Hi everyone, welcome back to Remote PI Planning in the shoes of a Team. I hope your RTE did a great job and created an amazing stage for you to be able to focus on planning the next Program Increment. As a Team make sure you've prepared yourself and agreed on a few working agreements helping you being effective. I recommend to have three permanent channels open.

• A conference call.. don't forget to turn on your video cameras.
• A chat, where you can quickly write to each other if necessary or collect notes.
• And last but not least a channel where you collaboratively work on your plan. Replace your physical Team and Program Boards with digital ones where everyone can contribute to. Don't let your Scrum Master type in all information. It is your plan and therefore every team member should be able to add and edit digital post-its on all boards.

Avoid to plan multiple Features or Enablers at the same time. Work on small batches. Planning Features one by one will keep you focused and allows you to work with short feedback loops. Being able to visualize a planed Feature already after 1 hour team breakout session shows progress and minimizes risks.

During planning, don't forget about dependencies. The ones you have, but also the ones you may get from other teams. Based on the overarching Program Backlog priorities, solve Dependencies as soon as possible. If the Feature from another team has higher priority, you should focus on solving that dependency first. Afterwards you can move on with the Features YOU have pulled from the Backlog Board.

Make sure you're having working agreements which trigger the conversations you need. A good practice is definitely to use digital stickers. For instance... raising a blue question mark triggers Product Management, as you have questions regarding content. Raising a red exclamation mark shows, that you're facing an impediment. All participants should speak the same visualization language to avoid confusion.

I'd like to add a few words about Draft and Final Plan Review. This stage is yours! Be prepared to present your plan to all participants. And I mean to all. I’ve often seen the Draft Plan and Final Plan Review used as kind of Status Reporting towards Product Management and Business Owners. That’s not the main purpose of a Plan Review. To get alignment across the whole ART presenting your plan to other teams is as important as presenting it to Business Owners.

Going into a Remote PI Planning is a totally new experience. Not everything will work perfect. Be open, honest and support your Scrum Master and Release Train Engineer to continuously improve your Remote PI Plannings.

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