Flying High with Agility: How Etihad Scaled PI Planning with Excellence
Join us on November 13 at 18:00 Gulf Standard Time for a live Zoom webinar: Flying High with Agility. Discover how Etihad Airways scaled Agile and PI Planning across global teams using SAFe® and piplanning.io. Gain insights from industry experts and learn how to drive alignment, collaboration, and faster delivery in complex environments.
When:
November 13, 2025, 7:00 am – November 13, 2025, 8:00 am MST
Where:
Virtual Event
Who:
Agile Professionals, Business Analyst, Business Professionals, Certified Members, Enterprise Agile Coaches, Product Owner, Program or Project Manager, Release Train Engineer, Scrum Master, SPC
In this exclusive session, Etihad Airways will share their journey of scaling Agile practices across distributed teams. Learn how they leveraged SAFe for transformation, aligned cross-functional teams, and used tools like piplanning.io to maintain visibility and momentum. Panelists from Etihad and piplanning.io will offer practical strategies and lessons learned from real-world PI Planning experiences.
Whether you’re an RTE, Scrum Master, Agile Coach, or transformation leader, this webinar delivers actionable insights to elevate your planning process.
Seats are limited — register now to secure your spot!
“Adopting SAFe has been an incredible and proud journey for us. The collective commitment and determination from leadership to Agile teams enabled us to overcome periods of uncertainty and challenges, leading to our first significant achievements. By bridging the gap between the business and technical worlds and fostering alignment across the entire organization, SAFe has proven to be an indispensable framework… for sustainable growth and long-term success.”
— Trang Duong, COO of Mobio
Overview
Mobio offers an all-in-one Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Customer Data Platform (CDP) that serves more than 50 organizations worldwide. They pride themselves on being more than just a technology provider. They are a strategic partner assisting in digital transformations. Mobio’s goal is to empower marketing, sales, and service teams to work in harmony and build deeper customer relationships–all from a single, unified platform. Read on to learn more about how Mobio was able to align business and technical teams with the Scaled Agile Framework.
The Challenge: Finding Alignment Between Business and Technical
The greatest challenge Mobio faced before transitioning to SAFe was the lack of alignment between the business world and the technical world. Business objectives and customer pain points could not effectively reach the product development teams due to a missing feedback loop, which resulted in outputs lacking empathy and difficulties for users in adoption.
At the same time, as our product grew into a more comprehensive solution, the fragmentation among Agile teams and between different solution components became increasingly evident, making integration and scale-up efforts highly challenging.
Previously, Mobio had applied Scrum, which was suitable in the early stage when the product scale was small and focused on a single product line. However, as Mobio expanded into three parallel product lines with strong interdependencies, Scrum began to show its limitations. Overlaps in collaboration created difficulties in maintaining alignment, transparency, and ensuring both speed and quality — critical factors for the company’s long-term goals.
These challenges ultimately drove Mobio to adopt SAFe — a framework designed to scale, orchestrate cross-team and multi-product collaboration, while preserving agility. With SAFe, Mobio has been able to establish a synchronized and sustainable development process, bringing our solutions closer to customers.
Why use SAFe?
When facing these challenges, Mobio’s leadership team proactively sought solutions and explored several methodologies and frameworks, including Scrum of Scrums, LeSS, and Scaled Agile. After carefully comparing the strengths and weaknesses of each, Mobio chose SAFe for these key reasons:
First, when mapping against their biggest pain point, Mobio recognized that SAFe’s mindset, core values, and principles are oriented toward outcomes rather than outputs. This ensures top-down strategic alignment, connecting the objectives of the entire organization with each Agile team’s objectives.
Second, SAFe strongly supports customer-centricity and the economic view at every level and role across the enterprise.
Third, while the framework is inherently complex, this very characteristic brings clarity in roles and responsibilities, along with detailed guidance on how the system should operate. This makes communication, training, and implementation significantly more effective.
Above all, SAFe is designed for building complex solutions with a product-development mindset, rather than just creating simple tools within a project-based approach. “This is precisely what we were looking for, and so far, it has proven to be the right decision,” says Duong.
Results and Business Outcomes with SAFe
Since implementing SAFe, Mobio has observed significant improvements across process, Agile teams, and business outcomes:
How SAFe led to process improvements and helped teams align:
Thanks to PI Planning, IT Planning, and regular sync sessions, transparency and collaboration among Agile teams have been markedly enhanced.
Backlogs, progress, and risks are now better managed, with survey results averaging 4/5.
Although PI Objective completion rates fluctuated in some periods, the overall trend has improved due to better dependency identification and stronger delivery discipline. Average completion rates increased from 60% to 82%.
Predictability rose from 65% to 85%, making product planning and releases more accurate.
Mobio’s first PI Planning
Mobio’s second PI Planning
Agile team performance:
Teams are more seamlessly connected through Agile Release Trains (ARTs) and PI Objectives.
Survey results show that most members feel their daily work directly contributes to the company’s overall goals.
Team responsibility and cohesion improved significantly, with average scores rising from 3.4/5 before SAFe to 4.1/5.
Blocker resolution time was reduced from 2 days to 0.5–1 day.
Team satisfaction increased by 15–20% after 4 PIs, reflecting higher ownership and stronger team engagement.
Achieving business and customer outcomes with SAFe:
Release cycles are now consistently maintained every two weeks, delivering value to customers faster.
Bug counts decreased by over 30% after 4 PIs, demonstrating continuous product quality improvements.
The ratio of post-release bugs to total development bugs dropped from 8% to 3%, making the product more stable and reducing customer issues after releases.
The percentage of features delivering measurable business value rose from 75% to 90%, showing clear improvement in prioritization and feature selection.
Beyond Business: How SAFe Improved Company Culture
“Beyond the business benefits, what impressed us most about adopting SAFe were the positive impacts on people and culture at Mobio. SAFe’s mindset naturally aligns with and reinforces the core values Mobio embraces even before adopting SAFe: Ownership, Respect, and Growth-Oriented.” -– Trang Duong, COO of Mobio
Through SAFe practices that connect daily work with ultimate outcomes, every team member now experiences greater clarity, meaning, and ownership in their roles, Mobio reports. The company culture has become more open and transparent, as SAFe events encourage participation, facilitation, and the sharing of fresh ideas and perspectives. This has fostered stronger collaboration, mutual support, and alignment toward common goals.
At the same time, a culture of continuous learning and improvement has taken root, enabling the organization to become more proactive, cohesive, and mature with each Sprint and PI. Most importantly, individuals feel their voices are heard, team cohesion has grown, and satisfaction with the work environment has improved significantly — with survey scores rising from an average of 4/5 to 5/5.
In summary, SAFe has helped Mobio become more transparent, aligned, and adaptive in delivering value to customers. This has built a strong foundation for scaling Agile further and achieving even greater business results in the future.
O SAFe® Day Brazil realizado pela Adaptworksé um encontro imperdível na agenda de executivos, líderes e especialistas da comunidade ágil brasileira em busca de insights sobre como escalar a agilidade no setor público, aprender e debater sobre impulsionar a transformação Lean-Agile com SAFe® ou desejam conhecer os casos reais de aplicação no Banco do Brasil e Petrobras.
Speakers
Stosh Misiaszek
Senior Director of Federal Business Development, (Scaled Agile)
Together with our partner Deloitte, we are bringing together leading minds from administration and Agile transformation to discuss solutions for the future.
Speakers
Felix Dinnessen
Partner | Government & Public Services, (Deliotte)
Dr. Thomas Karl
Director | Technology Strategy & Transformation – Industry Lead GPS, (Deliotte)
Five years ago, I had the opportunity to participate in the 5 Things I Wish I’d Known before My First PI Planning video series for piplanning.io. Now, I’m reflecting on those tips and sharing them in this blog.
My journey with SAFe® started with SAFe 2.5. Since then, I’ve enjoyed coaching and mentoring other coaches and leaders.
As an RTE, I’ve had the chance to facilitate PI planning and coach others to take over that role. While facilitating and coaching, I identified six key tips that created the smoothest PI planning experience for everyone.
Here they are:
Communicate the core message
Plan social activities
Be mindful of the start time
Prepare, don’t over-prepare
Cleary visualize features
Take care of basic needs
PI Planning Tip 1: Communicate the Core Message
In the standard agenda, the first half-day of PI planning focuses on the vision, desired deliverables for the PI, features, and architecture.
As the RTE, it’s important to check that the messages from management, including executives, are inspiring and motivational. These speeches should reflect on achievements from the previous PI, address the current state, and provide insight into the organization’s future, specifically how the organization will contribute to building that future in the next PI.
It’s helpful to review and rehearse the message while supporting effective storytelling. Think of a traditional story arc. Assign you and your customers to a specific role and place in the story. Are you the hero or is the customer the hero while you’re the fairy godmother? What obstacles have you helped your customers overcome? What happy endings have you or your customers created? Sequencing your presentations in this way (if only loosely) will make it easier for your audience to connect with your organization’s purpose.
One important ingredient of effective storytelling is an executive who knows the customer and the business. They can create a truly captivating story based on real experience in the field. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and share the story or problem you’re trying to solve from their perspective. This will capture the audience and show your people exactly what they helped create for your customer or will create in the upcoming PI.
In summary, follow these pointers to create a core message that resonates with teams.
Do a rehearsal beforehand to ensure smooth transitions between segments
Support storytelling from one presentation to the next
Share customer success stories or examples from the field
Invite executives who know the customer and business to present and tell the story
PI Planning Tip 2: Plan Social Activities
Between days one and two, organize an activity like a fox trail or a bowling night. This unstructured time allows people to connect, converse, and build relationships.
However, it’s important to remember that there is still a second day of PI planning. Do not party too long!
Social activity ideas:
Bowling night
Fox trail
Escape room
Team dinners featuring local and international foods
If you don’t want to use outside work hours for social time, you can add icebreaker activities to the PI planning agenda. These are short, no more than 10-minute activities that allow people to learn about each other in a different context than work. However, it’s important to note that icebreaker activities don’t work in all cultural contexts, so use discretion when deciding whether or not to include them.
Here are some quick icebreaker activities:
Chat surveys or questions: Use the survey tool that comes with online meeting applications like Google or Zoom to poll the group on things like their favorite candy
Breakout groups/partners to answer a question or share favorites
Rapidfire, round robbin question and answer (better in smaller groups): Ask the group a series of “This or that” questions (for example, horror or mystery?)
Get to know you Bingo: Give everyone a card with different traits listed on it, like “Owns a dog” or “Has lived abroad;” during breaks, fill out your card with people who have those traits until someone shouts “Bingo” when they get five boxes checked in a row on their board
You can even get creative and pick an activity that matches your PI planning theme.
Because virtual PI planning is here to stay, we need to get creative with social activities you can do from afar. Plan time for structured exchanges and organize remote socials.
During Covid, we had “blind dates” during lunch for those who did not want to eat alone. Participants were assigned to another teammate to dine with. This meant they socialized via video call during their lunch from the comfort of their own kitchens.
Human interaction is important, and PI planning is a great opportunity to get everyone together, even virtually, to create relationships that make collaboration a seamless and enjoyable experience.
PI Planning Tip 3: Be Mindful of Start Time
During the first half day of PI planning, a lot of conversations take place. My SAFe experience is primarily in Europe, particularly Switzerland and Austria, where many people take public transportation to work. Therefore, it’s important to be mindful of the start time. Beginning at 8:00 in the morning might not be suitable as people often travel by train or bus. Starting around 9:00 A.M. allows for a more feasible and effective schedule.
Additionally, it’s common for fatigue to set in during the first half day, potentially due to cultural factors. Different cultures practice different presentation methods. This means some cultures are more tolerant of longer presentations than others.
To maintain high energy levels, it’s beneficial to keep some talks shorter and initiate breakouts earlier than the proposed agenda.
My remote agenda is different than for on-site PI planning. In remote settings, you’ll need more breaks than you have for on-site PI planning. Plan these breaks. Ask your Scrum Masters/Team Coaches to insist on these breaks. I have 15-minute breaks on my agenda every 60 – 75 minutes. During these breaks, I ask people to stand up and leave their desks to walk around, drink water, and do something physical. Remind your Scrum Masters/Team Coaches to do the same in the breakouts.
PI Planning Tip 4: Prepare, Don’t Over-Prepare
When preparing for PI planning, there are two approaches: A) Going in without stories and focusing on known features, or B) Going in with all the stories.
From my European experience, starting with fewer prepared stories yields better results.
Over-preparing with excessive detail can lead to wasted time. Imagine if each team spends three days preparing stories for their “assigned” features. They might then complain that two days of PI planning is wasted because they now have nothing to do.
The real waste lies in excessive pre-planning. What happens if the dependencies aren’t properly identified? Or if the business owner asks to reduce scope during PI planning due to a competitor’s actions? Valuable time would be wasted if the work that took time to plan is then descoped or deprioritized.
The magic of PI planning lies in the opportunity to learn together and collaborate closely.
PI Planning Tip 5: Visualize Features
It’s important to share planning progress while teams are working. Therefore, it’s good practice to visualize features so they’re accessible to the entire organization.
There are different ways to visualize features based on whether you plan in-person or virtual.
In-person
To track progress and provide visibility, pin the features on a board using multiple instances and colors. For example, use two blue slips and one gray slip—all pinned over each other. When a team selects a feature, they remove the blue slips and write their names on the gray slip on the board.
This allows the RTE, Product Manager, or Business Owner to see the progress visually. The more gray slips, the greater the progress. It also helps the team members understand who is working on what and provides an overview. The blue slips can be kept in the team area, pinned to the iteration where the feature is finished, while the other blue slip goes to the ART planning board.
Virtual
You can accomplish this same goal without physical stickies if you’re working in a virtual environment.
piplanning.io has a color-coding system for the feature stickies. Once a feature has been assigned to a team, it will change color. It will also list the name of the team assigned to the work.
This is a simple and easy way to see which features have been planned and which haven’t.
Feature stickies in piplanning.io
PI Planning Tip 6: Take Care of Basic Needs
Maintaining wellbeing is crucial for a productive session.
As the saying goes, “A hungry bear makes no tricks,” or as participants in a German implementation training described it, “Ohne Mampf kein Kampf,” which translates to “No food, no fight.”
It’s impossible to concentrate when you’re basic needs aren’t being met. Food, hydration, and bathroom breaks are essential for productive PI planning.
Designate someone to organize snacks, coffee machines, water, brain food, and other refreshments to ensure everyone stays energized and focused during the sessions.
If you’re virtual, ensure there’s a lunch built into the schedule and breaks during long meetings, especially during the first day. Encourage people to take breaks as needed throughout.
Conclusion
Now that I have dozens of PI plannings under my belt, I can safely say these six tips will provide you with a strong event that provides the right amount of certainty to an uncertain and challenging, but rewarding, experience.
In addition to these tips, here are some SAFe PI planning resources.
Nikolaos has always been driven by improving people’s working lives. As a developer, he wrote UIs that made work easier. As an organizational developer, systemic coach, and SPCT, he has added skills to that ambitious endeavor. In partnership with organizations, he develops them so both the organization and all employees benefit.
Struggling with PI Planning? Join us for a thoughtful exploration of strategies that enhance real-time collaboration and minimize cognitive load in PI Planning.
This session is designed to be interactive and focused on providing value to participants, with an emphasis on learning and growth. Whether you’re new to the field or an experienced RTE, we invite you to join us in this informative webinar.
Highlights include:
Real-Time Synchronization: Explore how bi-directional sync with ALM tools can eliminate delays, fostering efficient communication and information sharing.
Effortless Planning to Execution: An exploration of methodologies that ensure a smooth transition from planning stages to actionable execution, keeping aligned with overall objectives.
Collaboration Beyond Boundaries: Insights into tools and practices that enable effective collaboration, regardless of location.
Smart Visualization: Get insights into optimal planning through visual aids that guide, rather than dictate, the planning process.
With a focus on customer success and a user-first approach, I leverage my expertise in product/market strategy and execution to deliver tangible results that delight end-users and propel the business forward. Whether it’s identifying pain points, uncovering unmet needs, or discover hidden opportunities, I thrive on the challenge of creating innovative and impactful products that customers love.
Rosana Johnson
SPCT Candidate / SAFe Strategic Advisor
Rosana has twenty-five years of experience and is a successful result driven leader. She has an extensive background in transforming people, systems, tools and processes. Her expertise ranges from creating deliverables for complex tooling deployments to transforming teams to agile ways of working to drive productivity while delivering a solid customer/employee experience by accelerating time to market and ensuring quality and business agility.
Writing useful Iteration Goals and Planning Interval (PI) Objectives requires focus and discipline to achieve proper agility transformation. Bad objectives are one of the most common reasons organizations stop using them. This guide will help you write objectives that get results.
For simplicity, I will use “objectives” interchangeably when talking about iteration goals and PI objectives. Iteration goals are a scaled-down version of PI objectives, which means you can apply my guidance to both metric types.
Why We Write Iteration and PI Objectives
Before you can write effective iteration and PI objectives, you must understand why we write them. It’s common for organizations to treat objectives as summaries of the features or stories teams commit to in the PI or iteration. But that is a misunderstanding of the objectives’ purpose.
Objectives represent the Agile Team’s commitment to delivery in the PI or iteration. They create a feedback loop from the business to the team. This loop ensures both parties understand the organizational vision:
Teams can confirm their understanding of the business’s desired outcomes
The business can clarify or further refine its value priorities
During an iteration or PI Planning, teams neither commit to all the features brought to PI Planning nor to whole features. So it’s important to understand what outcomes the features create. This gives everyone a chance to weigh in on those outcomes.
How PI Objectives Support PI Planning
At PI Planning, the business gives its prioritized feature list to the Agile Release Train (ART). Then, teams on the ART sequence their stories and features based on their priorities and capacities.
During this process, teams will only commit to a subset of the business requests. PI objectives ensure teams commit to the proper subset of the business’s requests. Business value scores and conversations with business owners and key stakeholders also support team commitments.
Teams can then sequence stories and features into a delivery plan that leads to business outcomes. They communicate this plan through the objectives and summarize the business and technical goals in language the business understands. It’s much more than a summary of the planned work.
Another benefit of well-written objectives is they create an opportunity for alignment. Teams should be able to connect their features and stories to the highest value objectives. This makes it easier for the team(s) to see if they’re doing the most valuable work first. If not, they need to address priorities or technical dependencies.
How PI Objectives Are Evaluated by Business Owners
Besides understanding what objectives are for, we must also consider who objectives are for.
Teams write iteration and PI objectives for the Business Owners and key stakeholders. Teams do not write objectives for the Product Managers and Product Owners (POs) who manage the backlogs. The Product Managers and POs know what work they asked for.
Objectives communicate which business outcomes the team contributes to and why they matter. Teams then understand the deeper purpose behind their work, thus helping employee engagement.
Business Owners evaluate PI objectives at the end of the PI to help the ART measure its performance and business value achieved. This helps determine ART predictability.
One caveat to note: uncommitted objectives do not count towards a team’s predictability measure. Therefore, it’s important to write uncommitted objectives during PI planning to demonstrate that the team plans to complete the work but understands there are factors out of their control that may prevent them from delivering the value named in the objective.
Near the end of PI planning, the Business Owners assign a business value to each PI objective. The business value is a number between 1 (lowest) and 10 (highest). Business Owners quantify the value of PI objectives through a conversation with the team. To determine the business value, they consider questions like
Is the work customer-facing?
Will the work improve future velocity and value delivery?
When will the value be delivered?
How much of the organization will contribute to the objective?
How large will the impact be if the objective is not completed in the PI?
Once the PI is over, Business Owners assign Actual Business Value to the PI objectives. Actual Business Value is the amount of value that was delivered toward the objective in the PI.
For example, if one of your objectives was assigned a business value of 7, Business Owners will decide based on the team’s completed work how many of the 7 points were delivered. Like in PI planning, the scores are determined through conversations between the team and Business Owners.
The structure of your PI objectives impacts how smoothly the Actual Business Value assignments go. Well-structured and clear objectives help Business Owners and teams easily measure what was delivered in the PI. The tips in the following sections outline how to write objectives Business Owners and teams will understand.
How to Write Meaningful Iteration and PI Objectives
Now that we’ve identified what objectives are and who they’re for, let’s inspect some PI objective examples from the field.
Implement Jenkins
Build 2 APIs
Build a database
Design a template
These examples do not effectively communicate the business outcomes the work produces. Additionally, these example objectives are written solely from the perspective of development or engineering teams and have no connection to why the work matters. If the objectives just restate the names of the features, they are a waste of time and energy.
Let’s review how to write objectives that create a meaningful connection between the technical work and the business.
Second, a good objective has five components that effectively communicate a business outcome and why it matters:
Activity: What will we be doing?
Scope: What are the boundaries of the work we will touch?
Beneficiary: Who is the intended recipient of the new work?
User Value: Why does this work matter to the new user?
Business Value: Why does this work matter to the business?
Examples of each component include:
Activity: Create, Implement, Define, Design, Enable, Modify, Etc.
Scope: App, API, Mobile, Web, Database, Dashboards, Etc.
Beneficiary: Customer, End-user, System Team, Mobile Users, Etc.
User Value: Faster, Better, Cheaper, Enhanced, New Features, Etc.
Business Value: Reduced Call Times, Increased Sales, Increased Data Efficacy, Reduced Loss to Fraud, Etc.
You can put these two steps together using the following formula.
Iteration and PI Objectives Examples from the Field
Here are a few examples of good iteration and PI objectives from three different contexts.
Financial services company example
Activity: Add
Scope: three new methods of e-payment
Beneficiary: so that mobile users with digital wallets
User Value: have an improved checkout experience
Business Value: to drive a three-percent revenue increase
“Add three new methods of e-payment so that mobile users with digital wallets have an improved checkout experience to drive a 3 percent revenue increase.”
Digital transformation team example
Activity: Create
Scope: an Agile Ways of Working guide
Beneficiary: so that {Company} employees
User Value: have clear guidance on implementing Agile behaviors
Business Value:to enable a faster flow of value with higher quality delivery
“Create an Agile Ways of Working guide so that {Company} employees have clear guidance on implementing Agile behaviors to enable faster flow of value with higher quality delivery.”
An example from a team building a new customer data platform
Activity: Create
Scope: a single source of truth customer database
Beneficiary: so that customers who call us
User Value: have an improved customer experience
Business Value: with a 25 percent shorter time to resolution
“Create a single-source of truth customer database so that customers who call us have an improved customer experience with a 25 percent shorter time to resolution.”
Using the above approaches creates a powerful statement of business value. And it creates greater alignment between the teams’ work and business strategy. Tip: teams can write their objectives using the bulleted format to make them even clearer.
Find More Objectives Resources in SAFe® Studio
Iteration and PI objectives create feedback loops between the teams and the business. They also assess how well the team’s work aligns with organizational goals. When you understand this connection, you can improve your implementation of these objectives.
If you have objective-writing stories, good or bad, in your organization, share them with me. Together, we can improve this process for everyone.
Saahil is a SAFe® Practice Consultant Trainer (SPCT) and certified Enterprise Business Agility Strategist. He is determined to help organizations extend their Agility beyond IT. He started his career as a Data Scientist, and Saahil is still passionate about the metrics behind successful transformations. As a former collegiate rugby player for the University of Florida, Saahil bleeds Orange and Blue and is a die-hard fan of Gator Football.
As we approach 2023, you’re probably mulling over your next PI Planning event. Will it be in person? Will it be remote? Will it be something in between? How will that look?
Before 2020, most organizations held PI Planning events in person, but COVID-19 forced an abrupt shift to remote/virtual events. However, in recent months it has become clear that many organizations have fundamentally changed, and a new hybrid format is necessary. This hybrid format brings many challenges around facilitation, tools, and collaboration.
We just held our first hybrid PI Planning event at Fred IT Group. I wrote this blog post based on that experience. In this post, I discuss the following:
The four types or formats of PI Planning
The main challenges of hybrid PI Planning
How we prepared for our first hybrid PI Planning event
Before we go any further, it is essential to define the four types of PI Planning that are now commonly occurring:
In-person PI Planning — Everyone on the Agile Release Train (ART) is in one location (collocated). The planning is done face-to-face, in “a big room”, using physical tools. This format was the recommended and most common format before COVID-19.
Distributed PI Planning (Scenario 1) — Teams are collocated but distributed from other teams on the ART. This scenario occurs when teams are based in different countries or states, and it is impractical for them to travel.
Distributed PI Planning (Scenario 2) — Individuals are distributed, and there are no common or shared locations. Everyone joins remotely (typically from their homes), so facilitation is carried out using digital tools exclusively. This scenario is sometimes called remote, online, or virtual PI Planning. This format became prevalent in 2020 due to COVID-19.
Hybrid PI Planning — A subset of the attendees are located in the same place (a large meeting room). Other participants join remotely from individual locations (their homes). Teams may have a mix of in-person and remote attendees. Facilitation and tools are therefore needed to accommodate both types of participants throughout the event. Due to increased flexible working arrangements and remote-first hiring, hybrid PI Planning is likely to become increasingly common.
Although they might seem similar, there are key differences between distributed (scenario 1) and hybrid PI Planning. In the distributed scenario, the ART is spread across a few locations only, with a facilitator at each. Teams with strong dependencies will ideally be collocated, so most key interactions are still in-person. In hybrid PI Planning, there is one group in a central location and individuals joining from dozens of remote locations. This context is much more complex as all interactions are potentially a mix of in-person and remote. Additionally, hybrid events carry a unique challenge around ensuring that the in-person subset (effectively the largest group) does not disproportionally dominate the event.
The Challenges of Hybrid PI Planning
We suspected that hybrid PI Planning would likely need to differ from the in-person and distributed events we had previously held. Some of the initial questions that we knew we would have to address were:
How do we facilitate the event so as not to privilege people in the office over people at home? or vice versa?
How do we create equal opportunities to participate?
How do we help people returning to the office feel safe at their first large-scale work event in several years?
What are the challenges for people who have only attended fully remote, distributed PI Planning events?
What are the logistics of a hybrid event?
What tools and equipment are needed?
Do we use any physical tools? Or do we exclusively use digital tools?
How do we ensure that everyone can hear and be heard? And see and be seen?
Do teams do their breakout planning in the “big room”? Or do we need to provide physical breakout rooms? How do we help foster cross-team collaboration if the latter?
How do we communicate expectations?
How do we support our team facilitators (Scrum Masters)?
These questions are mainly looking to answer a broader one: How do we create an event that values and includes both in-person and online participants equally in a shared experience?
How We Prepared for Our First Hybrid PI Planning Event
Having established that hybrid PI Planning would involve unique challenges, we made some critical decisions and took the following steps to prepare.
Communication and alignment with the teams
Several weeks before the hybrid event, we held a meeting with the ART to share our plans and offer the team members a chance to ask questions or provide feedback. This pre-work helped us set expectations and create alignment. We also made and distributed an information pack, which contained information such as:
Agenda
Floor plans and locations of the team breakout rooms
Instructions on how to use video conferencing equipment
Facilitation tips
Excerpt from the information pack (floor plans blurred for this blog post)
Collaboration tools
We decided to primarily use digital tools over physical ones. We knew our remote team members would not be able to see or contribute to physical boards. We used Miro for whiteboards, Mentimeter for polls (including confidence votes) and feedback, and MS Teams for calls.
(Left) physical Program Board (Right) digital Program Board
Facilitation
In our Scrum Master Community of Practice, we ran a Futurespective workshop (AKA Pre-mortem Workshop) where we discussed what the worst and best hybrid PI Planning event would look and feel like. This helped our Scrum Masters anticipate issues, find solutions, and discuss the best outcomes.
Futurespective workshop
Moving team breakouts out of the big room
During in-person PI Planning, the entire event usually takes place in a single big room. Given the hybrid setup, we realized this would not work well for the team breakout sessions. So we booked individual breakout rooms for each team instead. We then used the main room for sessions with the entire ART, such as the Business Context and Plan Reviews.
Testing equipment
We spent significant time testing the equipment in both the main and team breakout rooms before the event. We also had backup plans in case of equipment failure.
My Key Hybrid PI Planning Learnings as Release Train Engineer
The two days were pretty intense, and we learned a lot. We collected feedback throughout the event so that we could continually make adjustments. We collected in-person feedback on physical boards and remote feedback on a digital board. This ensured we understood the context of the feedback we received. Keep reading for some of our key learnings.
PI Planning event feedback
Quality of internet connection and audio/video
Two of the most important success factors for a hybrid event are a stable internet connection and clear sound and video. We had a great audio and video setup, but unfortunately, the internet connection was poor in our main room on day one. After receiving feedback from our online participants, we moved to a location with a better internet connection for day two.
Consider what you share on the screen
We discovered during the main group sessions that it was really important that both the in-person and remote participants could see:
The screen share
The chat window
The videos of the other participants
If the chat window was not visible for in-person participants, they were not able to follow some of the conversations that were happening online.
We also realised it was important the online participants could see all the people in the room, not just the people presenting. Likewise, it was important for in-person participants to see the videos of the people online.
Microphone use and etiquette
Most of us were not accustomed to using microphones and struggled to hold them consistently at an appropriate distance (myself included). In-person attendees needed occasional reminders to wait for a microphone to reach them before speaking so that online participants could hear them.
Nerves
It had been several years since most of us had attended a large-scale work event in person, and many people understandably felt quite nervous. We chose to acknowledge this in the opening address, which I think helped calm nerves and establish an appropriately supportive environment.
The social benefit
One thing that was universally agreed on was that it was great to get a chance to meet or reconnect with all of our colleagues. We provided coffee, snacks, and lunch so people could spend their breaks socializing and not searching for food.
Time for a break
It takes a team
I learned that it takes a team to pull off a good large-scale hybrid event. If you are the RTE facilitating hybrid PI Planning, find people who can assist you with AV setup, office logistics, tech support, etc. It’s far too much for one person to attempt on their own.
Tips and Resources for Release Train Engineers Facilitating Hybrid PI Planning
Facilitating PI Planning as a hybrid event is a lot of work, particularly the first time around, but it is definitely worth trying. Although we are still learning, my key takeaways so far are:
Be intentional in how you design and facilitate the event, and do not underestimate the work required.
Expect to learn a lot and to make adjustments and improvements as you go.
Make sure you focus on both perspectives, in-person and online. Be extra mindful of the experience you are not having!
While we still value flexible working arrangements, the communal and social benefits of coming together for PI Planning are real, tangible, and significant.
Tom Boswell is an Enterprise Agile Coach and certified SPC and RTE. He has worked at multiple organizations using SAFe, coaching at the team, program, and enterprise levels. He is passionate about lifelong learning, helping others grow, empowering teams, and co-creating more meaningful workplaces. Connect with Tom on LinkedIn or at www.tomboswell.com.
This interactive session walks through updates with the Scaled Agile Product team to cover the following releases: Updated SASM Course Role-Based Home Page PI Planning in Collaborate Collaborate Improvements PI Event Facilitator Guides (ART & Team Events)
I’ve found myself in many different contexts throughout my career as a SAFe scrum master:
Multimedia
Instructional design
Marketing
Globalization
Data analytics
Make no mistake. I am neither an animation artist nor an instructional designer, nor a digital marketer, nor fluent in a second language, nor can I write SQL (or any code for that matter).
So how do I effectively work as a scrum master when I don’t share technical experience with my teammates? I’ll help you answer that common question by focusing on three areas:
What does a scrum master do?
What if I’m a scrum master without experience?
Setting scrum master improvement areas
What does a scrum master do?
This sounds simplistic, but there’s a reason! Reviewing the basics, in this case the role of scrum master, can help reaffirm your role on the team you serve and help you clearly state it to others.
Your goals are simple (not easy), and they often include:
Helping the team navigate ART practices and processes. In doing so, the team can participate fully and have their interests, concerns, questions, ideas, and voices heard. This is especially true for new team members. Everyone will need time and support to adjust to a new way of working, no matter their experience level. Scrum masters are a little bit like the glue that holds cross-functional teams and ARTs together.
Allowing teammates to focus on execution. As experts in their domain, your team members are usually deep in the trenches of value delivery. Most other team responsibilities are shared between you, the product owner, and the product manager. This means scrum masters need to be experts at supporting the PO, PM, and other team members at defining the why, gathering requirements, prioritizing work, and knocking on doors to unblock progress.
Being a champion of relentless improvement. You should help define success metrics, measure the team’s value delivery, and create a forum for the group to view and discuss the results. Teams might think they’ve defined value delivery well, but scrum masters are uniquely positioned to provide essential perspectives from the ART, customers, business owners, and other teams. Aside from objective metrics, you can also discuss qualitative experiences like team dynamics. In partnership with the product owner, you can create a system to start incrementally improving. The organizational value realized from increasing and sustaining employee participation is always significant.
The full SAFe® scrum master article has more extensive guidance to help you define role expectations and responsibilities. As a quick reference, the image below will help you visualize three core areas where any scrum master can immediately start to add value.
Does this work require you to know what the team is making and how? Yes, to an extent. But it often doesn’t require the depth of specialized knowledge needed to build end solutions. In fact, another voice with the same experience and biases might only add to a myopic perspective and goals.
What if I’m a scrum master without experience?
Starting as a scrum master without experience is a little overwhelming.
When it feels like too much, there are some foundational concepts you can use to stay grounded and help your team succeed.
Below are three key reminders for scrum masters that are new to their role or serving an experienced team in an unfamiliar domain.
1 | The team is expert in their way, you are expert in your way
To coach a team effectively, you need to understand and maintain focus on:
The team’s value flow
Typical bottlenecks
Impediments to high quality
The rest is simply nice to have. Understanding flow, bottlenecks, and quality will allow you to quickly grasp what holds the team back and how they achieve success. This will also help you relate to your team’s emotional dynamics, including what makes them personally frustrated or fulfilled. Empathy will break through differences in experience levels and foster lasting relationships.
If you’re still skeptical, think of it this way; the product owner is backlog and content authority for the team. They still do backlog refinement with the team. Why? Because team members are the experts! That’s their thing. That’s why they were hired.
A scrum master isn’t an expert in the same areas. That’s not their job. Their job is coaching and enhancing the PDCA cycle, customer centricity, flow, dependency visualization, bottleneck identification and removal, conflict management, and listening.
2 | Build initial trust levels with authenticity
The not-so-secret ingredient in serving any team is trust. If you share technical expertise with your teammates, building initial trust may be easier. Teammates will know that you understand their impediments and have insight into root causes because you may have experienced them before. Your coaching may be well received because “you know what you’re talking about,” and teammates can immediately talk shop with you.
There may be some initial distrust if you don’t share technical knowledge with your teammates and they don’t understand how you contribute. If this situation sounds familiar, it’s best to start with openness about your background and willingness to learn. Emphasize that you’re not a technical expert but you do fill many other roles that help them work better, including:
Servant leader
Live-in consultant
Advisor
Team protector
Your expertise starts with process, method, and people.
Trust is particularly key when your work environment prioritizes honesty, candid feedback, and personal responsibility. Technical competency is a must for most roles, but emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills are vital for helping teams and individuals thrive. Organizations using SAFe should create ample space for digging into messy issues, feedback, processes, and team performance. Scrum masters can build trust in these complex emotional environments in several critical ways:
Help everyone approach discussions in good faith
Create a safe environment for all feedback
Find and equip team members with the right tools and methods to provide feedback
Encourage participation by all; not only the loudest or most persistent voices
Communicate feedback clearly to others, demonstrating advocacy for the team
3 | Promote self-organizing teams
A scrum master’s best tools are powerful questions and intentional listening. If you share deep technical expertise with your teammates, you may have a bias when determining problems and solutions.
You might make more assumptions and be more suggestive because you have so much familiarity with the team’s work. Scrum masters without technical experience have the benefit of an outsider’s perspective and have no choice but to truly listen, clarify, and guide the team to their own solutions.
Setting scrum master improvement areas
It’s helpful to build trust and develop personal relationships. But you’ll need concrete growth goals to gain competency and confidence.
The list of scrum master improvement areas below will give you a big head start in owning your role:
Identify the team’s value stream(s). The team might already have a value stream visualization. Maybe the product owner knows it well. Or maybe there’s a great opportunity for the team to work on identification. This will help both you and your team understand how work flows and the most essential tools and processes the team uses. You’ll likely find areas for immediate improvement!
Ask obvious questions. Though it might feel like you’re slowing the team down, asking foundational questions is actually beneficial for everyone. Here are just a few obvious benefits:
You need to learn more about team content
The teammate receiving the question needs to think about the purpose and processes behind their work
Other team members who aren’t involved in that work may have the same question
Schedule one-on-one meetings. Learn team member’s professional goals and interests. Ask about their pain points, what keeps them up at night, dynamics within the team, dynamics with other teams, etc. Build empathy to help smooth over inevitable future difficulties. Also, if your teammate is comfortable with it, you can ask to shadow their work while they narrate and complete day-to-day tasks.
Always have a Google tab open. Answers to technical questions are often difficult to grasp. You can’t expect to know everything your team does. Instead of scheduling an hour lecture with a teammate every time curiosity strikes, try checking internal directories, knowledge wikis, and even Google to find a quick answer. Continuous learning is imperative.
Use an assessment to measure your progress. The AgilityHealth Scrum Master Radar Assessment (or a similar tool) can help you understand your current performance and identify areas for improvement.
Learn more about the team’s work. This shouldn’t necessarily be your first priority, but it’s definitely worth your time. Common examples include joining a lunch book club, attending a conference, creating content that requires you to learn new material, and reading technical articles. You’ll deepen your knowledge and show that you truly care about the team’s work.
Hone your craft. Consistently prioritizing professional development will demonstrate your growing expertise to the team. Whether you’re trying new approaches to retrospectives or diligently protecting and coaching team members, your efforts will earn trust.
If you’re still unsure about exactly where to spend your time, the graphic below breaks down how real scrum masters (in our company) spend a typical week. You can use this tool as a gut check for balancing priorities, assessing your time management skills, and planning for a productive iteration.
More Resources for You, Scrum Masters!
Even with prior scrum master work experience, serving a team with technical expertise that you don’t have can feel daunting. But a skilled scrum master can quickly bring significant value. By clarifying how you serve the team, building trust, and continuously learning, you and your teammates can work together to build a self-organizing, high-performing team.
Here are some additional resources to help you learn more about how scrum masters of all experience levels can continue improving and serving well:
Emma is a Certified SPC and scrum master at Scaled Agile, Inc. As a lifelong learner and teacher, she loves to illustrate, clarify, and simplify to keep all teammates and SAFe learners engaged. Connect with Emma on LinkedIn.
![PI Objective Formula
[Activity] + [Scope] so that [Beneficiary] have [User Value] to [Business Value]](https://scaledagile.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/SAi_Blog_Header_PI_Formula_103122-1-1024x244.jpg)
