PI planning
PI Planning is the 1-2 day event at the start of each Program Increment where the entire Agile Release Train, all teams, Product Management, Business Owners, System Architect, assembles to plan the upcoming PI. The output is a committed set of PI Objectives per team and a program board showing dependencies and milestones.
PI Planning is SAFe's most distinctive ceremony and the one organisations most frequently get wrong. The right execution: every team in the same room (physical or video), reading from the same prioritised backlog, surfacing dependencies in real time on a visible board, and ending with a confidence vote (1-5 fingers) that allows the team to flag a low-confidence commitment. The wrong execution: 'PI Planning' as a series of separate team meetings stitched together by a Powerpoint, with dependencies discovered weeks later. The 1-2 day investment per PI is a deliberate concentration of coordination effort that pays back across the next 8-12 weeks of execution.