Skip the paper and highlighters to work more efficiently

For many Agile teams, one of the biggest challenges to implementing the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is the inclusion of the Program Increment (PI) planning session. This big-room planning session was originally designed to get everyone in the same space to hold all the important planning conversations, so teams can quickly discover dependencies, priorities and (over)allocations.

Unfortunately, following a strict SAFe-prescribed quarterly cadence for these sessions has several drawbacks.

Let’s face it: Typical planning strategies have some flaws

For distributed teams, flying everyone to the same place presents a large logistical and financial challenge. For any team that relies heavily on technology (read: all teams!) planning every task for the next quarter with butcher paper, Post-it notes and string is both frustratingly simplistic and impractical. Paper is easily lost (and those sticky notes never stick as well as you want them to). Transcribing notes to digital format increases the chances of human error.

Finally, while the existence of a single artifact that everyone can reference for dependencies and prioritized issues is great in a big-room planning session, the benefit falls apart as soon as that meeting is over. Where will the artifact live? Who will have access to it? Posting the butcher paper outside the release train engineer’s (RTE) office is great for the RTE, but not for everyone else stuck with a low-resolution digital photo.

But perhaps the biggest drawback to all this is that despite how or where you hold the meeting, how you take notes or where you store those notes, all that information has to end up on your planning platform — and for the majority of us who are using Jira, all those steps could have been done just as effectively (and a lot more simply) using the tools readily available there.

The efficiency of planning within Jira

When a PI planning session includes the tools each team uses on a daily basis, you will see teams work more freely in the team breakout sessions. This isn’t to say that Post-it notes can’t be helpful when you are breaking features down into stories.* (Note: We use the epic-feature-story hierarchy here for consistency with the SAFe literature) However, creating these issues in Jira will allow you to directly create dependencies and link to other tickets as you’re considering them — not as someone is trying to painstakingly transcribe the RTE’s scrawled notes.

Of course, butcher paper and sticky notes do provide a level of visualization not easily replicated in Jira alone. But with the right tools, Jira can be just as useful for visualizing projects. You can use Easy Agile’s Programs to facilitate your PI planning sessions and drive your transition to a distributed, paperless PI planning session.

Or if you’ve made changes to how you store PI information that are incompatible with Easy Agile’s Programs, you could opt for a read-only version of the program board that allows everyone to track it through the Smartdraw Visualscript PI board. Regardless of the tools you use, visualizing the entire program board becomes much easier when all the issues are already in Jira.

Create a single reference source

One of the biggest advantages of using these kinds of add-ons for planning is that teams can perform their feature and story planning as they are used to doing it, increasing efficiency. When it comes time for a cross-teams session, each team can present the data inside their planning tool, and every other team can view that same data and see how it impacts them.

Imagine Team A is preparing work related to three different features, but they are blocked by a number of issues relating to Team B’s work. They also have some enabler work that will impact Team C’s work. If Team C is used to tracking their work through the standard Jira boards, their insight into their dependencies is limited — but that’s OK, because this is where your cross-team planning and add-ons come in.

Whether it’s a traditional (albeit digital) PI planning session, a video conference with teams across the world, or simply one team walking over to another team’s table, when Team A and Team C get together to discuss their priorities, both can reference a central program board such as the ones generated by Easy Agile Programs or VisualScripts; or they could build a dependency map of all the stories scheduled for that PI in ALM Works’ Structure for Jira, Easy Agile’s Story Maps or a Jira board with enhanced ScriptRunner functions.

The data behind each of these is always the very same data your teams are used to entering in Jira; these programs just help them visualize how their work impacts and is impacted by other teams.

The result is a massive efficiency gain — and during a critical meeting to map out an entire quarter, time is vitally important. Having ALM Works' Structure for Jira or a similar Jira app wipes out wasted hours and allows you to be proactive rather than reactive.

Looking forward

After the PI planning session, teams will go back to their respective tables, offices or homes and start to work on the agreed-upon features and stories. All of them will have the same data, easily accessible in Jira, right where they’re used to working. The best part: You can get to work right away! No need to wait until an intern digitizes their notes.

For more detail on how to track your PI in Jira, read our next feature article, and be sure to read up on our discussion of SAFe hierarchies and how to choose the best option for your organization.