What is the Innovation and Planning (IP) iteration in SAFe?
For people to effectively innovate, you need to create time and space for them to do so.
So, in every PI (program increment) – which is a cadence in SAFe – time for innovation and planning is built into the cycle to ensure that our agile team are always working on the most valuable items or attempting to solve the most compelling problems.
A program increment (PI) cycle is usually between eight (8) to twelve (12) weeks, and so it is critical that we include time for planning and innovation if we are to achieve valuable outcomes that align with organizational and customer objectives.
Harnessing the power of agile teams
SAFe, also known as Scaled Agile Framework, aligns teams of agile teams with organizational and customer objectives to produce a valuable program increment in each release cycle.
When you have various functions or focus areas, integrated within a value stream, and aligned to a customer purpose, you want the team to be working on the most compelling problems or valuable solutions.
Agile isn’t simply about quicker time to market, we are focused on delivering value that delights customers and provides the organization with competitive advantage. We want to build great products and solve compelling problems rather than simply go through the motions.
Including planning and innovation in our PI allows the organization to tap into the brightest minds and harness the power of continuous learning and improvement. The data and evidence from the current PI inform what the team should plan for next and identify the most valuable work that should be attempted next.
How do we create space for innovation?
This is an interesting one.
As Simon Sinek says, you can’t simply tell people to be more innovative, and so how do you cultivate and nurture innovation throughout the organization?
This could be:
- Hackathons
- Training
- Experimentation
- Coaching
- Mentoring
And so forth.
Sometimes, you may be using third-party elements that empower you to achieve your objectives. If we invite the specialists and experts from those third parties into our environment to teach, coach and mentor our teams, we can innovate a great deal based on knowledge and skills acquisition.
Each team will discover how best to foster innovation and cultivate an environment for continuous learning and skills acquisition, you simply need to allow them to carve out time to focus on that.
Planning for the next PI (Program Increment)
As the team learn through product discovery, product development, and delivery, they get a much better feel for what should be prioritized in the next PI and what their capacity to deliver will be.
SAFe (scaled agile framework) encourages teams to plan during the current Program Increment for the following Program Increment, to ensure that we have continuous delivery to customers.
As one program increment ends, the following PI begins, and so we are becoming more efficient as we become more effective.
Carving out time for planning in the program increment ensures that teams, or teams of agile teams, know what they are working on and why that matters from the moment the next program increment cycle commences.
In an environment that requires continuous integration or has interconnected departments, it is vital that teams know what the priorities for this PI are, why that matters, and how that aligns with customer and organizational objectives.
It would be incredibly difficult for cross-functional teams in various departments to organize their work and integrate their solutions if it weren’t for the planning and innovation iteration in SAFe.
So, it’s an essential component of the SAFe agile framework.
Inspect and Adapt
Agile, and SAFe, are built on the foundation of being transparent and frequently inspecting and adapting what we are doing to ensure we are on the most valuable path to product development.
The planning and innovation iteration provides us with the necessary time to inspect what we have done, apply what we have learned, and adapt what we attempt based on the data and evidence.
A problem-solving workshop is built into the planning and innovation iteration.
We bring teams together to inspect what has been built, identify the most compelling problems that need to be solved, and use the workshop to improve our problem-identification and problem-solving capabilities.
The workshops also allow us to identify systemic issues, the organizational impediments, that prevent us from achieving our goals and objectives. Problems and impediments that are beyond the team’s influence and control and require interventions from others in the organization.
As a team, we will identify the root causes of those problems and impediments and identify how those impediments can be removed or who needs to be recruited to resolve those impediments on our behalf.
Identifying and inspecting these impediments allows us to plan for the resolution of these impediments in the next program increment (PI) or include those elements in our discussions with leaders and stakeholders to see if they can help us resolve those impediments.
So, in a nutshell, this is the purpose of an innovation and planning iteration in a program increment.
About Value Glide
Value Glide are a SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) consultancy, coaching practice, and training specialist who work with organizations to align business objectives with customer needs and wants.
As deeply experienced agile coaches and practitioners, our team are invested in continuous learning through each client engagement and use the data and evidence we gather from each implementation to inform our training, coaching, and consulting services.
In a nutshell, empirical process control or empiricism.
If you are thinking of adopting agile within your organization and have identified SAFe as a great agile framework to adopt, implement and improve your business agility, visit our SAFe Quickstart ART Launch program page or view our SAFe Consulting Services page.
If you have identified a need for an agile coach and SAFe coach to help your organization adopt and implement SAFe, visit our SAFe Coaching Services page.
If you want to know more about SAFe and how to lead SAFe, visit our SAFE Training page for a host of options, from Leading SAFe to a SAFe Release Train Engineer course.
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