3.14.159265
Yup March 14… Happy PI Day!
One of science’s greatest minds of all time, Albert Einstein, was born on March 14, 1879, at his family’s home in Ulm, Germany. 
He shares his birthday with PI Day, a celebration of this special never-ending number.
There is another kind of PI…
SAFe has a program-level equivalent of a team-level iteration… it is called Program Increment (PI)…usually spans three months (or a quarter of a year). 
Also, in same program-level to team-level parallelism, “Iteration/sprint Planning” at a team-level is to “PI Planning” at a program level. Program backlog (features) refinement is to iteration/sprint (stories) backlog refinement… you get my drift.
Strangely enough… I was in a PI Planning — as the ART’s (Agile Release Train’s) Lean Agile Coach — that just concluded yesterday! It’s the ART’s first PI Planning and it was not “as easy as pie”. But no worries, most first PI Planning events are chaotic…chaos is almost expected.. and..take note: an ART must start somewhere… and improve from there with the knowledge and retrospectives that were gathered as a result of that exercise. Knowledge is based on experience…empiricism.
Have you had your first PI yet? If not, then do it! Put a date … an immovable date of your first PI… make that a “forcing function”… work (regading the PI Planning event prep) expands without this date. As one Australian commercial in the 90’s (yes, I still recall it… and yes, I am also an Aussie) put it: “You’ll never never know if you never never go“. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q13t0_FN7Ho#action=share
Be like Einstein… don’t stop questioning…be curious… take the leap… do it…and experience the feelings of ecstasy and agony of your first PI !
Fear of failure? Failure is almost never as bad as we fear it will be… but it’s our fear that we feel, not the failure.
There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it. — Alfred Hitchcock
