What changes
Classic PI Planning plans features into iterations. PI Outcome Planning plans outcomes: measurable changes in customer or business behaviour, each with two to five key results, and lets teams choose the experiments, prototypes, enablers and features that move them. It fits in one day because the unit of agreement is the outcome and its milestones, not every story.
The spine is an outcome tree: portfolio outcomes above the ART, ART outcomes, PI outcomes for this increment, and team outcomes that contribute to them. Ambition is explicit: moonshot or roofshot.
Milestones on the board
| Kind | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Fixed-date milestone | Events and contractual obligations on or before a date set outside the ART. |
| Learning milestone | Where the ART validates a technical or business hypothesis and decides whether the work is still worth pursuing. |
| Synchronization milestone | Where two or more teams' work must converge; missing it stalls the dependent work. |
| Release | A planned point where value reaches customers; mostly on demand, sometimes tied to a fixed date. |
What teams put on their boards
- Experiment: a cheap test of an assumption with a clear learning goal
- Prototype: something customers can touch that answers a riskier question
- Enabler: capability, data or infrastructure the outcome needs
- Feature: value delivered to customers, with a hypothesis and acceptance criteria
The one-day agenda
| Half | Minutes | Slot | What happens |
|---|---|---|---|
| morning | 30 | Business context | ART vision, ART outcomes, progress on key results, the draft PI outcomes, and what changed since last PI. |
| morning | 60 | Outcome breakout | Per PI outcome, across teams: how each team contributes, and the milestones that keep them aligned. |
| morning | 60 | Team breakout | Per team: all its outcomes on one board, capacity, constraints, the critical experiments, prototypes, enablers and features. |
| morning | 30 | Outcome breakout | Draft the PI Outcome Planning Board; surface decisions needed and risks. |
| morning | 30 | Draft PI Outcome Planning Board presentation | Representatives walk the board: team outcomes, milestones, decisions needed, risks. |
| morning | 60 | Lunch & Management Review and Problem-Solving | Leadership and stakeholders turn decisions needed and risks into confirmed decisions and actions, each with an owner. |
| afternoon | 30 | Communicate planning adjustments | Each decision and action, with the owner who helps teams adjust. |
| afternoon | 30 | Outcome breakout | Fold the adjustments in; deepen the cross-team conversations. |
| afternoon | 60 | Team breakout | Adjust intentions and sequencing; re-examine the team outcomes and their key results. |
| afternoon | 30 | Outcome breakout | Finalize the PI Outcome Planning Board, including other commitments. |
| afternoon | 60 | Final plan review | Each PI outcome, the other commitments, open decisions and risks, then the fist-of-five confidence vote. |
Management review board
- Decisions needed: raised by teams during the breakouts, with the options
- Risks: ROAMed at the review
- Decisions confirmed: the decision as made, with who made it
- Actions: an action with an owner and a date
The vote
The final plan review ends with a fist-of-five vote per PI outcome and for the plan as a whole. Anything under three gets a voice before the vote closes. Trainyard records the votes against the outcome so the next Sense and Respond knows where confidence was thin.
Updated 2026-10-22. SAFe® is a registered trademark of Scaled Agile, Inc. All guides.