[00:10]
So, welcome to PI Planning therapy. You haven't heard from me for a while,  and we've all been on Corona lockdown here in Switzerland, hiding from each other and hiding from the virus. We’re back now, and I thought, the best thing to do is start off with a little bit of context about your therapist — that’s me, Shane Harrison.

[00:29]

So, I want to give you some context of how I'm going to look at these questions: what lens am I going to use when I'm looking through these challenges that we have during PI Planning.

[0:41]

So I look through a lens of agility.  I'm not looking through the lens of agile, I'm not looking through the lens of Scrum, Kanban, or SAFe. I'm looking through a lens of agility, because I believe that is what we need in our organizations to be successful.

[01:03]
It is not the strong that survive, and it is not the smart that survive. It is not the thick and thin; it is those who are most adaptable. And as our world becomes more complicated, more dynamic, where we have new people coming into the market, we have new players, we have disruptive innovators, and all of those things coming along. Our organizations must become not just more agile, but they have to develop agility in the same way that an athlete would develop agility. 

[01:39] 

So it's not enough doing small elements, doing Scrum, doing Lean. They bring great things! But it’s not just about doing SAFe, or, say, bring those things together. It's about developing all of those things together, and combining them with everything you need in the organization. 

[01:55]

So you take Scrum, and you put it together with Lean, and then you wrap that around with SAFe. But you also need to include a growth mindset. You need to include a sense of leadership, to bring in the leader-leader culture, and you need to bring in all of these elements to create agility and more.

[02:18]

So when I start to answer your questions about PI Planning, and when I'm starting to answer your questions about SAFe, and share with you some of my thoughts and observations, it’s that lens of agility, that lens of ‘how do we create a dynamic, adaptable organization using these tools’, an organization that can grow and thrive in a constantly changing, challenging environment. 

[02:44]

So that’s the lens that I’m gonna use as we go through the therapy sessions that we're about to have when we talk about PI Planning and what the teams are doing. I'm going to be answering those questions looking at how we create agility. Not just how we do SAFe well, or how we do Scrum well, or how we plan or break down the story well. 

[03:04]
I'm really going to focus on what are the things that we need to do in those contexts to create agility, so the whole organization can, as I see it, adapt quickly, function quickly, and have really huge success. I truly, truly believe large organizations can be just as adaptable as the disruptive innovators —  they just have to choose to do so. 

[03:29]

So, that's a little intro to how I see the world! In the next session, we're going to talk a little bit about SAFe, and how I approach SAFe, because we are going to be talking about PI Planning after all. I think you'll find it interesting, being told I have a slightly different view on SAFe and its place in the world from other people, and I think it’s only fair that you get a little bit of a look inside my mind. To open it up a bit in terms of how I see SAFe and how I see its place; then, the development of organizational agility.

[04:03]
Thank you! See you next time!