For many companies, PI planning or big room planning is a significant success factor for planning projects and programs and involving the teams involved.

Carrying out a PI planning requires a lot of organizational skills, as it is important to make the time as efficient as possible for everyone involved and to optimize the event for value creation.

If the teams or individual team members are also spatially separated, the requirements for tools and communication options increase enormously.

Many of our customers currently have to convert PI Planning from a planned face-to-face event into a remote working event in a short period of time and are therefore asking us about the possibilities to support this technologically. There is no standard recipe that can be used for all situations. This article focuses on various solutions and links to some helpful articles on the topic of distributed work.

Everything SAFe®?

Even though that PI Planning a SAFe® discipline is, the approaches described are not limited to this framework. The ability to coordinate work in a team and create a common working basis, including dependencies and a roadmap, is a generally valid requirement. Each team or organization can therefore also individually adapt and expand its suitable setup to suit its needs.

Most companies already use tools for collaboration and teamwork. As an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner, we therefore provide Jira Software and Confluence when we look at the center. We also present some solutions that can be seamlessly integrated with Jira Software or can be used completely independently.

Jira Apps for PI Planning

The following list is not exhaustive and focuses on the apps that we have already been able to use successfully with our customers. Have you discovered an exciting solution for yourself? We welcome any feedback and are happy to add more ideas to the list.

Programs for Jira - Easy Agile

Programs for Jira impresses with its structured structure and supports cross-team coordination in a simple and tidy way. Fully integrated in Jira, projects can manage PI roadmaps at a higher level and view the individual Product Increments (PI) dependencies. Each team coordinates their work and dependencies with other teams in their team backlog.

Programs can be quickly and easily integrated into Jira and are therefore immediately available to teams.

Easy Agile The manufacturer of Programs for Jira has the following article on the topic”How to prepare for distributed PI planning“created.

Agile Hive - Seibert Media

Agile Hive can be described as a complete solution for your SAFe® process in Jira. All SAFe® disciplines and hierarchies are supported and made available in Jira. The integration of Confluence and the associated combination of task and knowledge management has also been nicely implemented.

Peter Weingärtner from Seibert Media has described the process of PI planning with Agile Hive in a recent blog:
“Agile Hive: PI Planning in the Time of Covid-19”

The appropriate webinar on the topic has just been published: “Remote PI Planning with Agile Hive”

Big Picture - SoftwarePlant

BigPicture is a complete solution for project management that integrates seamlessly with Jira and supports a whole range of activities, such as: portfolio management, roadmap, resource management, risk management, etc.

SAFe® is fully supported, which is why PI planning is also possible.

The manufacturer SoftwarePlant described in the blog article”How to do PI planning in Jira with SAFe in mind?“how PI planning can be carried out in connection with BigPicture.

Jira Align - Atlassian

Jira Align is aimed at larger companies that are driving agile transformation across divisions. All levels are supported, from the product/project portfolio to the delivery team. If you're looking for a complete solution that covers all of these aspects, Jira Align fully supports you.

The following blog article from Atlassian summarizes some Virtual/Remote PI Planning best practices and presents solutions with Jira Align:
“Virtual/Remote PI Planning Best Practices and FAQ Table of Contents”

Standalone apps

The following tools can be completely detached and used in conjunction with Jira Software. All tools have integrations to exchange data and, where appropriate, to avoid media breaks.

Pi Planning app - Rentouch

The team of Rentouch Since its inception, it has specialized in optimizing remote work for teams. They have their expertise and experience in Pi Planning app incorporate, which has been allowing teams to successfully carry out locally separated PI planning for quite some time.

The PI Planning app impresses with its simple operation and real-time synchronization. All team members can therefore follow all changes live. The result is a “single source of truth.” The integration with Jira Software is of course exciting for us.

Your advantage: You can start using the PI Planning app right away. The Swiss company Rentouch offers a 30-day trial. Start your free trial right here.

The latest video from Rentouch sums up the current situation and explains how the PI Planning app works in 3 minutes: “Piplanning app — The solution for remote SAFe PI Plannings”

Miro

Miro It used to be called Real Time Board. And the old name says it all. Miro focuses primarily on the general collaboration of distributed teams on a shared whiteboard. In addition to the options of PI planning, many other creative approaches are supported, such as: ideation/brainstorming, creative work and design, etc.

Miro has a Integrate with Jira, which allows Jira issues to be managed as cards directly on a whiteboard. Changes are synced instantly.

Mural

Auch Mural primarily addresses remote collaboration and offers many possible uses for distributed teams. Different templates give a good impression of Mural's wide range of applications, as this project management example shows.

Mural also lets me Connect Jira and prevents a media break.

For those who are familiar with the Atlassian Playbook, we'd like to refer to the Atlassian Playbook Template point out. The playbook helps teams to constantly improve. Especially for distributed teams, this approach helps to advance the topic.

More remote work tips

There are currently countless tips and tricks for dealing with remote work everywhere. We would therefore like to limit ourselves to a few highlights here:

• Atlassian makes many of its products available free of charge for smaller teams. All information about this is available here:
  https://www.atlassian.com/remote
• Slack enables conversations efficiently and purposefully. Oh yes, the mailbox is also heavily relieved:
  https://slack.com/intl/de-ch/

How can we help?

At Swarmit, we want to help you make distributed work as efficient as possible. We know all of the solutions presented in practice. In addition, our certified SAFe® Program Consultants (SPC) are familiar with the methodological challenges.

We are happy to answer any questions you may have. We are happy to receive suggestions, additions and experience reports. We can also present all solutions to you in more detail.

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