PI Planning for Beginners Series | #1 - My Story

i remember the first time i had my very first pi planning back in 2013. back in those days it was really strange and an unheard concept to have a hundred or even more people in a single room to do a planning event so i was really nervous i mean everybody who was anybody was gonna turn up to this event that i had been convincing all of the executives was a great idea now truth is i didn't know what i was doing in fact though in those days very few people had even run such an event themselves and now i had a hundred people turning up to this event because somehow i'd managed to convince these people that it was a great idea have you ever done that and then i started to doubt myself i'm like am i really good enough to organize and coordinate and manage and support over a hundred people a hundred people for me in those days was a lot was a large number now it's a relatively smaller train but i started to get doubts in myself and this is the planning series i wish i had all those years back when i started hi guys i'm ahmed a skilled agile and productivity coach based in the uk on this channel we cover productivity agility and even joy in the workplace in this particular pi planning series i'm going to cover step by step what you need to do to have not just an okay event i don't know about you i don't want an okay of it i want an amazing event i want a best implementation event and that's what i would like for you as well so from today in this video we're going to start working walking through step by step a real example which obviously has been changed to protect confidentiality and other elements but it's going to give you a true flavor of all of the steps you need to go through to implement an amazing pi planning event now i intend to release a video every week on this series until i'm satisfied that we're done and hopefully until i've answered all of your questions so i hope you found this useful now this video series is mostly for beginners so if you're an experienced pi planning uh person or scaled agilist you may want to skip this series but i hope everybody finds something here that they find useful okay so let's get started so here i was 2013. i'm pretty nervous as i said i managed to convince all these people have you ever been in that situation where you so focused on convincing somebody to do something and you're almost sure they're not going to do it and then they actually turn around and go yeah okay we'll do it and then you're like oh my god oh my whatever why am i dad right so what's what made things worse is my boss really wasn't helping he's making me even more nervous so my boss is a finance guy so he says ahmed okay so this two-day event yeah i said yeah two days event yeah so how many people are going to be in i said everybody's what do you mean everybody i mean everybody on this train that we're gonna form is gonna come to this uh planning event so he says well do you know how much this is going to cost us and i'm like no it's not going to cost us anything don't worry about that we're just using our basement right so we'll just use our own facilities it's not going to cost us anything he said he kind of looked away and he's like oh okay have you ever had that sort of like people like where did i hire this guy from well if you haven't i got that look right it's like where did this guy come from okay now pay attention so he walks me through this calculation he says okay so how many people are we gonna have at this event and i think it wasn't 100 it was about 80 people so 80 people as i said is a lot of people for me even then so it was about 80 people i say this is 80 people okay so you got 80 people and so their daily rate on average is about 500 pounds okay 500 pounds okay so that ahmed is 40 000 pounds per day right and i'm like okay that sounds quite a lot of money and he says and you want this for two days right two days yeah i said yeah absolutely we need to do in two days because it is uh it's what's actually needed it's the standard best practice you know we want to do in two days so he said okay so you don't need to be a math genius to work out how much this is going to cost right so it's like you're going to spend 80 000 pounds on this planning event so i'm like okay yeah i suppose you're right when you think when you think like that so he says you better make sure you don't muck this up because not only my boss is going to be there my boss's boss is going to be there there's a whole publicity that's gone around this event and i'm like why did you do that and it's like well if we're spending that kind of money on it we want to get the kind of visibility on it so so that's one of the challenges we have right whether we like it or not a lot of the pi planning events becomes a key kind of cornerstone event where a lot of individuals a lot of senior executives and other people and the entire train they're counting on us to do an amazing job during this pi planning event so we need to make sure that we do a fantastic job now in those days there wasn't there weren't any videos on youtube there was hardly anybody that i knew who was doing it it was just theory at that time i just want to give a big thanks to sir to sergi dala keaney i think it is hope i got your name right sergi for triggering me with this request yesterday and so i hope this video serves you with walking through this real example but at that time i had no idea what i was doing but what i decided to do is you know what i'm going to manufacture tony robbins style positivity right just as i'd learned right i'm going to be positive and i'm going to continue learning step by step as as i go along now this video series is built upon what i learned all those years back then and since that point till now all these years over 800 years is covering all of the things that i learned around pi planning now as i said it is for beginners right so i'm not going to go into the most advanced topics but but you will get a good foundation and i believe if you cover all of the elements that we've covered in this series you will be ahead you will definitely be in the top five percent of pi planning events out there today okay i know tall order um but let's get started okay so in this series i'm not just going to cover the template the examples i'm also going to give you templates and other uh ideas and concepts as well but before we get stuck in the question is what is pi planning so it's a high level plan for 8 to 12 weeks for an agile release train okay so what is an agile release train so an agile release train is simply a collection of between 5 and 12 agile teams now this is a rough guideline as i'll show you in the real world you might have less than that or you might have a little bit more than that in practice i've gone from around three less than three is probably not worth your while and i've gone up to 16 beyond 16 starts to become very challenging to manage and support that train okay now of course this is context dependent and it depends on your style and your appetite for risk okay but that's just my real world insight that i just wanted to share with you okay so that's what pi planning is it's this high level plan eight to 12 weeks for this agile release train which is a collection of agile teams how is this quite different though what is different about this what is really different about it is is that you know if you're from a waterfall world or a traditional project management world what you'll be used to is this idea of a project manager or a program manager sitting together with maybe a few other individuals and they will come up with this huge plan for everybody this is a completely different concept because here we're bringing everybody on the train into this planning event so we can get the collective intelligence the collective insights we get buy-in now into this plan we look at the viability of the plan and we can also work out whether is there any dependencies across the different elements of the plan it just makes for a better planning more realistic and more likely to achieve your targets that's why you can justify that eight thousand well the way in which you would justify it you say well if we cut out these and save these two days are we likely to achieve these objectives two days early and you know the answer dies probably no okay so that's what pear planning is right so now when should i use it okay now that's important because there's a large overhead there's a large overhead in the number in in terms of the number of people that are going to be coming there there's a large overhead in terms of the overall cost of the event you also need to set up the event et cetera et cetera now if you're doing this in the kind of cover time period in terms of when this is actually shot during this period you need to now set up the remote planning as well and i'll cover that a little bit during this series but there are other videos that you can click on if you want to learn more about remote pi planning immediately so just click on the link over here okay all right so next question is when should i use it okay so you you should use it when you have a problem or a mission that you cannot use a single team to solve okay you need multiple teams as i said you probably need at least three or four teams to make this viable you need multiple teams to solve the problem so that's the first characteristic the second thing uh characteristic you need to have is you want is when the actual value or what you are actually uh releasing requires the interaction of multiple teams to deliver what's called customer user end user or business value okay so the value cannot be delivered by just a single team it needs these multiple teams to work together in a coordinated way okay and that's when you would need pi planning the third thing you need to do is you'd want to make sure for you it to be viable for you to set this up is you want to make sure that the size and scale of the problem is not something you can solve in in a week or so right or two weeks or even a month right it's probably not worth the effort that you're going to go into to set up a an event like a pi planning event if you've got a very sh a problem that can be solved in a very short period of time okay so there's the three things that you need to bear in mind you have a problem that can't be sold by a single team you've got value that spans multiple teams and you've got dependencies across these different teams and also you've got a problem that spans multiple sprints as well okay so the question you may say is you may say okay i got it ahmed pi planning it's this high level event it's for a collection of large uh it's a it's for a large train or for a collection of teams you've got this problem that can't be sold by individual teams and you've got these three characteristics that you just work walk through but why do i actually need this well the reason why you actually need it is because when we've got multiple teams and they've got their own individual plans if they're to do the individual planning i've got plan a plan b and plan c right what's to say they will hang together right so if i've got a dependency from on off on another team and i'm in one team what's to say that that dependency it has been taken into consideration into the other team as well and also more so what's to say that it's given the right priority when you're looking at a large organization large enterprise many teams may have different pulls and requests coming on their time and this means we need to coordinate and align the prioritization of what we actually do and the goals as well okay so that's a kind of quick definition of of pi planning so now let's walk through a real world example so many years ago i was working for a large law firm they would prov they would provide books legal books case laws precedence reference reference books to lawyers and especially in the olden days what you would have is you have your typical stereotypical lawyers sitting there at the desk right and behind there'd be these rows of stacks of books and books and books and books right so those books are what this company used to put together okay now they this new breed of lawyers were coming through these youngsters coming through said hey i don't want to look through all of these books thank you very much i'd like i'd like to have you know google for lawyers thank you very much so that's effectively what they were trying to do they're trying to build a google for lawyers if you want to think of this in a kind of simplistic way so now what you've got is you've got these hundreds of editors that would be compiling the cases that were going into the different tribunals and into the different courts and they would be bringing them together they would be compiling all of these findings and they would be digitizing them so all these lawyers could actually search across them so okay so let's take a fictitious let's make up a fictitious example all right let's just say we're creating a new product line okay we need to create this new product for lawyers and in a new region let's just say we're doing this in australia okay so we'll say we're going to do this in oz and basically what we have is we've got new content we've got new customer requirements we've got new systems and we need a new search capability just to keep things interesting okay so to keep things simple we're going to say we have just three teams to make it manageable for this example right in actual fact you'll probably have more but i want to simplify and i think you'll get through the essence of what's actually required with just three teams because we can show the interrelationships there okay so let's just say we have so we said we've got three teams so we're gonna say we have got a team that does the editorial so these are the individuals and the team that's going to be be responsible for putting in all of the legal content from the case law we've got a a fabrication team this is a team that is responsible for parsing the data cleansing the data building relationships of the data both the syntax syntactical and semantic uh cleansing and integrity of the data and then you've got the final team which is the actual customer facing portal so we'll just call that customer system okay so we'll work out what that looks like as we go along okay so that's the scene now so in the next video we have um we're going to cover how we take these three systems okay and we're going to see how we're going to form them into teams and we're going to do this in a real way not in a textbook way because i don't want to teach you this kind of oh here's the theoretical pollyanna kind of stuff i want to show you what's the kind of problems that you're really going to learn and you're going to face in the real world and stuff that you are going to need to overcome now if you want just a standard textbook theory you've got scaleagile.comscrum.org you've got scrambled lines i love these sites i recommend them you can go then you can pick up a lot of the standard theoretical stuff right but that's the theory great foundation but how you apply that that's what we're covering over here that's where the magic happens and that's where all the all the growth and all the fun actually happens as well okay so we've set the scene today we've discussed and we've looked at what pi planning is we've also looked at basically when you should use pi planning right and why you should use it as well so i hope you found that useful this is the first of many videos subscribe if you've not subscribed already and you're interested in getting the full video series i intend to be releasing this uh one video a week until we're done so keep growing continue learning and most importantly don't forget to bring the joy thanks very much see you later bye

Channel: SAFe in the Real World

Views: 10,507

Keywords: PI Planning, Program Increment Planning, PI Planning for beginners, SAFe PI Planning, Scaled Agile Planning, Big Room Planning

Id: zBEQ3BhumyY

Length: 17min 41sec (1061 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021