PI Planning and SAFe

Last month, we provided an overview of Program Increment (PI) Planning, a quarterly event that brings technology teams together, to plan work from January to April 2022. Stacey and Bernie Gulacheck kicked off the planning sessions with the Executive Briefing, which provides an overview of OIT’s strategic themes, alignment with MPact25, and great information on our important work in ASR and partnerships with OIT.

We are continuing to train leads and managers who work or collaborate closely with OIT teams and are starting to see OIT reach out for more participation from other units. For example, Andy Hill will be spending part of his time as the Product Owner supporting the Infrastructure and Production team starting this PI. OIT teams are presenting their PI Planning summaries over the course of the next two weeks, and in our February update, we’ll share these summaries. Please contact Jaime Wascalus (wascalus@umn.edu) if you have any questions.

PI Planning & SAFe

By now, many of you have probably heard about Program Increment Planning (PI Planning), which refers to the quarterly planning meeting that is at the heart of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) methodology. OIT is undergoing a transformation to implement SAFe across its portfolio, which involves meeting every three months to better understand the business priorities across the university. ASR is also planning in three-month increments so our OIT partners can understand ASR priorities and coordinate work across Agile teams for the next quarter. This work is being led by the ASR Operations Group with Kristy Davis and ASR’s leadership team. Currently, we are wrapping up ASR’s quarterly priorities in preparation for OIT’s upcoming PI Planning events the week of January 10.

We recently had managers and leads from ASR IT and OTR attend Leading SAFe training. While we are not in the process of fully transforming into the SAFe methodology, there are pieces, like PI Planning, that we will focus on adopting in 2022. Planning out our work for a quarter will allow our teams to understand the work done across ASR, see the capacity for new initiatives, and communicate impacts when new initiatives are presented to us. There will be more training opportunities in 2022 and collaboration across our teams to implement the most impactful facets of the SAFe methodology. Please contact Jaime Wascalus (wascalus@umn.edu) if you have any questions. We will continue to share updates in N&N.