#171 – Pre-PI Planning

Just like a team shouldn’t have Features corresponding to its full capacity refined, planned and committed to (in the form of PI Objectives) before a PI Planning, an entire ART shouldn’t have its combined capacity filled up before Pre-PI Planning, either.

Some organizations shorten their PI Planning to one day in the name of efficiency and effectiveness, but the consequence can be that too much work has to be done beforehand; Features have to be refined, the Feature Definition of Ready met, dependencies aligned, and Business Owners prepared. All that is perfectly OK, as long as there is (a lot of) wiggle room for the teams to change their plans at PI Planning based on conversations with each other.

When working in a super-scaled context of Large Solutions SAFe with Solution Trains, there’s Pre-PI Planning is also a potential funnel of work for the teams, as they’ll have to help the other dependent teams in not only their own ART, but also other ARTs. So, Product Owners must accept that an even smaller part of their team’s capacity is available for their own product—and don’t even get us started on the multiple levels of refinement needed…