How PI Planning Drives Strategic Alignment and Predictable Delivery

You’re about to take on one of the most high-stakes planning events your team will face all quarter. There’s a lot on the line... your next few months of work, team alignment, and whether or not you’ll hit your delivery targets. Now, you’ve probably seen how easy it is for things to slip when the structure isn’t clear, the vision feels vague, or the process lacks focus.

What if your PI Planning session gave you more than just a set of dates and backlog items? What if it helped you drive meaningful collaboration, better decisions, and stronger outcomes?

This article is for enterprise teams who use SAFe PI Planning and want to make the process more data-informed and collaborative. But first, let's start by understanding more about PI Planning.

What Is Program Increment Planning?

Program Increment Planning is a scheduled event in the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) where Agile teams align on business goals, sync their work, and commit to clear outcomes. You’ll hear this called PI Planning for short. It’s one of the core steps that helps you organize multiple teams around shared objectives.

If you work in a large organization, you’ve likely run into messy handoffs, unclear expectations, and last-minute fire drills. That’s where this event comes in. PI in Agile connects the bigger picture (your program vision) to what individual teams actually build.

While SAFe is the most common framework for enterprise Agile, only 26% of respondents in the 17th State of Agile Report said it’s their favorite choice. If you’re in that group, this process can bring structure, clarity, and visibility across your Agile release train.

What Is PI Planning vs. Sprint Planning?

PI Planning looks at multiple teams working together across an entire program, while Sprint Planning focuses on what a single team will achieve in a short cycle.

During PI Planning, you zoom out to the big picture. You define objectives, map out feature priorities, and align teams for the next program increment. Also, you may be juggling draft plans, backlog items, and dependencies across departments.

Sprint Planning, on the other hand, is more focused. You work on the individual team level to decide what to deliver over the next one to four weeks.

In fact, 49% of marketers say they use Sprint or Iteration planning. That makes sense since it’s faster, easier, and fits most team setups. However, when coordinating multiple moving parts, PI Planning provides the structure to keep everyone on track.

Big Room Planning vs. PI Planning

PI Planning is a structured event that helps you focus on aligning teams, setting PI objectives, and identifying cross-team dependencies. Big Room Planning, by contrast, is a more general Agile practice where cross-functional teams meet to align on larger initiatives.

According to ResearchGate, 45.5% of Integrated Project Delivery projects use a “Big Room” approach to bring people together. These sessions tend to support broader strategy and don’t always follow a strict framework.

If you're scaling Agile across multiple departments, you could use both. So, here’s a real-world view of both approaches to help you decide:

Why Is PI Planning Important for Enterprise Agility?

PI Planning is important for enterprise agility because it helps you align large teams around shared goals, set clear direction, and deliver work that supports real business outcomes.

You’re working with many moving parts, such as cross-functional teams, shifting priorities, and high expectations from business stakeholders. Without a strong planning process, it’s easy to lose clarity and waste time on work that doesn’t move the needle. Program Increment Planning gives you the structure to step back, reset, and align everyone around what matters next.

These are the reasons why this planning event is so critical:

• Aligning teams with broader business goals
• Synchronization across Agile Release Trains (ARTs)
• Connection to Inspect & Adapt
• Timing and frequency to stay responsive
• Expanding Agile to full business operations
• Importance of leadership buy-in

These benefits go beyond theory. Large organizations using PI Planning have seen real change:

• Sony Interactive Entertainment doubled the value it delivered in two years compared to the four years prior, saved $30 million yearly by cutting downtime, and reduced initial planning effort by 28%.
• Philips shortened its release cycles from 18 months to 6 months and reduced feature delivery from 240 days to under 100 days.
• At Cisco, one team reduced quality assurance defects by 25%, improved sprint efficiency, and saw fewer critical issues in production.

If you’re asking about one benefit of PI Planning, it’s this: clear alignment helps you avoid waste, reduce delays, and move faster as a unified team.

How Is PI Planning Done?

PI Planning is done by gathering all Agile teams, product owners, and key stakeholders to align on goals, define program priorities, and create a shared plan for the upcoming program increment. You bring everyone together, sync up on direction, and map out work. It’s where strategy meets delivery, and you shift from vague ideas to clear PI Objectives.

To make it successful, you must follow a set structure. It all starts by reviewing the business context and product vision. Then, teams break out to build draft plans, identify potential risks, and coordinate dependencies. You come back together to review, adjust, and finalize the plan. That’s your blueprint for the next quarter.

Let’s walk through who makes it happen.

Who Joins PI Planning?

PI Planning includes everyone who contributes to or depends on the success of the upcoming increment. This covers the development team, product owners, business owners, release train engineers, and more. Everyone in the loop needs to show up ready to engage.

According to Miro, these are some of the key roles you’ll find in the session:

• Release Train Engineer: They lead the Pi Planning process, guide the meeting, and keep everything on track. Think of them as your facilitator and coach.
• Scrum Master: They help prep the teams and watch over team capacity, and also help remove blockers and flag unclear work during breakouts.
• Product Manager: You’ll rely on them to present the current vision, clarify upcoming milestones, and align efforts with actual customer needs.
• Developers: This is where hands-on input matters. Developers break down stories, flag potential issues, and work with product owners to define the objectives.

This mix of critical roles is what brings cross-team collaboration to life. You won’t just be planning in silos. You’ll get feedback, negotiate scope, and strengthen alignment across your Agile release train.

Now let’s talk about how long you’ll need.

How Long Is PI Planning?

PI Planning usually spans two full days, allowing time for alignment, breakout work, reviews, and risk management. According to Scaled Agile, Inc., this planning event kicks off the Program Increment, which typically covers 8 to 12 weeks of work.

Each Program Increment includes multiple development iterations and a final innovation and planning (IP) sprint. You use this cadence to maintain focus, adjust quickly, and deliver steady value. Like an iteration gives rhythm to your team, the PI gives structure to the full train. It creates space to plan, commit, build, and reflect without scrambling.

Before you hit the ground running, though, you need the prep done right.

PI Planning Preparation

Your prep makes or breaks the session. It’s not just about putting time on calendars but about setting everyone up with what they need to contribute meaningfully. Here are the essentials you need to get in place before the event:

• Stakeholders’ schedules: You need decision-makers in the room. Align with key stakeholders early so they don’t miss the most critical conversations.
• Program purpose and vision: Without a clear why, you’ll lose direction. Your Product Manager should prepare to explain the business context and priorities.
• Facility (in-person and online arrangements): Whether fully remote or hybrid, every participant needs access to real-time collaboration tools.

This is where Axify gives you an edge. You can pull up historical throughput data to understand team capacity. You can also use the forecast feature to set realistic expectations about how much work each team can take on. Instead of making rough guesses, you walk in with facts.

With visibility built into Axify’s dashboards, everyone from upper management to developers sees the same picture. That clarity helps speed up your planning board discussions and keeps planning tools in sync. You go from disconnected notes to a single source that ties strategy to execution, without needing a dozen spreadsheets.

How to Run a PI Planning Session

Running a PI Planning session means guiding your teams through a clear structure that drives alignment, sets shared goals, and locks in achievable plans. You’ll walk through a standard agenda, using digital tools to support clarity, coordination, and communication. Let’s start with day one.

PI Planning Agenda Day One

Your first day of PI Planning sets the direction. You use this time to create alignment, share context, and let each team build their first draft plan. Everyone shows up with a clear purpose, and that's to contribute to the plan and make sure nothing critical falls through the cracks.

Here are the key moments that structure your day:

• Business context: A leader or business owner opens with a big-picture update. This helps you understand where the company stands in the market and which goals are top priority.
• Product/solutions vision: Next, Product Management guides you through the current goals and top-priority features. This provides the clarity you need to understand what success should look like in the coming months.
• Architecture vision & development practices: Here, you get a look at changes in the technical infrastructure. A senior development manager or architect explains what updates or constraints might affect your work.
• Planning context & lunch: The release train engineer provides an overview. He’ll explain what’s expected from your team, what the agenda looks like, and how draft plans should be built and reviewed.
• Team breakouts: Now it’s your team’s turn. You estimate velocity, look over your backlog, and start building a plan. If you find cross-team dependencies or risks, this is the time to flag them.
• Draft plan review: You present your plan and get feedback from other teams, product owners, and business owners. It’s a quick round to help spot gaps or major blockers early.
• Management review and problem solving: This session is for leadership. Based on feedback, they step in to adjust the scope, resolve conflicts, or rebalance work so you can move forward confidently.

At the end of day one, you’ll have draft plans on the table and open questions identified. Now you’re ready to move into refinement. Let’s walk through day two.

PI Planning Agenda Day Two

The second day is all about refining the work you started on day one. You use it to finalize plans, assess risks, and check team confidence before you wrap. Here are the main moments that shape the day:

• Program adjustments: You start the day by reviewing any changes that came out of the management review. These planning adjustments can affect priorities, scope, or resourcing. Updates are posted on the planning board so every team can see what’s changed and make fast decisions.
• Team breakouts (round 2): After reviewing the updates, your team returns to work. This is your chance to refine your PI objectives and clarify your Iteration plans. You’ll also start assigning business value with help from product owners and business owners, so priorities are crystal clear.
• Final plan review and lunch: Every team presents its plan to the group. You’ll highlight what you’re committing to, list out any program risks or cross-team dependencies, and post your plan for feedback. This is about visibility, not fixing every issue in the moment.
• Program risks: You walk through all risks raised during planning. For each one, you mark it as resolved, accepted, owned, or mitigated. This structured risk assessment helps everyone understand what’s truly at stake and who’s handling what.
• Confidence vote: Each team does a quick five-finger vote on how confident they are in their plan. If someone shows two fingers or less, you pause and address the concern. You don’t move on until your team believes they can follow through.
• Retrospective: You wrap with a quick planning retrospective led by the release train engineer. You talk about what worked and what didn’t, so you can improve next time.

If your team includes remote participants, digital tools are essential on day two. Axify gives you real-time delivery insights, team performance signals, and forecast visibility to adjust with confidence.

Instead of switching between apps or waiting on updates, you track everything in one place (live). That way, your remote team has the same clarity as anyone in the room.

What Helps Visualize Work During PI Planning

If you’re wondering what helps visualize work during PI Planning, the answer starts with the right tools. You need ways to see work clearly, spot blockers early, and stay aligned with your plan.

Digital program boards are a must since they give every team a shared view of who’s doing what. Burn-up charts show progress against your goals, while team health dashboards highlight early signs of overload or slowdown.

Axify pulls all of that together for you. You can quickly understand your team’s capacity for iterations, flow efficiency, and delivery patterns. This means you’re not just estimating but forecasting with data. You can even budget how many items your team can realistically deliver next quarter based on past performance.

With Axify as your source of truth, you eliminate guesswork and focus on what matters: staying on track and reaching your shared goals. Whether you’re tracking feature priorities or dependencies between teams, visual tools keep everyone moving in the same direction.

What Can Be Revealed During PI Planning?

PI Planning reveals gaps, risks, and misalignments that could derail your next increment if left unaddressed. It gives you the space to look at the full picture, not just your piece of it, and catch issues before they affect delivery.

Here are the most common things you’ll uncover:

• Misaligned team objectives: If your goals don’t line up with company strategy, your efforts won’t hit the mark. This is a big one since 66% of projects fail due to poor alignment between teamwork and organizational direction.
• Underestimated dependencies: Teams typically miss how their work connects. When dependencies are overlooked or underestimated, there’s a 60% drop in the chance of delivering top-priority features.
• Risky delivery timelines: Promising more than you can deliver leads to missed expectations. About 70% of projects fall short of delivering what was promised to customers, and you definitely don’t want to be part of that group.
• Communication gaps between ARTs: Without clear channels across teams, confusion spreads fast. Nearly 80% of organizations operate without a solid internal communication plan, resulting in more tactical than strategic decisions.

When you have access to real-time data in Axify, these insights aren’t just noticed... they’re acted on. Axify helps you check delivery progress through flow metrics, track cycle time trends, and monitor team signals like velocity and WIP across your program. It gives you what you need for effective planning and stronger alignment across teams.

Does PI Planning Contradict Continuous Delivery?

PI Planning doesn’t contradict continuous delivery; it supports it. You use PI Planning to set direction, define priorities, and get everyone on the same page. But you’re not locking down every task or freezing change.

You need both. PI Planning provides structure, such as clear program objectives, prioritized features, and a shared understanding of what success looks like. It’s how you set your goalposts. Continuous delivery allows you to adjust quickly, receive fast feedback, and improve your product throughout the increment.

With Axify, you get full visibility across sprints and releases, even while working within a fixed PI. You can track changes, review iteration plans, and make adjustments without losing your broader direction. That kind of alignment with business objectives keeps your delivery predictable, even when things shift midstream.

So no... It’s not one or the other. You need the alignment of PI Planning and the flexibility of CI/CD to build real momentum.

SAFe* PI Planning and Business Agility

If you're working inside a large organization, you’ve likely seen how hard it is to align multiple distributed or co-located teams toward a common goal. The scaled Agile framework PI Planning process helps you fix that.

This two-day event gives you a repeatable structure to plan together, commit as a group, and move toward shared outcomes. This isn’t just about planning but about improving business agility by staying connected to your strategy every step of the way.

Enterprises use this method to coordinate key roles, manage cross-team dependencies, and keep everyone focused on delivering business value.

But having a framework isn’t enough. You also need tools like Axify to turn planning into action. Axify helps you stay aligned with your goals, spot delivery risks early, and keep your team’s work moving in the right direction.

* SAFe is a methodology developed by Scaled Agile, Inc. © Scaled Agile, Inc. Read the FAQs on how to use SAFe content and trademarks here: https://www.scaledagile.com/about/about-us/permissions-faq/

Best Tools for PI Planning

The best tools for PI Planning help you turn plans into clear, trackable actions. That’s where Axify fits in. You get a single view of your data, right where you need it, to support smarter planning and fewer blind spots. With Axify, you’re not just collecting metrics but making them useful.

Here’s what you can do with it:

• Track team velocity before and during the PI
• Surface risks, WIP overload, or morale drops before they impact delivery
• Align delivery metrics with your OKRs and broader business objectives
• Give remote or hybrid teams full visibility using Value Stream Management (VSM)

You’re not stuck stitching together information from different platforms. Axify connects your data, so you can plan with confidence and respond fast. Whether you’re reviewing your team backlog or managing cross-team dependencies, the right view can change everything. And when the post-PI Planning period comes around, you’re already ready for what’s next.

Conclusion

Planning doesn’t mean locking every detail in stone. It means creating a structure you can adapt as things evolve. With PI Planning and continuous delivery working together, you get scalable agility backed by real-time data.

Axify supports this by helping you visualize flow, align with strategic priorities, and keep delivering inside your PIs. Axify gives you insight into delivery metrics by analyzing issue types like code reviews or bugs to help you improve flow, cycle time, and team velocity. It’s about staying clear, consistent, and ready for change.

If you're ready to simplify your next planning cycle, book a demo with Axify and see what smart visibility really looks like.

FAQ

1. What does PI Planning stand for?

PI planning stands for "Program Increment Planning." You use it to bring teams together under one plan that aligns with business goals and drives key outputs for the quarter.

2. What helps visualize work during PI Planning?

Tools like digital program boards, dashboards (like Axify), and clear metrics help you and your team stay aligned, even across locations and schedules. Axify also helps you spot slowdowns early by tracking flow and surfacing blockers in real time with a high level of confidence.

3. What is one benefit of PI Planning?

It helps with strategic alignment by syncing multiple teams, removing blockers early, and speeding up decision-making through cross-team and cross-ART collaboration. You also get clarity on feature priorities and a shared understanding of what each team is expected to deliver.

4. Is PI Planning Agile or waterfall?

PI Planning is part of the Agile planning process, specifically within SAFe. It focuses on collaboration, flexibility, and quick feedback, not rigid, top-down plans like in waterfall. It supports Agile projects and helps you meet customer expectations with more predictable delivery.

5. What happens before PI Planning?

Before the actual event, teams go through a pre-PI Planning event to align on priorities, ensure content readiness, and identify any technical dependencies. It’s also when initial resource allocation and discussions about upcoming features begin.

6. Who participates in PI Planning?

PI Planning involves active participants from across the organization, such as team members, Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Architects, and Business Owners. Everyone plays a role in connecting activities to business objectives and making sure development aligns with business goals.

7. How long is a PI Planning event?

Typically, it's a 2-day event. The agenda structure includes team breakouts, planning discussions, and alignment meetings. It’s designed to support collaborative planning sessions between co-located and remote teams alike.

8. How does PI Planning support organizational goals?

It’s an effective method for tying team-level plans to organizational goals. Teams use it to prioritize a list of features, align with quarterly steering, and set clear acceptance criteria for delivery.

9. What tools are used during PI Planning?

Teams typically use team planning boards, digital or physical boards, and online tools like Axify to track feature dependencies, progress, and blockers. These tools support communication between teams, even in nimble companies with distributed teams.

10. What are the common challenges in PI Planning?

A common issue is misalignment between teams or unclear goals. Having strong communication channels and tying content to business objectives helps avoid a battle for resources. It’s also key to sync plans to the annual calendar so long-term strategy meets short-term execution.

11. How is customer feedback used in PI Planning?

Customer feedback plays a major role in refining features and setting priorities. It helps shape the current product's roadmap and ensures teams are solving the right problems.