PI planning during pandemic
By: Coding For Life
Tags: Scrum, Work From Home, Agile, Long Term Planning, Pi Planning

I believe this is the third time we’ve had a PI (Program Increment) planning during corona-time, and I’m finally ready to talk about it and share some of our learned lessons.

See, PI planning was always a special day (with special food), where we got all stakeholders in one room and held them hostage until we had a clear view of the coming quarter. Imagine all these people in a single room with no windows, crowding over profiterole plates. Good times.

So how do you keep the engagement online?

Analyse external dependencies

It’s really hard to hold external teams representatives in a full-day online event, that does not really concern them. When we gave the idea some thought, there was no need having them present the whole time, just in case there are matters to resolve. If dependencies development timeline is clear, it is enough to have an on-call duty in case something has to change. So having an alignment about those dependencies in a dedicated short call, saved time to all parties. We knew their timeline and were able to adjust ourselves to it. If there are any issues, we can always have a short meeting and mitigate risks.

Have an owner for every major feature

As a team lead, it is pretty difficult to stay in the details of each and every feature. Having an owner for big features allows me to have one focal point for every major development. She can help me understand when integrations are planned, give effort estimation and complexities. On top of that, I find that when developers take the role of an official “owner”, it increases engagement and sense of responsibility. It’s their little project to lead and oversee development end-to-end. Caring makes the difference.

Divide (and concur)

There’s a lot to plan, and it takes time. Having all team member on the call can be exhausting. For me it works best to work feature by feature (according to priority of-course) and have only the relevant people in the conference.

Others can utilise this time as they see fit (in my experience, most just continue with the day-to-day work). Having short precise sessions for every big feature focuses me, and keeps other team members focused in their specified periods of time. Everybody knows they will be contacted when they are needed, and until then, they are free to work on whatever they think they should.

So one would ask (and in fact I was actually asked that by a manager recently),why would I have all my team members present in the PI planning, and not send just the owners to plan it for all. There are in fact teams that work exactly like this, feeling other people to their commitments.

I believe that all team members should participate because, at the end of the day, this is their work we’re all planing, and everyone’s got a say. The sessions are lead by myself and feature owner, but in practice, people join, give feedback and make suggestions. This engagement is what makes the commitment for the quarter matter. We are all committed, we all take part in the process.

Use an online board.

This may sound very obvious now, but we actually started out old-school style with a big board, colourful post it’s and red strings connecting them (with stickers). After PI ended we had to carry this board to our sitting area, make sure we don’t damage it on the way, and I remember sitting in front of it and updating all the numbers in JIRA.

Well, it’s 2020. Luckily we had to use a virtual board on our fist remote PI plan, and were amazed at how much easier it is to have it all digital.

So to sum it all up, I would say that the keys to a fast and non-exhausting PI planning, is to have a good preparation in advance to understand the requirements, have an owner to every feature to hold the details that one person will probably get lost in, and have the meetings short and to the point, with relevant audience only.

Hope this helps someone, and if not, well, I owe you 5 minutes 😊