This blog post was co-authored by Danijela Nandi, Sr. Product Manager; Nikos Takoulis, Sr. Manager, Engineering; and Lubos Muller, Manager, Engineering
Program Increment (PI) planning is a complex activity that occurs once every three months and brings teams together to determine a program’s direction for the next period. Traditionally, the easiest way is to conduct PI planning is for everyone to get together in a room and work as a team of teams.
But the COVID-19 pandemic made that impossible for our most recent PI planning event. We needed to adapt and take a different approach, given that we have 14 teams with more than 100 outstanding employees in various time zones.
This blog post will show you how we transformed our PI planning for Citrix Workspace and our microapps service to accommodate our new normal of remote work. We brought together Citrix teams from Product Management, Engineering, Shared Services, Security, Product Design, Support, Globalization, Pre-sales, and other critical stakeholders. We had to have everyone’s involvement to achieve our primary mission: to deliver tools and workflows that enable people to work remotely in the ways they want.
Our Typical PI Planning
Usually, our PI planning event is two days packed with pre-planned activities and without any flexibility. Our typical schedule looks something like this:
- Day 1 includes vision and architecture discussions, team breakouts, draft plan reviews, and management review. The primary goal is to prepare a draft plan based on priorities and to identify dependencies.
- Day 2 includes team breakouts, a final plan review, and a quick retrospective to make sure we learn from our mistakes. Our goal here is to ensure the entire Agile Release Train (or team of teams) commits on the plan for the next three months.
This works great when things are “normal.” But in our current situation, spending two full days on a call wouldn’t be optimal and probably wouldn’t be very productive.
The Remote PI Planning Schedule
In developing our schedule, we spread our main planning activities across four days, with one critical event each day, and we let teams plan their own time and choose their own path to achieve results. For each day, we communicated to the larger group what needed to be delivered and deadlines, while keeping in mind a proper work/life balance.
Monday, we started with a short kick-off from the Product Management team and a quick overview of what we achieved in the previous Program Increment. Each team prepared an availability matrix so we all knew the best times to connect during team breakouts, which communications channels teams preferred, and who were the team’s key contacts.
On Tuesday, we did our draft plan review. The teams had time from midday Monday to Tuesday afternoon for team breakouts. Instead of three hours, we gave them more than 12 hours for that significant first activity. They drafted their plan and talked to other teams to identify dependencies and sync with other stakeholders for alignment.
We gave the teams all of Wednesday to address gaps in their plans and to prepare to present. On Thursday, we had our final plan review.
Thinking about this like a recipe, here were our ingredients for success:
- Spread the event over four or five days and pay close attention to where you place critical events. This helps maintain a healthy work/life balance.
- Focus each day on what needs to be delivered and make sure to communicate about the objective (and that it is understood).
- Work with the scrum masters and POs to fix impediments.
- Require each team to share their availability matrix.
- Hold a daily scrum master/product owner/product manager sync to facilitate healthy discussion on progress.
Before the PI Event
We adapted the SAFe® framework and did much of our work in the weeks before the event. After all, preparation is key. We started with what we wanted to achieve and created an understanding and a shared vision among the teams while keeping a detailed schedule. Here’s how we got ready for our PI event:
- About two months before our PI event, we held several “pre-planning” workshops, where each team presented a subset of initiatives/features they thought were essential to delivering in the next iteration. We created an opportunity for relevant stakeholders to see what was coming well in advance; to ask questions; and to help teams get a “go ahead” for their next steps. We still encountered some surprises around changes in priorities and adjustments in the scope of activities.
- We were punctual about sharing schedules and details about logistics. We had one document that provided a “single source of truth” — a detailed agenda, links to virtual rooms, participants, and expectations of what will happen at each step. The goal of this? Helping to create a sense of flow and order in a highly complex environment.
- We generated a single list of priorities based on the outcomes of pre-planning sessions. This gave product and engineering stakeholders an opportunity to understand and rate initiatives. The process was inclusive, and although it required more time, it created a shared understanding of value (the why) and prepared us well to talk about execution (the how).
- Our leadership team’s kick-off session happened the week before planning. Normally, this would happen at the beginning of the planning event. However, in virtual circumstances, having this the week before gave us the opportunity to ask questions and sharpen any work that we were doing in preparation for the coming week.
The Week of the PI Event
During the week of our PI event, we focused on maintaining work/life balance, setting the right expectations, and fixing problems as they emerged. Here’s how we did it:
- Our four-day event started with a presentation of each team’s area and what they were planning. One benefit of a virtual PI event? Attendees were able to avoid offline disturbances that often occur when such a large group is together in one room.
- The virtual PI event made it possible for entire teams to participate instead of just representatives (no budget/travel constraints).
- Before each session, we provided reminders of what had been completed and what was upcoming; clarity around working agreements; and an outline what was essential to completing the virtual planning.
- Regular sync-up meetings with key stakeholders helped to close any gaps in connections and break up silos among teams.
What We Did (and What We Learned)
After four days of planning, we committed as an ART to a significant number of objectives to help our customers work remotely by using microapps to help streamline functionality from complex enterprise applications and by adding some intelligent automation on top of the use cases we delivered in the previous PI sessions.
And we tried to learn and adapt in everything we did. A few areas for improvement we identified for next time included:
- Start preparations and have an agreed-upon list of priorities even sooner. Some parts were moving almost to the end. Starting even earlier next time will help us get the most out of this experience.
- Be better prepared to mitigate challenges around connection issues, time-boxing, and getting even more detailed in our agendas.
- Do even more to engage all team members because transparency is a critical element for PI planning success, whether the event is in-person or virtual.
We consider our first remote PI planning a success. We hope that sharing our recipe for success will help you plan effectively for your virtual PI event. And we want to hear from you. Please share your ingredients for success (and your questions) in the comments section below.
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