
The Benefits of Using PI Planning Tools
The complexity involved in coordinating multiple teams during PI planning requires organization, collaboration, and efficiency.
PI planning tools offer the following key benefits:
1. Visualization
They provide interactive and visual boards for teams to organize work in a highly visual manner according to Sprint, feature, team, etc. allowing all participants to gain insight into scope and priorities.
2. Collaboration
They offer real-time co-editing, comments, mentions, and discussion threads to enable cross-functional teams to work together efficiently.
Dependency mapping ensures teams identify and address connections between their work.
3. Analytics
PI planning tools supply data, metrics, and trends on planned work to support data-driven decision-making.
Custom reports and dashboards provide visibility into key performance indicators (KPIs) and milestones.
4. Coordination
They allow teams to identify roadblocks, mitigate issues and risks, and make adaptive changes to account for uncertainties. Work can be prioritized and reorganized in real time based on feedback.
5. Integration
They can enable seamless integration with existing tools like Jira, Azure DevOps, GitHub, etc. to provide end-to-end visibility without disrupting established processes such that all teams work within the same tooling and data sources.
Evaluation Criteria for PI Planning Tools
When determining which PI planning tool is optimal for your needs, there’s a variety of factors that need to be considered. These include:
1. Team Size and Complexity
The number of teams, stakeholders, and scope of your PI planning events will drive how sophisticated a tool you need.
Small deployments may prefer an easy-to-use, purpose-built tool, while large enterprises may require a comprehensive solution for handling complexity.
2. Existing Tools
Evaluate how well the PI planning tool integrates with tools your organization already uses, e.g. migrating to Jira Align if using Jira. This minimizes disruption and provides a seamless end-to-end experience.
3. Visualization
Some teams prefer highly visual, card-based interfaces for planning and tracking work, while others prefer traditional list views. Choose a solution with the visualization style your teams like to use.
4. Reporting and Analytics
The need for in-depth analytics, custom reporting, and data visibility varies between organizations. Ensure the tool provides metrics and insights relevant for your PI planning needs and levels.
5. Customization
Teams need certain functionality, layouts, and workflows to support their planning processes. Select a tool that can be adapted to your team’s unique ways of working with configuration options, custom fields, modeling, and third-party integrations.
6. Budget
While advanced tools deliver more capabilities, they typically carry higher costs. Find a tool that offers good value for the investment by prioritizing features that meet the specific needs of your PI planning events.
7. Scalability
For large organizations and enterprise, the ability to scale the solution to handle additional teams, programs, portfolios, and users over time is important. Assess how well the tool can grow with your company’s needs.
8. User Experience
An intuitive, easy-to-use interface ensures all teams and stakeholders can participate fully in PI planning events, even if they have limited experience with the tool. Look for a solution with a short learning curve that people will readily adopt.
Five Top PI Planning Tools
Here is an overview of the leading PI planning tools, including their key features and ideal use cases:
1. Planview LeanKit
Planview LeanKit provides an interactive Kanban board interface and planning environment along with real-time collaboration tools like comments, mentions, and discussion threads making it easy for multiple teams to work together during PI planning.
Features include:
- Customizable Kanban boards, swimlanes, and cards for visualizing team backlogs and planning work
- Dependency mapping for identifying relationships between teamwork items
- Analytics providing insights into work status, cycle time, lead time, and team productivity
Use Case: Teams seeking an easy-to-use yet collaborative tool for visual planning and tracking
2. VersionOne
VersionOne offers dedicated digital PI planning rooms bringing together vision, objectives, team priorities, and work items in one place.
Extensive dependency mapping, risk analysis, and resource management provide full visibility into and control over PI planning. Key features include:
- PI Planning boards for aligning objectives, priorities, risks and dependencies
- Risk management for identifying and mitigating events that could impact deliverables
- Custom analytics and data visualization through interactive reports and dashboards
- Integrations with development tools (Jira, TFS, Azure DevOps) providing end-to-end visibility
Use Case: Enterprise organizations requiring a robust, scalable solution to manage multi-level PI planning with governance and risk management capabilities.
3. Jira Align
Jira Align provides a dedicated PI planning space for conducting PI events within Jira.
All teams get a shared view into priorities, objectives, dependencies, blockers, and milestones in real time using cards, grids, charts, and dashboards.
Integration with Jira tools deliver transparency into program increments from planning to execution. Key features include:
- PI planning room to align multiple teams on vision, objectives, roadmap, and deliverables
- Dependency mapping to link teams, features, and work items together in context
- Real-time data and insights via interactive charts, reports, and analysis tools
- Two-way synchronisation with development instances of Jira Software and Jira Work Management
Use Case: Organizations using Jira suite and looking to scale Agile practices across the enterprise while providing end-to-end visibility from PI planning through delivery.
4. Kendis
Kendis offers dedicated functionality purpose-built for PI planning including interactive digital boards for visualizing objectives, priorities and dependencies.
Simple, intuitive interface designed specifically for Agile Release Trains and Suppliers in SAFe environments. Key features include:
- Custom boards for each event or team to track objectives and relate priorities
- Real-time coordination of edits, comments, and publishing changes
- Built-in templates, views, and widgets providing event overviews, team objectives, and milestone timelines
- Optional two-way integration with Jira, Azure DevOps, and Rally for development teams
Use Case: Teams seeking an easy-to-use, cost-effective PI planning tool specialized for SAFe without significant overhead or complexity. Most suitable for small to mid-size deployments.
5. Rally
Rally provides interactive digital PI planning boards, roadmaps, dashboards and workspaces for teams to align during events.
Robust dependency and risk management functionality delivers insights into how different teams’ work items are connected and may impact each other.
Customizable reporting allows teams to gain visibility into key metrics around their PI planning and delivery. Key features include:
- Interactive PI planning boards to visualize and organize team backlogs and objectives
- Advanced roadmapping capabilities for aligning multi-level work spanning teams, value streams, and portfolios
- Metrics and dashboards providing insights into work status, issues, and milestones to support data-driven decisions
- Integrations with GitHub, Azure DevOps, and Jira enable end-to-end visibility
Use Case: Rally is suitable for enterprise organizations requiring sophisticated roadmapping, dependency management and Agile project monitoring across teams at scale.
It provides robust framework for PI planning events and managing alignment from planning through execution.
Final Thoughts
The aim of PI planning is bringing clarity and shared purpose to upcoming PIs.
But without the proper tools to support planning the event itself, teams struggle with productivity, decision making, risk mitigation, dependency identification, and gaining real visibility into what is intended to be delivered.
Selecting a PI planning tool based on your team’s size, complexity, current tech stack, and ways of working is key to achieving the goals of alignment, collaboration, and a well-defined plan for the next program increment.
Remember, the perfect PI planning tool is the one that aligns with your organization’s needs, processes, and culture.
Don’t be afraid to experiment with different tools and adapt your approach as your team evolves.
