Agile PI Planning: The Story Behind The Stormboard + Jira Integration

Agile Pi Planning with both in-person and remote teams can be a major challenge, and one that we recently tackled with one of our long-term regulated Fortune 100 customers. 

This global organization has hundreds of developers who work with multiple products across dozens of teams, and were migrating their Agile practices to PI Planning following the SAFe methodology. 

PI Planning Session 1 — Paper and smartphones 

In their first PI Planning session, they used a classic format of taping flipcharts on the wall and adding handwritten sticky notes of their Jira issues to them. 

They gathered most of their team in a conference room, and coordinated travel, hotels, meals, and all of the logistics of getting everyone together for this massive session. To add to the complexity, many of their employees couldn’t fly in for the session, so they had to figure out how to enable them to collaborate remotely. 

The solution for this first PI Planning session was to hold smartphones up the flipcharts so the remote participants could at least see what was going on.

Being long-time users of Stormboard in other parts of their company, they presented us with the challenge of digitally transforming their PI Planning sessions with the goals of engaging their remote teams and bringing efficiency to the process by taking it paperless. 

PI Planning Session 2 — Stormboard Jira Integration early phase

A mere 10 weeks later, at their PI-2 session, we introduced them to our Jira Integration and helped them run their entire session on Stormboard. (At this point, our Jira Integration was in the early phase, and we manually exported issues from Jira and imported them into Stormboard.)
During this session, each team had a monitor on their table with one laptop connected to Stormboard. The rest of the team—both in the room and remotely—had Stormboard up on their own devices (laptops and tablets). For the first time, the remote participants felt like first-class participants, because not only could they clearly see the process, they could actively participate by moving issues where they belonged in the digital meeting space.
The teams also did all of the SAFe ceremonies in Stormboard, including iteration planning, managing dependencies, sizing issues, setting PI objectives, and completing a risks/roam board.

At the end of PI-2, in the Retrospective, we were honored to hear that the session participants felt that the best thing about the PI was Stormboard!

PI Planning Session 3 — Stormboard Jira Integration two-way sync 

For PI-3, we worked with the company’s security and Jira teams and implemented a live two-way integration between Stormboard and their Jira server (including going through Firewalls and a third party API proxy). 

This made instant querying of Jira (using JQL) right inside of Stormboard seamless, and users could drag issues directly into their iteration plan or sizing Storm. As stories were moved between iterations, they were automatically moved to the right sprints in Jira. This not only made the in-meeting process better, but eliminated all of the manual transcription and additional work traditionally done at the end of a PI to update Jira,
The two-way integration paid off, and once again, the feedback at the end of the session was that the Stormboard upgrades were the best thing about PI-3.

Ongoing PI Planning Sessions — Fully remote with Stormboard

With the recent world events, the next PI is going to be 100% digital and distributed. 

Recognizing that there’s value in the face-to-face connections, it’s doubtful they will do this for every PI in the future, but their preparedness took all the risk and scramble out of working remotely for their next PI session.

What Are Users of The Jira Integration Saying?

One of the Agile Coaches we talked to loved the integration. 

"This is awesome! Ten minutes into the demo, I knew our team NEEDED to have it. With 500 developers spread around the world, Stormboard’s Agile Integration is an absolute game-changer.”

From another Coach:

“This was truly an answer to our company’s prayers. We had been researching tools on the market for story mapping and big room planning. 
We have distributed teams and were spending a lot of money and time on travel expenses to be collated for these events, and even with all the expenses for travel, we still had offshore teams that were being left out. 
In addition, the extra time needed to input information from sticky notes to our system of record was a struggle.
With this integration, we will be able to cut travel costs, story map, and plan with distributed and even offshore teams, as well as integrate the work straight into our Agile tools instantly without having to duplicate entry into multiple systems.”

Want to try it out? 

If you’d like to find out more, sign up for a personal demo and see how Stormboard can help you dramatically improve your Agile planning processes.

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