pi planning – Lean Agile Guru

Sep

16

2020

Start With The End In Mind

inspect and adapt, pi planning, Platinum

Day 169. With Pi Planning, one of the outputs is a set of PI Objectives for each team on the Agile Release Train; the team will try their best to achieve both committed and uncommitted PI Objectives. They visualize the ‘End’... the desired outcome ... which is embodied by the PI Objective. What most people don’t do is this: Continue reading

Mar

26

2020

By Clarence Galapon

PI Objective — Demystified Part III

business objective, pi objective, pi planning

Tip on synthesizing planned work into PI objectives: Find the ‘Deep meaning’ (the intent). Try this: stand back and look at, holistically, the planned work. Can you form a few meaningful chunks? Aggregate similarly themed work. Find out the main reason why this work is important to the business. You are doing this work... to what end? Express your thoughts in business terms if the objective directly delivers something of value to the business. This is a Business Objective. If it indirectly delivers value then it could be a Technical Objective... meaning, it supports the delivery of value — albeit…

Nov

14

2019

By Clarence Galapon

Program Board

pi planning, program board

Scrum Masters of teams to populate the program board!

Sep

26

2019

By Clarence Galapon

The Case of a Missing Big Picture, Part II

pi planning

It begins with an idea with a hypothesis. Once approved to go further, it gets broken down into huge chunks -- the big bones of the idea -- to see what major pieces make up this idea. These huge chunks could be 'Features' or sets of related 'Features' collectively called 'Capabilities' So far, so good? Here is where most fail: they take these major pieces, unrefined, into the PI Planning... refine it there during the PI... and discover things (Constraints, Impediments, Risks, Dependencies) -- inter team items-- that could have been discovered earlier had the program backlog refinement occurred... earlier...…

Sep

25

2019

By Clarence Galapon

The Case of a Missing Big Picture

pi planning

Have you been in a Program Increment (PI) Planning wherein things -- a lot of things -- were being discovered and discussed ... and you wondered: these should have been discussed way before the PI Planning? As a result, key dependencies were discovered late. Capacity issues discovered late. Stories blocked. Features postponed. Constraints, impediments, risks (the CIRs) that could have been easily uncovered earlier were discovered during the PI. Result: the PI delivers value at a sub optimum level. The program's maturity level is in its infancy. Not cool. Why is this happening? To be continued...

Jun

18

2019

By Clarence Galapon

PI Planning Quotes

pi planning

Here are two quotes that might be of help before, during and after PI planning: The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one. Mark Twain This one is from Bruce Lee. Observe and learn ... for continuous improvement... always assume a 'positive intent'.

Apr

11

2019

By Clarence Galapon

The Tyranny of Perfect

Perfection, pi planning, Try, Tyranny

Aiming for perfection paralyzes us...forbids us to try...because if we try and fail to reach perfection, it is a failure. Perfect insinuates that this is the best we can do... we are done... that's it. Perfect closes the door of possibilities, of better things, and innovation. Long time ago, the U.S. Patent office believed that all that is to be invented has already been invented. Perfect has been achieved. The best we can do has been achieved. Not quite. That's not true. Look at inventions and innovations coming from the people from Xerox, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla... Today, the U.S. Patent…

Sep

27

2018

By Clarence Galapon

Continuous Exploration and Program Execution: Keys to Success!

continuous exploration, flow, pi planning

Flow. It's all about flow... a continuous flow of value on the Continuous Delivery Pipeline (CDP) is essential in SAFe. Ideas trickle down from the portfolio funnel down to portfolio backlog. Program work is pulled from the portfolio backlog ... pulled work to the program level goes through the Continuous Exploration (CE)... with the product manager on the center surrounded by collaborators. Product manager steers the train with prioritized features ... sequenced the right way. Note that, sometimes, work goes directly to the program-level without coming in from the portfolio-level funnel of ideas/epics; these could be technical debt, refactor, etc.…