PI Planning (Planning Interval Planning) is an essential element of operating an Agile Release Train (ART). It’s a great opportunity to establish face-to-face communication among ALL team members and stakeholders, and build the social network that ARTs rely on. Getting together, in-person and face-to-face, helps to refine roadmaps and speed up decision-making.
But in recent years, many organisations had to replace the traditional two-day face-to-face meetings of PI Planning with multiple days of online meetings via Teams or Zoom. While this met a need at the time and was functional, it removes some of the nuance from PI Planning. The best results from PI Planning come from in-person events.
On Monday, 11 November at Cliftons Margaret Street, Sydney, Em Campbell-Pretty and Adrienne Wilson from Pretty Agile are hosting a session about the benefits of in-person PI Planning events, as well as strategies for getting the best results from your planning session.
Big collaboration energy
PI Planning typically involves bringing together people, sometimes 100+, in a big room to build a collaborative plan over a couple of days every 10 to 12 weeks. According to Em and Adrienne, there’s a magic to in-person PI Planning and many people who’ve only experienced these planning sessions online don’t know what they are missing.
The Pretty Agile approach is focused on the idea of ‘turning up the good’ to get more value from increasing the things that are going well, rather than concentrating on problems and how to fix them.
In the session, Em and Adrienne will go through a standard two-day PI Planning agenda and how to ‘turn up the good’ in each of the recommended agenda items, as well as strategies to keep people engaged and ensure everyone’s viewpoints are heard and valued. It will give Release Train Engineers ideas on how to ensure both innovation and BAU tasks are appropriately planned for, as well as approaches to improve communication and collaboration between agile teams, business owners and managers. The result? An approach that has your teams aligned strategically, with visibility across all elements of the initiative and cross-team planning that matches demand to capacity and eliminates excess work so you can get things done more effectively and predictably.
Your presenters
Em Campbell-Pretty and Adrienne Wilson are two of the world’s most respected PI Planning experts. Together, they bring together deep expertise in Agile delivery and business transformation.
Em Campbell-Pretty, CEO, Pretty Agile
Em Campbell-Pretty is one of the world’s most experienced SAFe practitioners and the author of the best-selling books Tribal Unity and The ART of Avoiding a Train Wreck. As one of the first SAFe Fellows and SPCTs, Em has been working with SAFe since before it was called SAFe. Her journey started in 2011 when she launched Australia’s first SAFe Agile Release Train. This SAFe implementation later became one of the first ten official SAFe case studies. At the heart of Em’s success is her passion for creating cultures of transparency, lean leadership, learning, innovation and fun.
Today she is the CEO of Pretty Agile, a boutique consulting and training company focused on helping organisations achieve business agility by leveraging Em’s unique, culture-first approach to the Scaled Agile Framework. Em is an active member of the global Agile community. She is a thought leader on the subjects of scaling culture and creating agile tribes. Her commitment to building great leaders and transforming culture has made her a sought-after speaker at conferences around the globe.
Adrienne Wilson, COO, Pretty Agile
As a SAFe Fellow, SPCT, globally recognised speaker and business transformation consultant, Adrienne leverages nearly 25 years in engineering and delivery roles, from developer to executive, to help organisations achieve excellent results from their lean-agile transformation.
Since 2018, Adrienne has been the COO of Pretty Agile, helping to bring lean and agile to life for clients who are trying to deliver outcomes across large-scale, technically complex and geographically distributed organisations. She is also the co-author of the Amazon #1 Best-Selling book, The ART of Avoiding a Train Wreck.
