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Taking Part In My First SAFe PI Planning Session
It’s a new financial year for the project I’m working on and the client’s leadership wanted to be ‘more Agile’ by co-locating all the development cells in a hotel for two days and have a planning session for the next quarter’s worth of deliverables (adhering to an annual plan).
I’ve never been part of a scaled agile process before, having mostly worked in smaller teams and on smaller projects so this trip was going to be my first experience of this type of planning.
The SAFe Product Increment (PI) Planning session involves setting business context for the increments and then having the team plan and commit to work that will realise those increments but done as one big planning session so teams can freely communicate face-to-face when they need to discuss dependencies.
Prologue
The financial year just gone was a transition period for the client, having changed development partners to the company I work for in late 2019.
In March 2019 they sat down with the previous development company and set out their annual plan, based estimates on teams with over 10 year experience working on the product and then later that year they expected teams with no experience to deliver those same increments to the same timescales.
