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Advanced Roadmaps Guide

September 11, 2023
Bill Kimball

Create a program board so all teams and stakeholders can have an easily accessible visual summary of the goals, features, risks, dependencies, and timelines defined in the program increment plan. Use this all-inclusive roadmap to keep tabs on every planned product feature simultaneously. You can customize the roadmap to timebox sprint periods for Agile development. This template is perfect for tracking the broad strokes of feature development for Program Increment Planning and ensuring you account for all key features on your product roadmap. Effectively track your team’s development goals with this Scrum-specific product roadmap template. Enter feature and user requirements, prototype, feature design, user acceptance testing, and other sprint-by-sprint product-roadmap tasks to keep tabs on each team’s development goals and accomplishments. Timebox sprint details into two-week or month-long periods with this simple-to-use, customizable template.

program increment roadmap

SAFe divides the development timeline into a series of iterations within a PI. The Big Picture illustrates how a PI is initiated by aPI Planning event and is then followed by four execution iterations, concluding with one IP iteration. This pattern is suggestive but arbitrary, and there is no fixed rule for how many iterations are in a PI. Experience has shown, however, that a PI duration between 8 and 12 weeks works best, with a bias toward shorter durations. Figure 6 shows a PI roadmap that has left room for new features in the next PI. If an item can’t fit in the current PI, it can be scheduled for the next one. The wait is approximately 10 weeks or less depending upon the duration of the PI.

Training

The PI roadmap consists of a series of planned PIs with milestones and releases called out. Each element on the roadmap is a feature, capability that is planned to be completed in a particular PI. The PI roadmap may also reflect fixed-date and learning milestones that occur during that period.

In Advanced Roadmaps, a plan combines the roadmaps of multiple teams working across multiple projects and ladders them to company-wide initiatives. This scaled Agile framework roadmap template is the perfect tool to present projected and current product statuses. Month-by-month Program Increment Planning columns allow you to enter each PI’s objectives, making it clear to all stakeholders when to expect every product-development milestone.

While many see long-term predictability as the goal, Lean-Agile Leadersknow that every long-term commitment decreases the agility of the enterprise. Therefore these forecasts can and should be updated regularly to reflect new learning and changing market conditions. The pre-PI planning event is used to coordinate inputs (e.g., business context, key milestones and Solution Context) for the individual ART PI planning events.

Roadmap

In other words, to be genuinely Agile, plans must be kept as short and as flexible as possible. The portfolio roadmap illustrates the plan of intent for achieving the portfolio vision, primarily in the form of epics, over an extended period of time. The RTE and management teams address issues that are identified in the draft plans. This meeting should result in a new set of priorities and/or features that the teams can use on day two. These events are typically scheduled for two days and require a significant amount of preparation before the event and can benefit from post-event review to make improvements for the next PI.

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program increment roadmap

Capacity planning in Advanced Roadmaps is available to both scrum and kanban teams. However, sprint planning is exclusive to teams that use scrum boards as an issue source.

Avoid Turning The Roadmap Into A Queue

This easy-to-use Agile product roadmap template is ideal for keeping tabs on the status and progress of product-related components. Schedule feature-development details for product, development, user experience, and quality assurance teams to prioritize key initiatives and present the big picture of expected deliverables. This Agile-specific template helps your team stay focused on brief development iterations and enables you to perpetually improve your product. Account for all product releases and ensure they’re on track for any product updates with this simple release roadmap template. Enter product initiatives and features for various teams for alpha, beta, full, and future releases.

  • Use this all-inclusive roadmap to keep tabs on every planned product feature simultaneously.
  • List the specific details for your products in a single, shareable document.
  • Regardless of how future PIs are forecast, items don’t become committed until teams plan them during PI planning.
  • Subtask — A granular piece of work required to complete a story, task, or bug.
  • Predict and track your program performance against a range of metrics using all properly estimated and prioritized features and user stories.

The purpose of these events is to create a common Vision and mission, and align around a set of features and Capabilities that will advance the solution. A system demo is a biweekly event that provides feedback from the stakeholders about the effectiveness and usability of the system under development. This demo also helps ensure that integration between teams on the same ART occurs on a regular basis—at least once every iteration. And as “integration points control product development” , the system demo is the routine point at which the meaningful, emergent behavior of the full system or solution can be evaluated. The Release Train Engineer typically facilitates a weekly Scrum of Scrums event. The SoS helps coordinate the dependencies of the ARTs and provides visibility into progress and impediments. The RTE, representatives from each team , and others meet to review their progress toward milestones and PI objectives, and dependencies among the teams.

Features Roadmap Template

The ART aligns vision, planning, risks, and dependencies among the various teams to focus on fast, flexible development and release. Releases are the milestones in a plan that marks a point in time when work needs to be completed.

With a roadmap, it helps to give some sense of direction and lays the groundwork for some initiatives that would take years to be made. A market rhythm is a set of events that occur periodically on a predictable cadence. For example, retailers routinely prepare for the holiday shopping season by upgrading their systems to get a competitive edge and support significantly higher transaction volumes. The RTE holds a small retrospective to determine what went well in the PI planning sessions and what could be improved for next time. Each team presents its plans and identifies risks and dependencies. Identify risks and dependencies and ensure that team members know who to contact when they need help.

What is a recommended time horizon of the Program Increment Roadmap? You have to complete all course videos, modules, and assessments and receive a minimum score of 80% on each assessment to receive credit. SAFe PO Certification will make you expert in SAFe PO, through which you can converts into leads and new customers and gain benefit in your business or career .

This is particularly useful for large, cross-functional projects, where different stakeholders view your plan with specific concerns or needs in mind. Customize your plan to emphasize different aspects and save it as a view that can be easily accessed at any time. Epic — A large body of work that can be broken down into stories, tasks, and bugs. In a plan, epics represent a significant milestone or deliverable. The work contained in an epic can be assigned across multiple teams. Program list view to create, organize, track, start, and complete your program increments .

The planning cadence is often different from the release cadence. However, in some situations, the PI and release cadences are the same, particularly in large supply chains . Some ARTs may need to release more or less frequently than the PI cadence. Still, others will have multiple, independent release cycles for the solution’s various components. The committed PI shows the results of the teams’ most recent PI Planning event where they committed to event the program’s PI Objectives. Since the team’s planned the work it is a high-confidence, current PI plan. The teams address the risks that were identified in the final plan review meeting and determine how or if they can be overcome.

Saved Views

The new capabilities must be designed, developed, tested, and validated holistically, along with the existing capabilities of the solution. The solution demo is a critical aspect of the PI learning cycle for a Solution Train. This high-profile event allows large solution stakeholders, customers , and senior management to view the progress that the Solution Train has made during the PI. Figure 7 shows a roadmap where all five PIs are fully loaded and committed. If the teams are allocated up to their capacity, then the wait time for a new feature is more than 50 weeks! (This assumes a 10-week PI duration.) The enterprise, while thinking it’s Agile, is still stuck in a traditional mindset.

Pi Planning

A market event is a one-time future event, which has a high probability of materially affecting one or more solutions. Market events can be external, such as the launch of government regulations, or they can be internally created, such as a company’s annual user conference. Lucidchart is the intelligent diagramming application that empowers teams to clarify complexity, align their insights, and build the future—faster. With this intuitive, cloud-based solution, everyone can work visually and collaborate in real time while building flowcharts, mockups, UML diagrams, and more. Teams look at the planning boards to estimate the capacity to accomplish the tasks in each iteration. Digital planning boards that can be accessed by remote team members are ideal to ensure that all team members can work on the same document at the same time. Pre-PI planning events ensure that the teams for the train are set up, the necessary people have been invited, and the facilities and location are scheduled and ready to go.