PI (Planning Increment) Planning is a critical event in SAFe(Scaled Agile Framework), enabling teams to align their efforts, prioritize work, and synchronize their activities. It involves various participants who bring unique perspectives and expertise to the planning process.

If you are adopting the SAFe within your organization, make sure you have the right team to handle it. You must know their roles and how they can contribute to effective PI Planning. In this blog, we will explore the crucial participants in PI Planning.

Participants in PI Planning

Business Owners
Product Manager
Product Owner
Scrum Master/ Team Coach
Agile Team Members
System Architect
RTE (Release Train Engineer)

Let’s explore them in detail.

Business Owners

Business Owners (BOs) are key stakeholders in Agile Release Trains (ARTs) responsible for ROI, governance, and compliance. They actively participate in ART events, evaluate fitness for use, and guide solution development. In SAFe, self-managing Agile Teams and ARTs are essential, with leaders providing intent rather than assigning tasks. BOs decentralize execution authority to the ART while remaining accountable for organizational growth, operational excellence, and business outcomes. Identifying BOs involves determining those responsible for business outcomes, solution competence, planning participation, impediment removal, and coordination across departments. BO teams should have a mix of business and technical expertise, and membership may change as needed.

Responsibilities

Below is the list of core responsibilities of a Business owner.

Sponsoring Improvements: Business Owners sponsor and drive continuous improvement initiatives, promoting a culture of innovation and enhancing business agility.
Leading by Example: They lead by example, embracing agile values and principles, and encouraging adopting Lean-Agile practices throughout the organization.
Realizing Business Outcomes: Business Owners are responsible for delivering business outcomes, aligning strategic goals with the work of Agile Release Trains (ARTs), and ensuring that value is delivered to customers.
Aligning Priorities and PI Planning: They collaborate with Product Management and stakeholders to align priorities, define the program vision, and provide guidance during PI planning events.
Aligning with Lean Portfolio Management: Business Owners work closely with Lean Portfolio Management to ensure strategic alignment, financial transparency, and effective portfolio governance.

Product Manager

This role is responsible for defining possible solutions that meet customers’ requirements and supporting development throughout the product life cycle. Depending on the solution complexity, the role scales. For example, some solutions can be easily handled by one PM but some need a team of managers.

Product management guides every solution through all four stages of introduction, growth, maturity, and decline, to achieve maximum business value. Whether the team is working on an internal or external product, the product manager is the key to its success.

To make this happen, product management has to coordinate with different teams across the organization. The below image depicts the coordination between product management with other groups.

Pi planning -product management roles — img credit: Scaled Agile Inc

What does each relationship represent and what sort of information exchanges between them?

Product Management ensures solutions deliver tangible business value.
They collaborate with Customers, Business Owners, and Solution Management.
Collaboration helps understand market forces, economic outcomes, and solution vision.
Product Management works with System Architects and the Release Train Engineer (RTE) to steer successful delivery.
The leadership triad (Product Management, System Architects, and RTE) maintains synergy between strategy and implementation.
Agile Teams execute the product strategy by developing, delivering, and continuously enhancing solutions.
Product Management synchronizes frequently with Product Owners of Agile Teams to provide accurate business context and receive implementation feasibility feedback.

Responsibilities

Below are the core responsibilities of the Product Manager.

Exploring markets and users: It starts with exploring potential solutions by collecting qualitative and quantitative information about the targeted market and users. Such data helps in designing the business and technical strategy to create hypotheses to fuel the continuous delivery pipeline. It includes conducting primary and secondary research, segmenting the market, identifying market events, and analyzing users’ preferences.
Connecting with potential customers: Product managers directly communicate with the customers to understand their constantly changing demands and turn them into product strategy throughout the product life cycle. It generally includes adapting to the customer-centric mindset and applying design thinking with consistent communication with customers.
Defining product strategy, vision, and roadmap: The product manager ensures that the portfolio strategy turns into a successful execution and is successfully delivered by the Agile team for optimum business outcomes. It includes aligning strategy to the business objectives, creating a vision, and working on those visions with suitable roadmaps.
Managing and prioritizing the ART backlog: The product manager manages all the work from the ART backlog prioritizes them and updates them as per the customer’s latest requirements. It includes- updating features in the ART backlog, prioritizing them with Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF), checking on the status of features, supporting the ongoing architectural runway, and participating in important ART events.
Delivering business value: Leveraging the Continuous Delivery Pipeline, product managers ensure that optimum business value is delivered while maintaining the time-to-market.

It includes- collaboration with internal and external stakeholders throughout the value stream to ensure value delivery to the enterprise and customers. Product Management ensures the completeness of solutions by designing them from the customer’s perspective, incorporating multiple features for engaging experiences. They enable operations by providing support to functions like marketing, sales, compliance, and channel partners to prepare for product launches. The Continuous Delivery Pipeline decouples solution deployment from release activities, empowering Product Management to release based on optimal business timing. Defining and tracking the value of solutions within the enterprise context is crucial for meeting business goals.

Product Owner

The Product Owner plays a vital role in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Below is the list of core responsibilities of a Product Owner.

Contributing to product vision and roadmap: PO uses the pragmatic approach to understand what solutions the ART can deliver. The Product Owner establishes a clear vision for the product, ensuring it aligns with customer needs, market trends, and business goals.
Managing and prioritizing the product backlog: POs help in managing and prioritizing the backlog by having multiple discussions with the Product Manager, System Architects, and Stakeholders. PO helps the teams in creating User Stories and enablers, considering any defects to be fixed, Prioritization of ART Backlog, and Accepting the stories built by the teams.
Collaborating with stakeholders: The Product Owner actively engages with stakeholders along with Product Managers and System Architects to gather requirements and feedback, incorporating their input into the product development process.
Guiding the Agile team: They provide clear guidance to the Agile team on queries regarding the User Stories, ensuring a shared understanding of requirements, and accepting completed work. PO helps the teams to understand the vision and roadmap during the PI Planning to ensure all the teams are aligned across the ART.
Ensuring timely delivery and quality: The Product Owner supports the agile teams in delivering the product on time and meeting the expected quality standards by highly emphasizing on Built-in Quality.
Continuously adapting and improving: The Product Owner evaluates and adjusts the product backlog based on market conditions, customer needs, and feedback, ensuring continuous improvement.

RTE (Release Train Engineer)

RTEs serve as servant leaders and orchestrators, facilitating the Agile Release Train (ART) activities and enabling the ART to deliver value.

Responsibilities

Below is the list of core responsibilities of RTE.

Facilitating PI Planning: RTEs lead and facilitate PI Planning events, ensuring that teams align on objectives, dependencies, and commitments for the upcoming Planning Increment(PI).
Supporting PI Execution: They provide support to Agile teams during the PI, helping them stay on track, removing impediments, and fostering collaboration and synchronization across teams.
Coaching the ART: RTEs coach teams, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Business Owners, and System Architects on the importance of a Lean agile mindset. Emphasize SAFe practices and principles, promoting a culture of continuous improvement and agility within the ART.
Optimizing Flow: They actively work to optimize flow by managing and resolving cross-team dependencies, identifying bottlenecks, and implementing measures to improve the overall efficiency of the ART.
Improving Relentlessly: RTEs drive relentless improvement by facilitating Inspect and Adapt workshops, encouraging teams to identify areas for enhancement, and implementing changes to enhance program execution and outcomes.

Scrum Master / Team Coach

The Scrum Master acts as a facilitator and coach for Agile teams, ensuring adherence to Agile principles and practices throughout the PI. Their role is to enable collaboration and remove any impediments that may hinder the team’s progress.

Characteristics of a Scrum Master/Team Coach-

Servant Leadership: They prioritize the needs of the team and enable their success.
Facilitation Skills: They possess strong facilitation skills to conduct productive Scrum events.
Communication Skills: Effective communication is essential for collaboration and aligning stakeholders.
Effectively handling the conflicts within the team or between the teams.
Continuous Learning: They have a mindset of continuous learning and improvement, staying updated with industry trends and practices.

Responsibilities-

Facilitating PI Planning: The Scrum Master/Team Coach plays a crucial role in facilitating the PI Planning event. They guide the teams in collaboratively planning and aligning their work for the upcoming Planning Increment (PI), ensuring a clear understanding of objectives, dependencies, and priorities.
Supporting Iteration Execution: During the PI, the Scrum Master/Team Coach supports the team in executing their iterations. They facilitate Agile events such as backlog refinement, team planning, team sync, review, and retrospectives. They also help remove any impediments that arise, ensuring the team can deliver value consistently by Working within the ART’s cadence and collaborating with the PO.
Building High-Performing Teams: The Scrum Master/Team Coach focuses on building and nurturing high-performing teams. They foster an environment of trust, collaboration, and continuous improvement. They support team members in understanding and embracing Agile principles and practices, helping them grow their skills and capabilities.
Improving ART Performance: The Scrum Master/Team Coach contributes to the improvement of the Agile Release Train’s (ART) performance. They identify areas for enhancement, facilitate discussions and retrospectives, and implement process improvements to enhance the efficiency, quality, and predictability of the ART’s deliverables.
Improving Flow: The Scrum Master/Team Coach helps improve the flow of work across the ART. They assist in identifying and addressing bottlenecks, reducing waste, and optimizing the flow of value delivery. They encourage the use of visual management systems like Kanban, and other Lean-Agile principles to streamline the flow of work.

In addition to these core responsibility areas, SM/TCs may also be responsible for other tasks, such as.

Training new team members on agile practices
Administering agile tools and processes
Providing metrics and reports on agile progress
Representing the team to stakeholders

SM/TCs play a critical role in the success of agile teams. They are responsible for ensuring that teams are able to adopt and implement agile practices successfully.

Agile Team Members

Agile teams are responsible for delivering value to customers in an iterative and incremental way. This means that they deliver working software frequently, typically every 2-4 weeks. This allows customers to get feedback on the software early and often, and it also allows the teams to learn and adapt quickly.

Characteristics

Cross-functional: Agile teams are cross-functional, meaning that they have all the skills and expertise needed to deliver a complete solution. This includes skills such as design, development, testing, and release activities. By having all of these skills in-house, agile teams can reduce the time it takes to deliver a solution, and they can also improve the quality of the solution by ensuring that all of the disciplines are working together seamlessly.
Self-organizing and self-managing: Agile teams are self-organizing and self-managing, meaning that they are responsible for setting their own goals, making their own decisions, and resolving their own problems. This allows the teams to be more agile and responsive to change. It also allows the teams to take ownership of their work and to be more motivated and engaged.

Responsibilities

Connecting with Customers- Agile teams need to rightly understand the Customer Centricity, I.e. understand what the Customer wants. Gathering feedback, and ensuring that the delivered solutions meet customer expectations is critical for the teams.
Planning the Work: They collaboratively plan and prioritize their work, breaking it down into manageable increments and creating a roadmap for successful delivery.
Delivering Value: Agile teams are responsible for executing and delivering valuable increments of work within short iterations or sprints, ensuring that each increment contributes to the overall product or project goals.
Getting Feedback: They actively seek and incorporate feedback from stakeholders, customers, and end-users, enabling rapid validation and iterative improvement of the delivered solutions.
Improving Relentlessly: Agile teams foster a culture of continuous improvement, regularly reflecting on their processes and practices, identifying areas for enhancement, and implementing changes to optimize their performance and outcomes.

System Architect

System Architects have a crucial role in designing and evolving the architecture of complex systems within an organization. The System Architect needs to define and communicate the Technical and Architectural vision for the solution to be developed.

Key Collaborators

System Architects need to collaborate with various roles in the organization to communicate architecture needs, and challenges and also to get the inputs.

Agile Release Trains (ARTs): System Architects collaborate with ARTs to align the system architecture with business needs, provide guidance on technical implementation, and ensure architectural integrity.
Product Management: Collaboration with Product Management helps System Architects understand product requirements, priorities, and strategic objectives to design an architecture that supports the product’s functionality and goals.
Agile Teams: System Architects work closely with Agile teams to provide technical guidance, resolve architectural issues, and ensure that the system architecture is implemented effectively.
Release Train Engineers (RTEs): Collaboration with RTEs helps System Architects align the system architecture with the overall release train plans and coordinate dependencies with other teams.
Business Owners and Stakeholders: System Architects engage with business owners and stakeholders to understand their needs, gather feedback, and ensure that the system architecture aligns with business goals and requirements.

Responsibilities-

Below are the core responsibilities of a System architect.

Aligning Architecture with Business Priorities: System Architects ensure that the system architecture aligns with the organization’s strategic goals and business priorities, supporting the delivery of value to customers.
Defining and Communicating Architecture Vision: They define a clear architectural vision and communicate it effectively to stakeholders, development teams, and other key collaborators, providing guidance on the desired architectural direction.
Evolving System Design with Teams: System Architects collaborate with development teams to evolve the system design, providing technical guidance, resolving design challenges, and ensuring that the architecture supports scalability, performance, and other key system attributes.
Fostering Built-in Quality and Attending to NFRs: They promote built-in quality by defining and enforcing architectural standards, ensuring that non-functional requirements (NFRs) such as security, reliability, usability, etc. are addressed throughout the system’s lifecycle.
Supporting DevOps and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline: System Architects collaborate with DevOps teams and support the continuous delivery pipeline, enabling the efficient and reliable deployment of software and ensuring that the system architecture supports the principles of continuous integration and delivery.

In conclusion, PI Planning plays a crucial role in the success of any organization adopting the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). It brings together cross-functional teams, aligns their objectives, and facilitates communication and collaboration throughout the planning process.

By providing a structured framework for prioritizing work, resolving dependencies, and ensuring a shared understanding of the goals, PI Planning enables organizations to deliver value to customers more effectively and efficiently. Ultimately, PI Planning serves as the foundation for effective execution and fosters a culture of collaboration, transparency, and continuous improvement within the organization.