Mastering Your First PI Planning in Jira - Practical Tips

Let's get our hands dirty and go step-by-step through the SAFe PI Planning exercise in Jira

The company decided to go all-in with SAFe, and the first PI Planning is on the horizon. This critical event sets the stage for aligning multiple Agile teams towards shared goals, ensuring they deliver maximum value in a coordinated manner.

As the newly appointed Release Train Engineer (RTE), you’re tasked with orchestrating this effort, from preparation to execution. In this article, I’ll clarify who drives this alignment and prepares the event, and how to get started with a successful PI Planning for your R&D organization.

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You can read my previous articles about SAFe:
- PI Planning Preparation
- PI Planning in 5 steps

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An Online PI Planning

In the post-COVID era, PI Planning has shifted online. No more big room planning with stickies, tapes and strings connecting dependencies on the walls.

While the energy of in-person collaboration is missed, one major advantage stands out: everything is documented digitally from the start.

This documentation topic is important at the time of making a decision.

Why? Because with SAFe comes overhead. The rigid processes and heavy jargon can easily unsettle your R&D teams. Choosing the right tools and practices is vital to avoid amplifying these challenges and to keep your teams focused on delivering value.

PI Planning Agenda

I couldn’t find the PI Planning agenda on the SAFe website. Seems like all their resources have been moved behind a paywall. The good news is I have an image of an agenda I saved when writing the “PI Planning in 5 Steps” article.

Use it as an example of different topics rather than a strict prescription. That’s because it was created when PI Plannings were big room face-to-face affairs and it made sense to squeeze everything in 2 days.

Nowadays, it might take more days because we are online and might want to give the teams more time to work on their backlogs. The precise time will depend on the company size, number of team, structure and many other variables.