To proactively enable our teams to continue to work at scale, I implemented and led Program Incremental (PI) planning once a quarter to ensure we were focused on the highest leverage work, had the right number of resources and were able to effectively collaborate across teams.
I led the effort to define, align and iterate on the right format for the planning sessions. After a few cycles, the agenda that gave our teams the most fruition was as follows:
- Introductions
- Celebrating the work in progress
- Roadmap readout
- Q&A
- Next steps and action items
My role and the attendees
My role within the design team was as a domain lead. I would lead PI planning for design within a line of business. The visual below is a simplified example of what the design organization would look like.
The attendees of PI planning would include:
- Head of Design for the line of business
- Domain leads
- Team leads
- Pod leads
- Horizontal designers like researchers and content strategist
Celebrating the work in progress
At the beginning of the session, each team lead would share the wins within their space from the previous quarter. This achieved three goals – it started the meeting on a positive and energizing note, it established what had been completed from the previous PI planning session and it helped bring visibility to the work across teams that were not working directly with each other.
Roadmap readout
The majority of the PI planning time was focused on the roadmap readout. Each pod lead would share out a high level roadmap for the coming quarter. This roadmap would be informed by the roadmap created with their cross functional team. Each pod lead would extract the design specific initiatives and share a brief description of the work at the epic level.
During the share out, the attendees of the PI planning session would add notes to the slide the pod lead was sharing. The notes would help identify areas where the work in their space could be duplicative or an overlap of efforts existed, where there could be potential dependencies on the work in their space and where there were opportunities for collaboration. The pod lead would be responsible for following up on each of the notes after the PI planning session.
Q&A
Throughout the session, a “parking lot” would be maintained to collect questions to address at the closing of the PI planning session. Once the roadmap readouts were complete, we would review and address all questions in the parking lot.
Next steps and action items
Before ending the session, we would ensure that expectations were clear for everyone in attendance.
Impacts of PI Planning
- Cross team awareness of the work in progress
- Bringing visibility to the wins and accomplishments of other teams
- Identifying duplicative work and dependencies
- Enabling collaboration
- Empowering design to lead cross functional collaboration
- Bringing visibility to the full portfolio of work to senior leadership