Making and meeting small commitments builds trust.

—Nonaka and Takeuchi, The Knowledge-Creating Company

PI Objectives

Definition: PI Objectives summarize the business and technical goals that teams and trains intend to achieve in the upcoming PI and are either committed or uncommitted.

During PI Planning, teams create PI objectives they intend to accomplish in the upcoming PI. These provide several benefits:

Provide a common language for communicating with business and technology stakeholders
Creates the near-term focus and vision
Enables the ART to assess its performance and the business value achieved via the ART Predictability Measure
Communicates and highlights each team’s contribution to business value
Exposes dependencies that require coordination

Details

SAFe relies on a rolling wave of short-term commitments from Agile teams and trains to assist with business planning and outcomes, resulting in improved alignment and trust between development and business stakeholders. These are communicated via PI objectives.

While development is uncertain by its very nature, the business depends on teams for some amount of reliable, predictable forecasting. Too little, and the company can’t plan. Too much, and the organization has committed to longer-term plans, which are unreliable at best and limit agility. Business and technology stakeholders need something in between, which is a primary purpose of PI objectives. In addition to alignment, setting realistic objectives also helps avoid too much work-in-process (WIP) in the system. PI objectives are built largely bottom-up as the teams identify them during PI planning.

Building the Team PI Objectives

During PI planning, the teams get presented with new Features and plan the Stories they need to deliver alongside stories representing work from their local context. This work is described as a set of specific team PI objectives. Doing so requires estimating and planning, knowledge of the team’s capacity, analysis of upcoming features, defining stories for the Team Backlog, and summarizing the information into simple business terms everyone can understand.

As for the number of objectives a team should establish, there is no fixed rule, but 7-10 committed objectives (plus 2-3 uncommitted; see below) seem to work best. Beyond this threshold, other teams and business partners find the details challenging to understand and process. Plus, there are too many to review and process in a medium to large ART. Less, and the level of abstraction or aggregation is probably too high to be measured objectively at the end of the PI.

Figure 1 illustrates an example of one team’s PI objectives.

Figure 1. A team’s PI objectives

Differentiate between Features and PI Objectives

The team’s PI objectives often relate directly to intended features. Many are the same. However, the mapping is not always straightforward since some features require the collaboration of multiple teams, as Figure 2 illustrates.

Figure 2. From features to objectives, some features will appear in more than one team’s PI objectives

Note that an individual team can deliver some features (such as Feature A); others (Feature B) require the collaboration of several teams. In addition to features and inputs to features, other team objectives will also appear. These can include technical objectives (for example, the proof of concept in Figure 1) that enable future features, enhancements to development infrastructure, milestones, and others. All the planning process results are captured in the team’s objectives.

Features and acceptance criteria are excellent tools to help understand, capture, and collaborate around the work that needs to be done. Still, it’s all too easy to get caught up in ‘finishing the features’ and missing the overall goals hiding inside. PI objectives help shift focus away from developing features to achieving the desired business outcomes.

A better understanding of the intent offered by direct conversations with the Business Owners often results in the teams providing new perspectives to System Architects and Product Management and quickly finding ways to apply their expertise to create better solutions.

(Note: The extended guidance article Role of PI Objectives further explains the differences between team PI objectives and features and provides additional insights into their usage and value.)

Committed and Uncommitted Objectives

Committing to and delivering a series of short-term objectives helps to build trust. Trust allows all stakeholders to move forward confidently and base decisions and plans on what is ‘very likely to be true very soon.’ But planning confidently in the face of the uncertainty inherent in research and development is difficult. Things don’t always go as planned, and building some small amount of buffer into the system is prudent. If the buffer is too big, the ART might accomplish less than would otherwise be the case. If the buffer is too small, many commitments may not be feasible. As a result, planning and confidence erode. To address this, SAFe recommends teams use both committed and uncommitted objectives during planning. Uncommitted objectives help improve the predictability of delivering business value since they are not included in the team’s commitment or counted against teams in the ART predictability measure.

Uncommitted objectives are used to identify work that can be variable within the scope of a PI. The work is planned, but the outcome is not certain. Teams can apply uncommitted objectives whenever there is low confidence in meeting the objective. This low confidence can be due to many circumstances:

Dependencies with another team or supplier that cannot be guaranteed.
The team has little to no experience with functionality of this type. In this case, the teams may plan Spikes early in the PI to reduce uncertainty.
There are a large number of critical objectives that the business depends on, and the team is already loaded close to full capacity.

In this case, a few (no more than 2-3) uncommitted objectives are prudent. However, teams do their best to deliver the uncommitted objectives, and they are included in the capacity and plan for the PI. However, stakeholders plan accordingly since these objectives might not be finished in the PI.

Uncommitted objectives provide several benefits:

Improved economics – Without uncommitted objectives, a team commits to a 100 percent scope in a fixed timebox. This forces teams to trade off quality or build other buffers into the system. The other buffers can accumulate and convert ‘uncertain earliness to certain lateness,’ resulting in less overall throughput.
Increased reliability – Uncommitted objectives represent variable scope, allowing confidence in delivering the main priorities. In turn, delivering on the stated commitments is the most important factor in building trust between the teams and the stakeholders.
Adaptability to change – To reliably deliver on a cadence, uncommitted objectives provide the capacity margin needed to meet commitments, yet alter priorities if necessary, when fact patterns change.

Write SMART PI Objectives

Team PI objectives summarize a team’s plan for the PI. They are critically important. Sometimes the descriptions may be very technical and a little vague. As a countermeasure, teams make their objectives SMART:

Specific – States the intended outcome as concisely and explicitly as possible. (Hint: Try starting with an action verb.)
Measurable – It should be clear what a team needs to do to achieve the objective. The measures may be descriptive, yes/no, quantitative, or provide a range.
Achievable – Achieving the objective should be within the team’s control and influence.
Realistic – Recognize factors that cannot be controlled. (Hint: Avoid making ‘happy path’ assumptions.)
Time-bound – The time period for achievement must be within the PI or sooner, so all objectives must be scoped appropriately.

Note: SMART PI objectives are similar to Key Results in the OKR format in that they are tangible and measurable. However, the OKR format has proven less effective when applied to PI Objectives. See OKRs for more detail.

Communicating Business Value with PI Objectives

As objectives are finalized during PI planning, Business Owners collaboratively assign ‘business value’ to each team’s objectives face-to-face. The value of this conversation with the team cannot be overstated, as it communicates the strategy and context behind these weighting decisions. Business Owners use a scale from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest) to rate each objective. One approach to assigning business value is to ensure each team has one or more 10s for their highest priority objectives, which can help avoid unhealthy comparisons between teams. An alternative approach is to ‘normalize’ business value across teams, meaning not all teams will have a 10 (or even 9s or 8s). This can help teams focus on the highest value objectives across the ART and can swarm if needed to ensure the highest value is delivered in the PI.

Business value is assigned, not calculated, and serves as an input to execution considerations. Many of the team’s objectives provide direct and immediate value to the solution. Others, such as Enablers (for example, advances in infrastructure, development environments, and quality initiatives), allow the creation of future business value faster. All of these factors must be weighed in the final balance.

Finalize Team PI Objectives

When objectives have been made ‘SMARTer,’ uncommitted objectives have been identified, and business value has been established, the objectives in Figure 1 might evolve to look like those in Figure 3.

Figure 3. The team’s final PI objectives with business value assigned

Commit to PI Objectives

A vote of confidence is held near the end of PI planning, where the teams commit to the PI objectives. (Uncommitted objectives are not included in this commitment.) However, it must be a reasonable ask for the people who do the work. Therefore, the SAFe commitment has two parts:

Teams agree to do everything reasonably in their power to meet the committed objectives
During the PI, if it’s discovered that some objectives are not achievable, then the teams agree to immediately escalate so that stakeholders are informed and corrective action can be taken

In this way, all stakeholders know that either the ART results will be achieved as planned or they will be provided sufficient notice to mitigate and take corrective action, minimizing business disruption. That’s about as good as it gets because this is, after all, research and development.

Creating ART and Solution Train PI Objectives

The output of the PI planning process will be a collection of approved team PI objectives. Teams vote on the confidence level for the objectives as a set, and if confidence is high enough, the aggregate set of objectives becomes the committed ART plan. The Release Train Engineer summarizes the team objectives into the ART PI objectives in a format suitable for management communication.

The summarized objectives should be SMART, like the team PI objectives, and have uncommitted objectives. Also, like the team PI objectives, the ART PI objectives might describe business features the ART is working on, enablers, or other business or technical goals.

If the ART is part of a Solution Train, the objectives are further rolled up by the Solution Train Engineer, and the Solution Train PI objectives are synthesized and summarized. This is the top level of PI objectives in SAFe, and they communicate to stakeholders what the Solution Train will deliver in the upcoming PI. Figure 4 below illustrates this summary from team to ART and from ART to Solution Train PI objectives.

Business value must only be assigned to team PI objectives. The predictability metric itself is rolled up to determine predictability at a higher level.

Figure 4. Roll-up of the team, ART, and Solution Train PI objectives

Reduce WIP with Realistic PI Objectives

During the team PI objectives review, not everything the various business stakeholders envisioned will likely be achieved in the PI timebox. Therefore, some of the planned work will need to be reevaluated with Business Owners to gain agreement with the PI objectives.

Those lower-priority work items get moved back into the ART Backlog. Decreasing excess WIP reduces overhead and thrashing and increases productivity and velocity. The net result is a feasible set of PI objectives agreed to by all business stakeholders and team members, increased efficiency, and a higher probability of delivery success.

Planning at the large solution level can be very similar; the planning of the ARTs will impact each other, pushing some work back into the Solution Train Backlog for re-evaluation in a later PI.

Learn More

[1] Leffingwell, Dean. Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs, and the Enterprise. Addison-Wesley, 2011.

[2] Reinertsen, Donald. The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development. Celeritas Publishing, 2009.

Last update: 13 December 2022