PI Planning Template
Bring your team toward one vision and decide what stories to develop with the PI Planning Template. Manage your team's backlog, increase productivity, and build the foundation for a successful PI Planning event.
About the PI Planning Template
Many product teams and agile facilitators use PI Planning to align and bring teams towards one shared vision. PI Planning is supposed to happen in person, but since the rise of hybrid work, many teams run it remotely. Miro’s PI Planning Template helps you get an excellent overview of your PI Planning event, with step-by-step frames that will guide you through the whole process.
Keep reading to know more about how to use the PI Planning Template.
What is PI planning?
PI planning or “program increment planning” is a method for strategizing toward a shared vision among teams. In a PI planning event, teams, stakeholders, and project owners are assembled to review a program backlog and determine what direction the business will take next. Typically, organizations carry out PI planning every 8 to 12 weeks.
Benefits of PI planning
PI planning can be useful in a number of ways, and teams in various industries apply the PI methods to boost efficiency and productivity.
Establish face-to-face communication
One advantage of PI planning is that it enables all the various stakeholders and teams on a project to meet face-to-face and talk about the overall mission and goals. This is the crucial first step towards aligning all the different parties towards the same mission and goals.
Boost productivity
PI planning fosters cross-team and cross-Agile Release Team (ART) collaboration and establishes a clear backlog and schedule for when tasks should be completed. With teams syncing and communicating in the right way and focused on their own goals, overall team productivity improves.
Align team goals
One of the main goals of the PI planning process is to set clear goals and ensure that all stakeholders and team members are working towards that goal. Making sure that everyone understands and shares the same goal is the foundation of a unified team effort.
When to use PI planning
PI planning is part of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), which is designed to help developers overcome the challenge of coordinating across teams, processes, and programs. In the SAFe model, teams are assembled into Agile Release Trains (ARTs), each of which works on a specific part of a broader goal.
To engage in PI planning, the Agile Release trains are brought together every 8 to 12 weeks. A PI planning event is an opportunity to step back and ensure everyone is still working toward the same business goals and is satisfied with the overall vision.
Create your PI Planning board
You can easily organize a PI Planning event remotely or in-person with Miro. Our PI Planning Template is divided into four parts:
Agenda
Program Board
ROAM Board
Teams Board
Read below to see how to use each part of the PI Planning Template:
PI Planning Agenda
Have a dedicated space to share the PI Planning schedule, where every participant will know what to expect and when. This will include all the PI Planning stages. Add a Program Backlog so you and your team know what still needs to be worked on.
Program Board (SAFe)
Here is where you and your team add milestones and iterations and how they correlate. Color-code tasks and connect them with lines and arrows to indicate flows and interdependencies. On the Program Board, you will overview features, dependencies, and milestones.
ROAM Board
A ROAM Board is where you and your team can see the program’s risks. That’s the moment to identify obstacles to achieving goals and decide how to proceed. Use the voting feature to perform the confidence vote.
Teams Board
Each team will have precise future iterations, tasks, and objectives moving forward. What’s on this frame needs to be included in the roadmap.
General considerations when running a PI Planning session:
Bring everyone together
Make sure all stakeholders, teammates, and project owners are present for the first all-hands planning session. For remote PI planning, you might choose to use video conferencing tools, which are widely used now.
Clarify team goals
Now, the team comes together to articulate the vision for the product or solution. Answer these questions: How are you filling customer needs? How have market changes impacted your ability to do so?
Draft a plan
Bring all these components together in a project management document for management and teams to review.
Tip: you can easily add Jira cards to your PI planning board to organize Jira issues and mark dependencies.
How do you do PI Planning?
A PI Planning event has a duration of 2 days, and it can be done remotely or in person. To run a successful PI Planning session, make sure that at the end of it you and your team come out with two things: committed PI Objectives and a Program Board where you will see the next milestones and delivery dates.
What are the PI planning stages?
The PI Planning event is divided into two days. On the first day, present your business context, draft a plan and manage and review blockers or constraints. The second day is meant to review your plan, evaluate program risks, perform the confidence vote and plan the rework and next steps.
Get started with this template right now.
Brainwriting Template
Works best for:
Education, Ideation, Brainstorming
Brainstorming is such a big part of ideation. But not everyone does their best work out loud and on the spot, yelling out thoughts and building on others’ ideas. Brainwriting is a brilliant solution for them—creative thinkers who happen to be more introverted. This approach and template invites participants to reflect quietly and write out their ideas, and then pass them to someone else who will read the idea and add to it. So you’ll get creative ideas from everyone—not just the loudest few.
Define A Winning Product Vision
Works best for:
Product Management, Planning
The Define A Winning Product Vision template assists product teams in articulating compelling visions for product development. By defining goals, target markets, and differentiation strategies, this template aligns teams around a shared vision for success. With sections for outlining product features, benefits, and value propositions, it communicates the essence of the product effectively. This template serves as a guiding light for product development efforts, inspiring creativity and focus as teams work towards bringing the product vision to life.
Pros and Cons List Template
Works best for:
Decision Making, Documentation, Strategic Planning
A pros and cons list is a simple but powerful decision-making tool used to help understand both sides of an argument. Pros are listed as arguments in favor of making a particular decision or action. Cons are listed arguments against it. By creating a list that details both sides of the argument, it becomes easier to visualize the potential impact of your decision. To make your pros and cons list even more objective, it can help to weight each pro and con against the others. You can then present your decision with confidence, making a strong argument for why it’s the right one.
Entity–Relationship Diagram (ERD) HR Management System Template
Works best for:
ERD
The Entity–Relationship Diagram (ERD) HR Management System Template in Miro is designed to streamline the management of employee-related information and processes within an organization. This template allows for the visualization and organization of complex HR systems, making it easier to understand relationships and processes. It enables users to map out departments, positions, and employee details, including attendance records, payroll, and performance reviews.
SIPOC Template
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Strategic Planning, Mapping
A SIPOC diagram maps a process at a high level by identifying the potential gaps between suppliers and input specifications and between customers and output specifications. SIPOC identifies feedback and feed-forward loops between customers, suppliers, and the processes and jump-starts the team to think in terms of cause and effect.
Johari Window Model
Works best for:
Leadership, Meetings, Retrospectives
Understanding — it’s the key to trusting others better and yourself better as well. Built on that idea, a Johari Window is a framework designed to enhance team understanding by getting participants to fill in four quadrants, each of which reveals something they might not know about themselves or about others. Use this template to conduct a Johari Window exercise when you’re experiencing organizational growth, to deepen cross-functional or intra-team connections, help employees communicate better, and cultivate empathy.