Tactical way to handle PI Confidence Vote!

[#1]

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) came up with the concept of a PI confidence vote as an activity towards the end of Day 2 of the Program Increment(PI) planning event.

PI confidence vote is an activity where everyone raises their fists up and votes on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest. As an Enterprise Agile coach my suggestion to RTE is to ask participants with less than a 3 score on voting as to what they think isn't giving them confidence in their own planning. The most important suggestion in case the average voting score is above 3 is to still conclude the PI confidence vote activity by asking the participants to give higher voting( what's giving them a positive feeling about the commitment) so as to conclude the planning on a positive note.

In general, if the votes score on an average is above 3, ART considers it as a commitment, however, if if average voting score is lower than 3, the ART needs to re-do their planning, yeah 2 days of PI planning again! Practically it's a lot of effort to re-do it again, however, it's worth it rather than going with a commitment that the teams aren't confident about delivering.

So what can be done in this scenario?

There is a solution to this, a relatively easy one.

The Solution: Though SAFe recommends doing a PI confidence vote on Day 2, why don't we do this towards the end of Day 1 as well, right after the Draft plan review of PI objectives? This will give enough visibility to Portfolio Management as well to stakeholders, as to what are the challenges foreseen by the Agile Release Train(ART).

The output of the PI confidence vote on Day 1 can serve as a major input for the last activity of Day 1, which is Management Review and problem-solving.

That gives us a great opportunity to convert the Confidence vote of 2-3(on Day1) to 3-4(on Day2), rather than re-doing the PI Planning Event again, as you can't get to know about low confidence in planning in time to take any actions on it if you do PI Confidence Vote only on Day2!!

Also, it's not just about having a high confidence vote, at the end of the day it's all about being confident on the commitments made across 2 days of PI planning for a duration of 8-12 weeks.

[Robert Wen_Cprime_]

This is definitely an intriguing notion.  There are some advantages to doing a "fist of five" after draft plan review as it definitely could give input to the upcoming management review to make serious decisions.

But would having a Day 1 Confidence vote result in naturally lower scores?  The plans are preliminary, with no opportunity to examine risks through a ROAMing session.

[Karan Madaan]

@Robert Wen_Cprime_ Even the draft plan review of PI objectives is half-baked on Day 1, which comes based on the planning done during the breakout of Day 1, still done to see where is the team headed for the next quarter. Not necessary that the confidence vote be low, as it's based on planning done during the breakout of Day 1, could be that the team might have struggled with their planning owing to some reasons, PI confidence vote will give them the platform to express themselves out. 

[Karan Madaan]

@Robert Wen_Cprime_ Regarding ROAMing, RTE can check out for the risks in Jira Align via the Risk ROAM report, anytime during the PI planning. 

https://help.jiraalign.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004895287-Risk-ROAM-report