Helping Agile teams with remote PI Planning
PI Planning is an essential part of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), a framework that’s designed to bring Agile to large companies with multiple teams. The goal of PI Planning is to get all your teams aligned strategically and enable cross-team collaboration. Without PI Planning, teams don’t have structured communication. They may not know what other teams are working on or realize there’s a dependency that could hold up a release.
The PI Planning event is two days of focused planning with all the teams, stakeholders, and product owners/managers in one place, to create the program board, draft sprints, write PI objectives, identify dependencies, and determine the direction of the business. PI Planning typically happens every 8 to 12 weeks but there are significant challenges with multi-locational teams.
While some distributed teams are turning to multiple platforms to translate their in-person process to one that can be done virtually, this often leads to confusion, duplication and extra work getting everything synced up after the event.
But with SharpCloud, the capabilities of multiple digital tools are combined in a single platform, eliminating the need to transcribe your team’s work.
Connect disparate Agile planning and work tracking tools, such as Jira, in SharpCloud and synchronize data for better cross-team planning, collaboration and transparency around risks and dependencies. Connecting task management and issue tracking with all other aspects of an agile organization, in one tool, will ensure the strategy and planning process become more aligned and dynamic.
Keep people focused and engaged
SharpCloud’s built-in presentations tool makes it easy for your teams to refer back and keep your vision in mind as they plan. As your teams get to work in their break-outs, Forms make it easy for them to update the value of existing items, like their team capacity, or add new items.
Uncover the insight
Using our handy QR codes, team facilitators can run remote Planning Poker to assign story points and once set, our data-driven formatting allows you to quickly spot issues of overload. Dashboard views and our commenting feature can help track team progress during their break-outs, and Forms allow teams to record risks as they’re identified, or even add items for the retrospective as soon as they think of them.
Filter out the noise
SharpCloud’s filtering capabilities are a great way to review your program board. Filter by team, by iteration — even hide items that don’t have dependencies so you can zero in on what’s most critical to your conversation.
These collaborative features for delivery teams and management ensure efficiency and transparency and with the ability to push data back out to Jira or another planning tool, managers can track task progress in the tools that they are familiar with against the features and capabilities you set out to deliver as part of the strategy.
