February 19, 202624 min readAirSaas
PI Planning: the complete guide to aligning your IT and business teams
Contents
Aligning IT and business teams is often a headache. Between business priorities that keep shifting, tech teams juggling technical constraints, and silos that make communication harder, you quickly end up with projects that move forward… but not necessarily in the right direction.
The result? Frustration on both sides, delays, and lost value for the company.
That's where PI Planning comes in. A pillar of the SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), this quarterly event brings together every team involved in an Agile Release Train (ART) to synchronize their efforts around a clear, realistic plan. Over two days, IT and business teams work together to set priorities, remove dependencies, and make sure everyone is moving in the same direction.
In short: it's the moment when everyone agrees on what we're doing, why we're doing it, and how we're going to get there.
But be careful: a poorly prepared session can quickly turn into an endless meeting with no impact. For it to work, you need solid preparation, strong stakeholder involvement, and a real collaborative dynamic. Otherwise, you risk walking away with a fuzzy plan and a false sense of alignment.
So how do you turn this exercise into a lever for performance and engagement across your teams? What are the pitfalls to avoid? And above all, how do you make this event a driver of value creation rather than just one more constraint?
In this article, we'll break down the keys to a successful PI Planning, with concrete field feedback and actionable advice. Because done right, this event can change the dynamics of your projects and finally align IT and business teams around a common goal.
What is a PI Planning?
Let's start with the definition of PI Planning, and a few key concepts to know before getting started.
It's a large-scale team meeting aimed at organizing tasks over a defined period, called a Program Increment or PI (and Planning Interval since SAFe version 6). This collaborative session aligns objectives and coordinates the actions of all a project's stakeholders, ensuring clear, concerted planning for the period in question.
PI Planning is a shared process. The notion of "shared" matters because the whole point of this process is that the people who take part are the ones putting money in — so the ones expecting benefits from the deliverable. PI Planning forces them to ask the right questions about the value tied to the project. It puts responsibilities in the right place.
This practice is often used in the context of IT product development. However, it works just as well in more traditional, structured projects, such as organizational change management, hardware creation, or documentary projects.
At scale, this approach can structure an organization's entire build — every project and every product development in progress.
Thanks to this planning process, you can:
- Regularly define and redefine shared objectives for all your stakeholders, around shared priorities
- Plan each team's deliverables, especially in cross-functional projects, while limiting the impact of dependencies
- Regularly and collaboratively deploy and challenge an action plan that each team commits to following in order to reach the shared objectives, through clear commitments on deliverables
The session usually lasts one to two days, segmented to cover every topic of the upcoming PI: key milestones, features to develop, priorities, risks, and so on.
PI Planning and the SAFe framework
The Program Increment (PI), and by extension PI Planning, is part of the SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) methodology. In this agile approach, teams collaborating on a PI are called an "Agile Release Train" (ART).
To go further on SAFe best practices, see our 8 essentials for a successful SAFe PI.
Traditionally, according to SAFe principles, a PI spans a period of 8 to 12 weeks. However, if you don't follow this framework to the letter, you can adjust that duration to your organization's needs — for example, by choosing a quarterly cycle.
The SAFe framework considers a Program Increment to have a specific duration, but it's possible to adapt that timeframe. Time values like the quarter are deeply rooted in human culture, which can make PI Planning deadlines easier for everyone to grasp. And in France, a quarterly cadence helps avoid scheduling the next PI Planning during a holiday period.
This flexibility doesn't rule out keeping shorter sprints and regular deliveries, ensuring an iterative rhythm for the development team.
When scaling up to align a company on its strategic or vital projects, we strongly recommend choosing a quarterly rhythm. The sun gives us a quarterly rhythm for the seasons, finance gives us a quarterly rhythm for financial reporting — so why not follow a natural rhythm for the build, for projects?
For teams that are used to the SAFe context, you can use the term Program Increment Planning. But in a project portfolio management context, using the term "PI Planning" can be confusing — because stakeholders will want to cling to the SAFe methodology. So you might as well keep only the useful principles of PI Planning and use a less jargon-heavy term that fits the organization's culture: for example, Quarter Plan.
What are the benefits of a PI Planning?
PI Planning, this large-scale project management practice, holds many advantages — whether your teams follow the agile manifesto to the letter or not.
Thanks to a well-oiled PI Planning, you can in particular:
- Align all your stakeholders around shared, clear strategic priorities that are regularly redefined
- Get a realistic view of projects and product developments, to avoid the tunnel effect
- Foster collaboration and engagement among your projects' players: program, project, or product owners and sponsors (Business Owners & C-level executives), or leads of cross-functional topics (financial controllers, risk & cyber managers, DPOs, and so on)
- Stay one step ahead of your projects' potential blockers and risks, thanks to early identification of their interdependencies
As a result, PI Planning also lets you keep a closer eye on the budget of your projects and products.
The Program Increment Planning process helps you better control a project's budget. With a PI Planning, you see everything go by: the capacity as well as the budget to allocate at each stage. That gives everyone (including the CFO) visibility into how the budget envelope is used, and how its use is prioritized over the period.
In short, PI Planning is an iterative development practice for accelerating the delivery of value from your projects and moving into a continuous-improvement approach.
But to reap these benefits, you need to understand how to set up a well-designed PI Planning at scale. Good news: that's exactly what this article reveals!
What does a successful PI Planning look like, with concrete benefits?
Here's what two typical days of PI Planning look like.
The prerequisite and the ongoing challenge: a calm, transparent climate for exchange
One of the keys to a successful PI Planning is managing to create an environment where everyone feels free to share their constraints, in order to collectively plan the project's future over the coming period.
Simple on paper. A real challenge for the organizers, who have to "sense" the company's moods and make sure everyone gets a chance to speak, while constantly prompting people to look for compromises.
Not lying to yourself in these moments is essential. Basing your thinking on the available objective data doesn't stop you from making reasonable bets, too.
A glass-half-full perspective will be an ally for always moving forward in resolving the portfolio's complexities.
To do this, use collaborative tools during the PI Planning; they help structure the exchanges and show that everyone's voice is taken into account.
Use:
- Team boards
- A dependency board
- A risk board
Also make sure to restate the rules of the PI Planning as soon as you kick off the meeting. Go into detail — for example, by highlighting the colors of the different sticky notes to use on the boards (depending on whether they're risks, key milestones, features, user stories, and so on).
These rules will be shared ahead of the discussions with each team, who can also skillfully prepare the ground.
And it's the role of the PI Planning facilitator, the Release Train Engineer (RTE), to manage to distribute speaking time fairly, to ensure calm exchanges.
The RTE is someone you choose for their facilitation skills. They have to be a good speaker and know how to manage their fatigue (because a PI Planning is tiring!). They need a few tricks up their sleeve to call for quiet, cut off overly talkative people, keep to the timing… RTEs often attend other PI Plannings to prepare.
An ultra-pragmatic launch of the PI Planning to give it meaning
The precarious balance — especially in the first experiments — between reasonable objectives and full impact shouldn't be discouraging. A PI Planning is a process that everyone learns from. Make sure to target the objective that solves one of the pains most widely shared by the teams.
At the very start of the PI Planning, it's the Release Train Engineer who takes the floor to open the meeting. They present the agenda for the coming days and highlight the objectives to reach.
"Here are all the challenges the PI lets us address, but for these first rollouts, we're going to focus on …"
They then present the vision for the upcoming PI, based on the strategic priorities they gathered ahead of the meeting.
The key stakeholders — Product Manager, leads of the various domains — present the PI's objectives, its vision, the roadmap, and the strategic priorities. Top sponsors from the organization may need to step in, prepared in advance so they personally carry the major strategic changes. Invite the business owners, the business directors, even the big bosses if you have to. Give these interventions the weight they deserve — they're the very reason your event exists.
The project vision is what lets you express, in the short or longer term, where we collectively want to go. The ultimate goal of the PI vision is to bring all the stakeholders on board over time, to have them all move in the company's direction.
Finally, the introduction ends with a reminder of the strategic stakes and the shifts to factor in over the coming period, a detailed overview of the backlog, and the priority features or deliverables to plan for that period.
Team-by-team planning workshops
During the second half-day of the PI Planning, each team launches its planning workshop. The idea: plan the delivery of the various features for the upcoming PI, detailing each user story and giving an estimate of the effort required.
Each team also analyzes the dependencies it might run into with other teams, and plans its iterations according to its capacity and the priority of the features to ship.
At this stage, the Scrum Master helps each team prioritize and organize the work. It's good to build a team of ultra-committed, multi-team champions to counter the "enlightened guru" side that too often clings to a Scrum Master…
Make sure a representative of the business sponsors is present in every phase of the PI. The big bosses at the beginning and the end, the business expert "knowers" at the heart of the exchanges.
The big difficulty, especially for the business teams, is managing to break the product down into finer features so the deliverable fits within the Program Increment period. To do that, you need to drive a culture change. Everyone has to understand that we're not building a monolith — that the product has to be sliced up to meet production deadlines. There are a few tactics for this: slice by geography, starting with one region first. Slice the product into smaller products (the car's tires before the cabin). Slice by population — for example, an 80/20 Pareto segmentation of the population concerned…
The RTE's tracking board: staying on course during the workshops
While the teams work on their planning, the RTE isn't sitting idle. Their role is to track each team's progress in real time, using a "Scrum of Scrums" board that asks the right questions:
- Have you identified the Capacity to Do (CAF) per sprint?
- Have you identified the total load of your features? Is it below 80% of your CAF?
- How many dependencies are left to negotiate?
- Have you identified risk-mitigation actions?
- Have you written your PI objectives?
This checklist helps ensure the quality of the exchanges between participants, and guides those who feel a bit lost during the Program Increment Planning.
This board is a simple but formidably effective steering tool. It makes each team's state of readiness visible and lets the RTE step in at the right moment, before a blocker takes hold.
Identifying dependencies, a key deliverable of a successful PI
Once the planning workshops are done, each team presents its plan to the whole agile train. Collectively, dependencies are validated, and each team's plans are adjusted to prevent those dependencies from creating bottlenecks.
Make sure these dependencies don't stay on the flip chart until the next PI — integrate them directly into your project and product tracking tools.
Risk management at the heart of the PI Planning's stakes
During the third half-day, the PI Planning participants analyze the risks the projects are likely to hit, which could potentially jeopardize deliveries. These risks are generally ranked by priority. Then the group puts in place actions to mitigate these risks.
Once again, particular attention should go to how you use this rich material (the risks) that surfaces during PI Planning. Choose a solution that makes these risks visible at the very heart of your portfolio, program, project, and product management.
A collective validation of the final PI plan
During the last half-day of the PI Planning, the team plans are finalized. The business representatives give their feedback on these plans, and final adjustments are made if needed.
Then everyone takes part in a confidence vote: the teams commit to aligning on the plan they've defined. In very rare cases, if the confidence vote is very low, it may be decided to rework the plans. But usually the planning workshops and the study of interdependencies have produced a solid plan, adopted by all.
Gathering feedback: showing you want to do better next time
A PI Planning doesn't end with the confidence vote. The final stage of the meeting is the retrospective — a dedicated moment for participants to share what worked well and what needs to improve for the next sessions.
Two formats work particularly well in this context:
The ROTI (Return On Time Invested) lets each participant quickly rate the perceived usefulness of the time invested. It's a flash indicator, perfect for taking the collective pulse at the end of the day.
The DAKI (Drop, Add, Keep, Improve) goes further: each participant identifies what to drop, add, keep, or improve in the process. It's a structuring format that feeds directly into the improvements for the next PI Planning.
Don't underestimate this step. A PI Planning that gets better from one quarter to the next is a PI Planning that takes lasting root in the organization's culture. And it's precisely this continuous-improvement logic that separates the teams that "do PI Planning" from those that genuinely get value out of it.
Right from its preparation, make your PI Planning an asset for transformation
You may have already gathered it: a successful PI Planning is a meeting that leaves nothing to chance and is well planned in advance. Here are a few key steps to go through for a smooth Program Increment Planning.
Bet on the right people to spark alignment
First, you need to draw up a list of participants for your PI Planning. All your project's stakeholders should be present — but be careful: it's also about bringing together the people who are genuinely decision-makers.
Otherwise, you run the risk of aligning the teams that do and those that organize without involving those who decide. Big warning: you're off to a bad start and will create high expectations. No sponsor, no PI.
A PI Planning is a planning session. Everyone needed for the planning and the trade-offs has to be present. On the other hand, be careful not to treat this meeting as "industrial tourism." If some people aren't needed, you might as well not invite them. Their presence risks polluting the PI Planning.
The following should be present at your planning session:
- Product Management, including the Product Owners
- The Scrum Masters
- The Business Owners, and the management involved in the project
- The architects
- The sponsors of the projects
Clarify everyone's role before D-Day
Having the right people in the room isn't enough: each one has to know what's expected of them. Take the time to spell out each profile's responsibilities ahead of the PI Planning:
The Release Train Engineer (RTE) coordinates and facilitates the entire PI Planning. They distribute speaking time, manage the timing, and make sure each workshop produces the expected deliverables.
Product Management (including the Product Owners) defines the priorities and the features to develop. It's the voice of the "what" and the "why."
The Scrum Masters help the agile teams prepare their plans, estimate their capacity, and clear operational blockers.
The Business Owners provide the strategic direction and validate the objectives proposed by the teams. Their presence is non-negotiable for the trade-offs.
Defuse resistance upstream
The participants' mindset is as important as their attendance. Spend time beforehand with the skeptical profiles: ease their fears, identify their constraints. If certain personalities are likely to slow the collective dynamic, prepare the ground with their direct manager. A simple deal often works: a personal stake addressed in exchange for a constructive attitude during the meeting.
Don't be naive on this point: a single poorly onboarded person can damage the impact of a PI Planning, especially during the first rollouts.
What can make a PI Planning fail is bringing together people whose objectives are truly at odds, keeping them from wanting to work with one another. But know that it's even possible to run multi-organization trains, with business partners. A sign that a PI Planning's success rests above all on the project being well sponsored on both sides. The PI Planning isn't a magic tool: everyone has to understand that we're after a collective win, a win-win process, despite any political misalignments.
Have a clear vision of the strategic priorities
When preparing your PI Planning, you need to determine the vision that will guide the period you have to plan. The idea: align everyone around the transformation your company is going to live through in the future.
Take into account the environment your company operates in and will operate in over the coming period. Your vision can be based on positive elements (like innovative projects the company is going to run), negative ones (like new competitors entering your market), or constraints (like a new regulation).
Also go talk with the business directors involved, and ask them what their strategic priorities are, and the friction points they'll need to address during the PI Planning.
Note that the vision you'll communicate to your PI Planning participants doesn't necessarily affect the upcoming period. It's mainly a broad guideline that should steer the prioritization of the actions to come.
Also remember to prepare your product roadmap and your backlog. Make sure the features are mature, understandable, feasible, sliced to fit within the PI, and loaded. Features that are too vague or too big will waste precious time during the planning workshops.
Anticipate potential blockers
Even though the PI Planning is meant to identify the blockers that could interfere with your project, take the time — if you can — to anticipate them during your preparation.
To do so:
- Prepare a risk matrix for the project
- Spot the potential bottlenecks, given the teams' interdependencies.
- Anticipate the constraints external to the project, as well as the technical questions participants might ask you.
The working material ahead of a PI Planning is essentially a project backlog, a project portfolio, pre-sorted with a macro-prioritization, and a "ballpark" estimate of the effort. And when you have a capacity issue, it can be worth trying to identify, upstream, which bottleneck might emerge.
Organize the logistics
You know it: large-scale project management demands considerable logistics. And that's just as true when organizing a PI Planning!
Take the time to:
- Block the planning days in the participants' calendars, and anticipate hotel bookings if some attendees need to travel. Book at least two months ahead. Also check whether the chosen dates let your guests plan team meetings on the preceding or following days — a deal with the local hotel is always something off the budget.
- Schedule the meeting in a room suited to PI Planning, or set up a videoconferencing tool if your meeting is remote. Your rooms (physical or digital) must be able to hold all the participants and let them work in smaller groups. Plan breakout rooms to handle problems that may come up during the session. Think about a seating plan that makes team and cross-team communication easier.
- Prepare a detailed PI Planning agenda. Carefully plan the length of each session. Then share this agenda with everyone.
Are you going for an online PI Planning? Don't underestimate the complexity of the logistics. Quality of the video calls, collaborative tools for the workshops, dedicated virtual rooms… Tests and a full dress rehearsal the day before seem essential. We personally advise against running your PI Plannings entirely remotely!
Communicate to change the project culture
Launching the iterative practice of PI Planning in a company is a genuine act of communication. You have to make sure your participants are ready to commit to it firmly, over time, and that they understand the benefits they can get from it.
Ahead of the PI Planning, you have to sell this process like a weapon of war. Everyone has to be ready to "burn the boats": each person commits to the approach, with no turning back. For that, you need to build engagement through a strong act of communication — by publishing posts on the intranet, for example. To launch a PI Planning, we once even ran an article on a leading external outlet to detail the process: ideal for building engagement.
Indeed, developers are often used to working incrementally, thanks to agile methods. But the business teams often have more trouble setting up such a fine, detailed planning method. The PI Planning process calls for real change management: communicating about the benefits, clearing everyone's blockers, and putting concrete techniques in place to plan better together.
Hence the fact that you have to drive diligent change management, communicating in a motivating way. Clear everyone's blockers ahead of the meeting, and remind everyone of the advantages of this way of working.
PI Planning pushes all the stakeholders to ask the right questions about the value tied to the project. During the discussions, the focus is on why we're doing this project, what the priorities are, and how to identify and manage the dependencies. This process lets everyone realize that project management is transparent, non-arbitrary, and puts responsibilities back in the right place.
What tools make for a PI Planning that runs perfectly?
An effective PI Planning doesn't rest on methodology alone: the right tools make all the difference. Without rigorous preparation and structured follow-up, this exercise can quickly become a waste of time, with fuzzy commitments and poorly managed dependencies.
That's where a tool like AirSaas makes complete sense. Even before the PI Planning, it lets you prepare the teams' capacity in advance, prioritize the key features, and anticipate the dependencies. By giving a clear view of the objectives and available resources, AirSaas makes it easier to review initiatives and aligns stakeholders on what's genuinely feasible over the coming quarter.
During the event, AirSaas structures the planning by making the trade-offs and commitments made visible. No more juggling dozens of boards: everything is centralized, readable, and actionable. And after the PI Planning, it ensures continuous tracking of commitments and project execution, to avoid drift and adjust priorities based on realities on the ground.
A successful PI Planning means solid preparation, smooth execution, and rigorous follow-up. With AirSaas, you give IT and business teams a clear, pragmatic framework so their efforts are genuinely aligned with the company's strategy.
Interested? Discover AirSaas, and book your demo right now.
After the PI Planning: ensuring follow-up so you don't lose the value created
The PI Planning is over. Two intense days, dozens of decisions made, commitments formalized. But all of that is worth nothing if the momentum drops the following Monday. Here's how to capitalize on the PI's energy.
Communicate the objectives and make them accessible to everyone
First reflex: gather all the Program Increment objectives and the team plans, and share them widely. Every participant should be able to easily find what was decided, everyone's commitments, and the associated deadlines.
Your plan in a hidden SharePoint or a PowerPoint sent by email won't cut it. Go for solutions that keep your plans understandable and accessible at all times — for the teams as well as the sponsors.
You didn't put in all this energy, mobilize this many brains, for the decisions made to stay confidential.
Set up follow-up rituals
Throughout the PI, regular follow-up is essential to make sure the plan is respected and that obstacles are cleared quickly. Three levels of rituals should be put in place:
The daily meetings (Daily Stand-ups) and the risk-management meetings let the teams handle irritants as they go.
The Scrum of Scrums and the PI Reviews ensure synchronization between teams at regular intervals. It's the moment to check that the identified dependencies are being properly managed.
The System Demos (or at least team demos) offer an objective, regular measure of progress, with the chance to receive feedback.
The pitfall many organizations hit: the PI Planning information stays on sticky notes in Miro or on a flip chart photographed… and six months later, we start identifying dependencies and risks all over again that we'd already cleared. Integrate the data produced during the PI into your project tracking tools, and use it continuously.
Inspect & Adapt: closing the loop before the next PI
Just before the next PI Planning, take the time to review what the PI actually delivered — in terms of value achieved, more than features shipped. This is the Inspect & Adapt ceremony: a key moment to identify what worked, what drifted, and what needs to change.
If the teams do Scrum, we keep all the Scrum ceremonies, which lets us handle the drift that may have appeared between the planning done in PI Planning and how things actually played out. And just before the next PI Planning, we run a session to review what the PI actually delivered (in terms of value achieved more than features) and to improve, a ceremony called Inspect & Adapt.
It's this complete loop — plan, execute, track, adjust — that turns PI Planning from a one-off event into a real engine of continuous transformation.
You're now ready to launch or optimize your next Program Increment Planning!
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