The OutSystems Way of PI Planning

I’d like to tell you about my first PI Planning experience, and I guess the best way to start this article is with a disclaimer: I have always been very skeptical about SAFe.

The truth is that OutSystems Engineering has new leadership. And with new people come new mentalities and experiences. Implementing a PI Planning cadence was a top-down choice, but I guess that such an endeavor would hardly start any other way. Note that I wrote “implementing a PI Planning cadence” and not “implementing SAFe”.

Yes, you can do one without the other. Agility within a high-performance organization is not about picking a framework and applying it point by point. It’s about analyzing the problems and selecting from your toolkit the solutions that might solve them. Learning and iterating.

Why PI Planning?

The way we see it, growing this complex engineering department can go two ways:

• We can structure the system for scale, adopting some process rigidity that will make things a bit more controllable and smooth.
• Or we can aim at organic growth with a system that will always feel stretched overcapacity and accept that this will bring some alignment and commitment challenges.

Since the goal is having teams moving fast but guided by core values of…