In just one hour the two day event paid for itself
No one saw it coming but the 2 day big room planning meeting paid for itself in just one hour.
Recently I was in Australia facilitating a 2 day SAFe PI planning event. We had worked for months leading up to this event training new roles, organizing around value streams and working to fund those teams. I’ve had the chance to work with numerous groups helping prep for that first PI planning meeting and the pushback I get as a transformation leader are predictable…”do we have to invite ALL of these people? Can’t we just have leadership attend?”…“This is looking expensive are you sure we need a room that big?”…”It’s hard to clear that much time on calendars, couldn’t we just meet for a few hours a day over several weeks?” Often times coaches or other transformation leaders cave and compromise the first one setting a precedent for more compromises in the future. It’s been my experience those groups never get the full value of big room planning and as a result never justify the expense to actually pull it off in the future. However, there are groups that stick to the SAFe recommendations and experience dramatically different results.
Usually I’ll recommend they “just try it one time” before they throw out such a cornerstone of the SAFe methodology. In EVERY case these groups have an amazing experience and funding future big room planning events is never a problem because the benefit is so evident. This group in Australia was no exception. They were willing to “try it one time”. Within the first few hours positive feedback was already flowing in as many development team members talked about how they had never had that clear a view of the company vision. By the end of the first day we realized we wouldn’t be able to pull off some key features because of a constraint on a single team. Starting day 2 we had everyone (developers, architects, infrastructure, DBA’s) together to swarm on the problem. This was the first time all of those people had the opportunity to work through a problem face to face. In just one hour they were able to solve our problem and come up with a better more scalable solution that would be 6 weeks faster to implement. All 150 people in the room immediately were able to have the solution explained and adjust their plans. Because we were face to face and had access to key knowledge workers we were able to have conversations that would normally take months in minutes…no passing the buck, no delays waiting to get on schedules. By lunch on the second day leadership was already discussing plans to expand the invite list for their big room planning meeting next quarter.
This isn’t an exception but rather the norm when a group makes the effort to really give big room planning an opportunity before they immediately compromise.
