PI Planning Process steps

 In a nutshell, there are three steps to deliver program increment:

1. PI Planning preparation

2. PI Planning 

3. PI Execution

Step 1: PI Planning preparation

At this stage, it is important to identify scope (i.e., WHAT needs to be delivered) and write up high-level requirements. This should clarify which teams need to be involved. Next, teams need to take these high-level requirements and provide sizing (estimation) and call out risks and dependencies. Importantly, this all happens before the PI planning, and not during or after. Also, all these steps need to happen; otherwise, the PI planning won't make much sense, because as any planning, it needs the refined requirements (i.e., refined down to stories) as an input.

It can help if you think of the PI planning preparation as a grooming session that usually happens before planning in Agile teams.


Therefore, here are the steps for the preparation process:

1. Business side agrees on which capabilities/use cases to be delivered.

2. Business and technical side split capabilities into epics and decide which team is responsible for which epic.

3. Each team splits epic into stories and size the work (high level sizing at minimum to understand the required capacity). Also, identify dependencies/blockers, and by when they need to be removed.


All these findings are gathered and become the input into the PI planning, which I describe next.

Step 2: PI Planning Week

During the PI planning sessions, our goal is to plan out the work for the entire PI. Importantly, we need to plan not only the high-level requirements but each team needs to execute their own team planning sessions and provide commitments based on the final plan. In other words, these sessions are supposed to provide assurance that what we had prepared and identified during the preparation sessions earlier, can be delivered during the PI.


Therefore, the PI planning steps are as follows:

1. PI Objective/Business context and Architecture Overview are communicated across all the teams.

2. Each team to have internal breakout sessions to plan required work on their side to contribute to the PI objective. This session includes assigning work into 5-6 sprints based on the team velocity, days off, etc. Also, discussing dependencies and risks. Note: Based on my experience, such sessions may take 3 - 8 hours depending on how well the preparation part was done.

3. Team representatives present their plans to the leadership/business side to see the big picture (PI program board with all the dependencies listed). During this session, PI plan becomes visible across the teams, and the dependencies/blockers across the teams are being discussed. A dependency map may need to be created for better visibility. If the PI plan across teams looks good and there are no concerns, PI Planning session may be complete. Otherwise, team representatives go back to their teams to see if any adjustments can be made to remove the blockers on the program level overall. Then review the final plan with leadership again.

Step 3: PI Execution

Scrums of Scrums should help with following up on the PI progress. Team representatives will go over PI program board with all the dependencies to give updates and call out possible risks.