Program Increment Planning Board

A program increment (PI) planning board is an essential part of the Scaled agile framework or SAFe^®.

The PI board gives management visibility into dependencies and highlights potential risks to delivering a project on time.

Multiple PI boards can show the relationship between planned work and fixed or actual work as teams progress through their sprints.

Most PI planning is first done on a whiteboard. This is great for getting everyone on the same page, however it's not connected to any data and it's not easily shared or updated.

Other specialized PI planning software and add-ons require you to capture data in specific ways and restructure team workflows. Changing team workflows and behavior in a large enterprise is a challenge most organizations don't want to deal with.

VisualScript's PI planning board is adaptive and flexible. Using VisualScript, large organizations can deploy digital program increment planning with minimal impact on their current workflows.

VisualScript PI board follows a standard program increment board format and will scale across multiple teams, projects and even Jira instances with the help of custom fields.

For many, the solution will work with little to no code out of the box. VisualScript is also fully customizable so you can easily customize and tweak the built-in solution to match your needs and data structure.

To generate a PI planning board using VisualScript, you'll need VisualScript installed on your Jira instance. Once VisualScript is added to your instance, you can add a VisualScript gadget to your dashboard. When the VisualScript gadget is added to a dashboard, you'll see a list of available reports to run. The built-in reports will be in a folder called "Built-In Reports".

Choose "Jira PI Board" to add to your dashboard.

You'll be asked to provide a project key. You can enter multiple project names separated by commas.

Next, you'll need to add Sprint names separated by commas.

Then enter the Issue Type or Types that you'd like to display, for instance Story, Task, Sub-task and Bug.

The last bit of data VisualScript needs to generate the PI board is information about how your team information is stored in Jira. By default, VisualScript assumes Components are used to represent teams.

Once the PI board is generated, you'll see from the top down all of your teams and left to right all of your sprints. Each item corresponds to a team and a sprint and you'll notice the color of these dots in each issue represents their status: to do is blue, in progress is yellow, and done is green. Dependency lines between issues will show in red.

Each issue has a hyperlink which lets you drill down to the issue in Jira.

VisualScript's digitized PI planning board can save large organizations the cost and labor associated with in-person PI planning events.

While VisualScript offers a no-code solution that will work out of the box for many teams, you can also make adjustments easily to fit your teams' workflows. With minimal effort, VisualScript will adapt to how your data is structured and generate custom PI planning boards.

If you’re an administrator, you can use the Report Builder to edit features of the report. You can choose parameters to change the options users will see in the UI of the report. Or use the Code Editor to customize every detail of the look of the report like shape size, spacing and arrangement.

We even have friendly engineers who will help you get started.

ARM IT uses VisualScript to supplement their in-person PI planning events to provide a real-time dashboard to their teams.

Their implementation of VisualScript's PI planning board uses ScriptRunner to generate code that is exposed to VisualScript using a REST endpoint. You can read the case study here.

If you're interested in how their PI planning boards were created, read about our collaboration with Adaptavist and ScriptRunner.