Our piplanning app has also changed with the new look of Rentouch. Admittedly, the changes are not yet very big. So far only the piplanning app icon has changed. There is also an additional modification of the icon for the piplanning app setup tool. In order to understand why many of piplanning app’s components and elements still came across as somewhat hand-knitted, we have to go back three years in history.

How we got here

This is a brief flashback of piplanning app’s development to date. At the end of 2015 we were able to put one of our touchscreens into an Implementing SAFe® Course. Our Whiteboard app was installed on it. As background we had loaded in a standard Program Board grid. We also had the possibility to create colored stickies. During the breaks the participants played around with it. Sometimes they were more interested in our existing apps on the touchscreen and the touchscreen itself. Nevertheless, during the course part “Experiencing Program Increment (PI) Planning”, a team decided to use the touchscreen with the modified Whiteboard app for their planning.

Indeed, this target group was anything but representative. By the day of the course, most participants had not yet experienced intensive points of contact with SAFe®, let alone PI Plannings. As such, it was difficult for them to see where the real sticking points were in distributed PI Plannings. So for the time being, we kept the idea in mind.

But at some point we had to do something. We recorded a very short video and published it on Vine (this 6 second video platform from Twitter, which is now dead). Together with the upload to Vine, we posted a tweet and were literally flooded with feedback and numerous requests.

Now we knew it was something that really made a difference. This time we wanted to avoid unnecessary waste during development and make sure that this really solved the main problem. So we scheduled meetings with a lot of people from the SAFe community. At these meetings we asked them about their experiences in PI Plannings and wanted to know where the main problems were. After that the very first version of the piplanning app was developed within a short time. But before we wanted to put even more effort into it, we wanted to see how the idea was received by real companies doing real SAFe® PI Plannings. So we put together a landing page.

When a new product is primarily based on customer feedback, it sometimes grows quickly in one area, sometimes in another. This makes it difficult to keep the appearance up to date at all times. Or better said, everything new will always be added to the existing pages. Over time this becomes confusing and then it is time to clean everything up, so that everyone has the overview again. That’s what we’re doing right now. The new piplanning app icon and the new landing page are just the beginning.

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