What Is a Valid Reason for Moving a Pi Objective to Stretch?
Making and meeting small commitments builds trust.
—Nonaka and Takeuchi, The Knowledge-Creating Company
PI Objectives
Programme Increase (PI) Objectives are a summary of the business organization and technical goals that an Agile Squad or railroad train intends to achieve in the upcoming Plan Increase (PI).
During PI Planning, teams create PI objectives, which are the things they intend to attain in the upcoming Program Increase (PI). These provide several benefits:
- Provide a mutual language for communicating with business and engineering stakeholders
- Creates the near-term focus and vision
- Enables the Fine art to assess its performance and the business value achieved via the Plan Predictability Measure
- Communicates and highlights each squad'south contribution to business organization value
- Exposes dependencies that require coordination
Details
SAFe relies on a rolling wave of brusque-term commitments from Agile teams and trains to help with business organization planning and outcomes, resulting in improved alignment and trust betwixt evolution and business organization stakeholders. These are communicated via PI objectives.
While, by its very nature, evolution is uncertain, the business organization depends on teams for some corporeality of reliable, anticipated forecasting. Also little, and the business organisation can't programme. Too much, and the business organisation has committed to longer term plans, which are at best unreliable, and besides limit agility. Business organisation and engineering science stakeholders need something in between, and that is a primary purpose of PI objectives. In addition to alignment, the process of setting realistic objectives also helps avoid too much work in procedure (WIP) in the organisation. PI objectives are built largely bottom-up as the teams identify them during PI planning.
Building the Team PI Objectives
During PI planning, the teams get presented with new Features and plan the Stories they need to deliver these alongside stories that correspond piece of work from their local context. This work is described equally a gear up of specific team PI objectives. Doing so requires estimating and planning, knowledge of the teams chapters, analysis of upcoming features, defining stories for the Team Backlog, and, finally, summarizing the data into uncomplicated business terms that can be understood by everyone.
Every bit for the number of objectives a team should establish, there is no stock-still dominion, but 7-10 seems to be about right. More than, and the item and specificity are hard to understand and process by other teams and the team'south business partners. Plus there are too many to review and procedure in a medium to large Art. Less, and the level of brainchild or aggregation is probably too high to be measured objectively at the end of the PI.
Figure i illustrates an instance of one team's PI objectives.
Differentiate between Features and PI Objectives
The squad's PI objectives ofttimes relate directly to intended features; indeed, many are the aforementioned. However, the mapping is not always straightforward, since some features require the collaboration of multiple teams, equally Figure 2 illustrates.
Note that some features (such as Feature A) can be delivered past an individual team; others (Feature B) require the collaboration of several teams. In addition to features and inputs to features, other team objectives will appear as well. These can include technical objectives (for example, the proof of concept in Effigy one) that enable future features, enhancements to development infrastructure, Milestones and others. All the results of the planning procedure are captured in the team's objectives.
Features and acceptance criteria are first-class tools to assist understand, capture, and collaborate around the work that needs to be done, but it's all too easy to get caught up in 'finishing the features' and missing the overall goals hiding within. PI objectives help shift focus abroad from developing features to achieving the desired business outcomes.
A better understanding of the intent offered by direct conversations with the Concern Owners oftentimes results in the teams providing new perspectives to Arrangement Architects/Engineering and Product Direction and quickly finding ways to apply their expertise to create better solutions.
(Note: The advanced topic article Role of PI Objectives further explains the differences between team PI objectives and features and provides additional insights into their usage and value.)
Committed and Uncommitted Objectives
Committing to, and delivering, a series of short-term objectives helps to build trust. Trust allows all stakeholders to move forrard with confidence and to base of operations decisions and plans on what is 'very likely to exist true very before long'. But planning with confidence in the face up of the uncertainty inherent in research and development is hard. Things don't always go every bit planned, and it'due south simply prudent to build some pocket-size amount of buffer into the system. If the buffer is too big, then less might be accomplished than would otherwise exist the case. If the buffer is too small, many commitments may turn out non to be feasible and planning and confidence erodes. To address, this Safe recommends teams use both committed and uncommitted objectives during planning. (Annotation: these were 'stretch' objectives in earlier versions of SAFe). Uncommitted objectives help improve the predictability of delivering business value since they are not included in the team's commitment or counted confronting teams in the program predictability measure.
Uncommitted objectives are used to identify piece of work that can be variable within the scope of a PI. The piece of work is planned, but the result is simply non certain. Teams can employ uncommitted objectives whenever there is depression conviction in meeting the objective. This can be due to many circumstances:
- Dependencies with another squad or supplier that cannot exist guaranteed.
- The team has picayune to no experience with functionality of this type. In this case the teams may plan 'Spikes' early on in the PI to reduce uncertainty.
- At that place are a large number of fairly critical objectives that the business is depending on and the team is already loaded shut to total capacity.
In this case, a few (no more than 2-iii) uncommitted objectives are prudent. Nevertheless, teams do their best to evangelize the uncommitted objectives, and they are included in the capacity and plan for the PI. Notwithstanding, since these objectives might non exist finished in the PI, stakeholders program appropriately.
Uncommitted objectives provide several benefits:
- Improved economics – Without uncommitted objectives, a team is committing to a 100 percent scope in a stock-still timebox. This forces teams to trade off quality or build other buffers into the system. The other buffers can accumulate, and convert 'uncertain earliness to certain lateness', resulting in less overall throughput.
- Increased reliability – Uncommitted objectives represent variable scope, allowing confidence in the delivery of the main priorities. In plough, delivering on the stated commitments is the most important factor in building trust between the teams and the stakeholders.
- Adaptability to change – To reliably evangelize on a cadency, uncommitted objectives provide the capacity margin needed to meet commitments, yet alter priorities if necessary, when fact patterns change.
Write SMART PI Objectives
Team PI objectives are a summary of a squad's programme for the PI. They are critically important. Sometimes the descriptions may exist very technical and/or a little vague. As a countermeasure, teams make their objectives SMART:
- Specific – States the intended upshot concisely and explicitly as possible. (Hint: Effort starting with an action verb.)
- Measurable – It should be clear what a squad needs to do to reach the objective. The measures may be descriptive, aye/no, quantitative, or provide a range.
- Achievable – Achieving the objective should exist within the team'south control and influence.
- Realistic – Recognize factors that cannot be controlled. (Hint: Avert making 'happy path' assumptions.)
- Fourth dimension-spring – The fourth dimension flow for accomplishment must be inside the PI, and therefore all objectives must be scoped appropriately.
Communicating Concern Value with PI Objectives
As objectives are finalized during PI planning, Business Owners collaboratively assign 'business organization value' to each of the team'southward objectives in a face up-to-face up conversation. The value of this particular conversation with the team cannot be overstated, as it communicates the strategy and context behind these weighting decisions. Concern Owners use a scale from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest) to charge per unit each objective. They need non exist 'normalized' across teams; every team has some highest priority (rated 10) items.
Business value is assigned, not calculated, and serves as an input to execution considerations. Many of the squad's objectives provide straight and immediate value to the solution. Others, such as Enablers (e.one thousand., advances in infrastructure, development environments, and quality initiatives) allow the faster creation of future business value. All of these factors must be weighed in the last balance.
Finalize Squad PI Objectives
When objectives accept been fabricated 'SMARTer,' uncommitted objectives take been identified, and business value has been established, then the objectives in Figure i might evolve to look similar those in Figure 3.
Commit to PI Objectives
A vote of confidence is held near the end of PI planning, where the teams commit to the PI objectives. (Uncommitted objectives are not included in this commitment.) Nevertheless, it must be a reasonable ask for the people who practise the work. Therefore, the Rubber commitment has two parts:
- Teams hold to do everything reasonably in their power to meet the committed objectives
- During the course of the PI, if it'southward discovered that some objectives are not achievable, then the teams hold to escalate immediately so that stakeholders are informed and corrective activeness can be taken
In this manner, all stakeholders know that either the program results will exist achieved as planned, or they volition be provided sufficient notice so as to be able to mitigate and take cosmetic action, minimizing concern disruption. That's about as proficient as it gets, considering this is, after all, research and evolution.
Creating Program and Solution PI Objectives
The output of the PI planning process will be a collection of approved team PI objectives sheets; i per team. Teams vote on the confidence level for the objectives as a ready, and if conviction is high enough, the aggregate set of objectives becomes the committed ART plan. The Release Railroad train Engineer summarizes the team objectives into the program PI objectives in a format suitable for management communication.
The summarized objectives should exist SMART, much like the team PI objectives, and have uncommitted objectives. Also, like the team PI objectives, the programme PI objectives might describe business features the ART is working on, enablers, or other business or technical goals.
If the Art is role of a Solution Railroad train and then during the Postal service-PI Planning result, later all the ARTs take planned, objectives are further rolled up past the Solution Train Engineer, and the solution PI objectives are synthesized and summarized. This is the top level of PI objectives in SAFe, and they communicate to stakeholders what the Solution Train will deliver in the upcoming PI. Effigy 4 beneath illustrates this summary from squad to program and from program to solution PI objectives.
Information technology's of import that business value is only assigned to team PI objectives. The predictability metric itself is rolled up to determine predictability at a higher level.
Reduce WIP with Realistic PI Objectives
During the review of the team PI objectives, not everything that was envisioned by the various business concern stakeholders will probable be achieved in the PI timebox. Therefore, some of the planned work will need to be reevaluated with Business concern Owners to gain understanding to the PI objectives.
Those lower-priority work items get moved dorsum into the Program Backlog. Decreasing excess WIP reduces overhead and thrashing, and it increases productivity and velocity. The net result is a feasible ready of PI objectives that are agreed to by all business stakeholders and team members, as well as increased efficiency and a higher probability of delivery success.
Planning at the large solution level can be very similar; the planning of the ARTs will affect each other, pushing some work back into the Solution Excess for re-evaluation in a later PI.
Learn More
[i] Leffingwell, Dean. Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs, and the Enterprise. Addison-Wesley, 2011.
[2] Reinertsen, Donald. The Principles of Production Development Menstruum: Second Generation Lean Product Development. Celeritas Publishing, 2009.
Final update: 10 February 2021
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