SAFe® PI Planning: digital vs. analog (Blog Post)

Develop on cadence is the heart beat of an Agile Release Train and the PI Planning essential to align teams across the ART. If the event runs with distributed teams, it takes place simultaneously at multiple locations. It’s no secret that doing distributed big room plannings is a challenge both operationally and communicatively. By Silvio Wandfluh, SPC4 at Rentouch

To give you a good overview, we have now developed an implementation roadmap for the piplanning app. There is no denying the similarity with the “SAFe Implementation Roadmap”. Yes, we admit. We were inspired by it. We thought it made sense because SAFe practitioners are already familiar with reading this type of roadmap. So let’s take a quick, step-by-step look at it!

We knew we wanted a logo that reflects why we exist, what values we stand for, what we believe in and where we want to go. At first we started from our vision.

The main mistake made in distributed planning is that we think we could behave exactly the same as in face-to-face conversations.

Everyone who’s a fan of paper sticky notes, who works in a Scrum or Kanban team and at the same time uses some ALM tool, has already thought about the optimal solution how these two worlds could be combined. Am I right?

When it comes to determining whether digital or analog tools should be used in the collaborative part of agile team planning, we suddenly find ourselves in an argument.

Since its official launch in March, the PI Planning App has already been evaluated by several large organizations and used for their SAFe® PI Plannings. These are companies whose size means that they are no longer able to bring all their employees together in one big room for the PI Planning. Therefore they had to look for suitable tools that could help their employees communicate across distributed locations.

The begin of our journey with the piplanning app.