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Program Increment (PI) Planning is a cornerstone of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®), bringing teams together to align on shared goals, dependencies, and delivery plans for the next increment.
Traditionally, PI planning is conducted in person using whiteboards and sticky notes. However, more and more teams are now relying on Jira and Confluence to support remote collaboration, structure work, and maintain traceability across Agile Release Trains (ARTs).
In this guide, we’ll walk through how to run PI Planning in Jira, using Atlassian tools and Smart Templates to bring clarity, consistency, and visibility to your Agile programs.
What is PI Planning in Agile?
Program Increment (PI) Planning is a key event in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®), designed to bring together all teams on an Agile Release Train (ART) to align on goals, roadmap, and dependencies for the next 8–12 weeks. It is a structured, two-day planning session that sets the direction for coordinated Agile delivery across teams.
During PI Planning, multiple Scrum teams collaborate with Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Release Train Engineers (RTEs), and Business Owners. Stakeholders participate to provide input, surface risks, and define priorities.
Each PI Planning event delivers tangible outcomes that guide execution:
- PI Objectives – agreed-upon goals for each team, aligned with business value
- Program Board – a visual map of features, dependencies, and key milestones
- Risk Assessment – identified risks and a plan to address or accept them
PI Planning is essential for managing complexity in large-scale Agile environments. It fosters shared understanding, aligns cross-functional teams, and creates the roadmap for the next increment of delivery.
Learn more in the PI Planning guide.
How Teams Are Currently Executing PI Planning
Program Increment (PI) Planning has traditionally been a highly physical, co-located event. It’s not uncommon for 100 to 200+ members of an Agile Release Train (ART) to gather in person from across the globe for a two-day planning marathon. The energy and alignment achieved during these sessions are valuable, but they also come with significant operational challenges.
During these events, Product Managers present the program vision and top-priority features. Then, Product Owners and development teams break out to identify work items and surface dependencies. These dependencies are often visualized using a physical Program Board, where teams connect related tasks with strings—hence the nickname “Spaghetti Board.”
While this tactile setup can foster engagement and transparency in the room, it often leads to inefficiencies once the session ends:
- Someone has to manually transcribe sticky notes and string connections into Jira, often late into the evening.
- Even when work is entered, Jira lacks a native way to replicate the visual context of a Spaghetti Board. Dependencies may be noted but are hard to track.
- Distributed team members who weren’t present may struggle to understand the plan, since the visual representation often ends up taped outside a Release Train Engineer’s office.
The cost of co-located PI Planning is also significant, especially for global organizations that hold up to five sessions per year. And once planning ends, keeping everyone aligned becomes increasingly difficult. Teams can’t easily track changes, progress, or dependency shifts unless they’re manually reflected in Jira or Confluence, which rarely happens in real time.
These friction points—a lack of visibility, limited traceability, and high coordination overhead — are why many Agile teams are transitioning to digitally enabled PI Planning. The right tools can retain the alignment and collaboration benefits of in-person planning while eliminating manual rework and enabling continuous visibility for all stakeholders.
How Do You Use Jira, Confluence, and Jira Align for PI Planning?
Jira is the foundation for agile work at many organizations, and it scales well to support PI Planning in SAFe. Whether you’re planning at the team level or across multiple Agile Release Trains (ARTs), Jira offers flexible tools to structure and coordinate the entire PI Planning event, track dependencies, and manage execution.
Plan Work with Jira Epics, Story Points, and Work Items
In Jira, Epics represent large features or initiatives that span multiple sprints. During PI Planning, teams break down these epics into smaller work items, typically user stories or tasks, and estimate them using story points. This helps establish team capacity for the PI and identify how much work fits into each sprint.
Each team plans its iteration using the sprint backlog and can organize items by team boards, labels, or custom fields to reflect ownership, risk level, or business value. Dependencies between teams can be linked directly in Jira using issue linking or custom dependency fields.
Jira’s flexibility enables the detailed tracking of these items through customizable workflows, which mirror the stages of delivery, from planning and implementation to review and release.
Use Advanced Roadmaps for Cross-Team Visibility
Advanced Roadmaps in Jira Premium is one of the most powerful tools for managing PI Planning across multiple teams. It allows you to:
- Create a shared timeline view of epics and stories
- See how work rolls up across teams or programs
- Customize the hierarchy above epics (e.g., features ? capabilities ? initiatives)
- Track team capacity across sprints
- Visualize dependencies between work items
To customize the issue hierarchy above epics for SAFe, follow Atlassian’s tutorial on configuring hierarchy levels.
Teams can also prioritize items and adjust plans collaboratively in real-time, ensuring alignment and visibility across the Agile Release Train.
Structure the Process with Confluence Pages
While Jira holds your issues and execution plans, Confluence is the ideal place to document the planning process. For each Program Increment (PI), you can create a dedicated Confluence page with:
- Team-level and ART-level PI objectives
- The shared vision and milestones
- Links to relevant Jira boards or roadmaps
- Space for capturing breakout notes and risks
Use Atlassian’s guide to building a PI Planning Confluence page to set it up. For collaborative workshops or remote teams, you can also use Confluence Whiteboards for interactive planning — see how to use Whiteboards for PI Planning.
Align Strategy with Execution Using Jira Align
For organizations running the full Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Jira Align is the Atlassian tool designed specifically for strategic planning across Agile Release Trains.
Jira Align provides:
- Program boards to visualize features, objectives, and dependencies across teams
- Real-time rollups of progress from Jira issues to PI objectives
- Support for business value scoring, risk tracking, and ART coordination
- Out-of-the-box alignment with SAFe terminology and ceremonies
It integrates directly with Jira Cloud to synchronize work items and provide enterprise-level visibility for product managers, release train engineers, and business stakeholders.
You can follow Atlassian’s full solution guide for configuring PI objectives and program boards to get started.
Key Phases of a PI Planning Event
A well-run PI Planning event is a big team meeting that serves as the point of alignment for agile teams working within a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). The event typically runs over two days and involves intense coordination between Product Owners, Scrum Masters, business stakeholders, and teams within an Agile Release Train (ART). Below is a breakdown of the three key phases of the event, with tips for execution and recommendations based on common challenges.
Pre-Planning: Aligning Before the Event
PI Planning begins long before the official kickoff. In the pre-planning stage, teams and leadership align on strategic intent, upcoming product features, and organizational capacity. This step is often underestimated, yet it determines how smoothly the rest of the event will go.
Teams start by reviewing the product roadmap and defining the Program Backlog. Product Managers should clarify business priorities and connect them to upcoming Epics or features in Jira. The goal is to ensure every team backlog is populated with well-refined and estimated work items.
One of the more common issues at this stage is backlog readiness. When stories are unclear or not broken down into smaller work items, teams may struggle to plan effectively during the event. During PI Planning, teams break down these epics into smaller work items, typically user stories or tasks, and estimate them using story points.
Confluence plays a key role in organizing planning documentation. Atlassian provides PI Planning templates for Confluence that help teams set up shared pages for the agenda, breakout instructions, and draft PI Objectives. Keeping these pages updated and accessible avoids confusion once the event begins.
Day 1: Team Breakouts and Draft Planning
The first day of the PI Planning event starts with a kickoff, typically led by the Release Train Engineer (RTE). Product Management presents the vision for the increment, outlines top priorities, and highlights major business value goals. This introduction sets the context for all teams participating in the event.
After the kickoff, teams split into breakout sessions to begin drafting their plans. Using their own Jira boards, each team reviews the backlog, estimates the effort required, and maps out how much work can realistically be delivered during the program increment. Teams typically plan across 5–6 sprints.
A frequent challenge at this stage is dependency management. Without a clear view of cross-team dependencies, plans quickly become misaligned. Jira supports dependency tracking using issue linking, labels, or custom fields, but for full visibility across teams, Advanced Roadmaps or Jira Align are often required. These tools enable you to visualize dependencies at the feature level and make adjustments in real-time.
Another issue that teams often face is inconsistent story point estimation. Differences in estimation practices across teams can create planning bottlenecks and confusion. It helps to align on a shared estimation method (e.g., Fibonacci, T-shirt sizing) before the event and to revisit the definition of ready as a guideline for what qualifies as plannable work.
Throughout the breakouts, teams draft their PI Objectives, flag blockers, and begin shaping their own roadmap for the program increment. They also begin filling in the Program Board—a visual tool used to capture key milestones, dependencies, and team deliveries.
Day 2: Risk Review and Team Commitments
The second day is dedicated to refining plans, identifying risks, and finalizing PI Objectives. Teams share their draft plans with the broader group and present their deliverables, dependencies, and open questions. The goal here is to achieve stakeholder alignment and create transparency across the ART.
One important aspect of this day is the ROAM analysis, a method for classifying and managing risks. Teams tag each risk as Resolved, Owned, Accepted, or Mitigated, and document this in Jira or Confluence. This collaborative risk assessment helps prevent miscommunications that often lead to rework later in the increment.
Another key element is scoring the business value of each PI Objective. This is done by Business Owners, who assign values based on alignment with strategy and impact. This practice not only reinforces prioritization but also helps teams focus on delivering high-impact outcomes.
Finally, each team formally commits to its portion of the program increment. This includes not just features and stories, but also any dependencies, risks, and unresolved work. Some teams also create stretch goals, but the focus should remain on shippable, validated deliverables.
Throughout Day 2, it’s important to maintain visibility into progress using shared boards and dashboards. Teams should keep Jira updated as they finalize their sprint backlog, and update the shared Program Board (either visually on a wallboard or digitally in Jira Align) to reflect the current state of planning.
When each phase of the PI Planning event is handled with care and structure, the result is a synchronized plan that reflects reality rather than wishful thinking. In the next section, we’ll explore how reusable checklists and templates can support teams in standardizing their planning and follow-through inside Jira.
Using Smart Templates & Checklists for PI Planning in Jira
Not every enterprise uses Jira Align, which is why Advanced Roadmaps in Jira and Confluence create the typical framework for digital PI planning. In addition to Advanced Roadmaps, you can use Smart Templates to help Agile Release Trains (ARTs) and planning teams streamline repeatable planning activities directly within Jira.
For example, many teams use a consistent structure across Program Increments, setting up epics and features to align with business priorities, assigning stories to development teams, and linking dependencies between teams. Instead of manually recreating this structure every quarter, Smart Templates let you save and reuse a full hierarchy of Epics, Stories, and Tasks as a predefined planning template.
You can create templates for:
- Pre-planning logistics (e.g., setting up Confluence PI planning pages, scheduling planning events)
- Team breakouts (e.g., task templates by team, department, or capability)
- PI Objectives and tracking (e.g., goals tagged in each Epic, with deadlines and contributors)
This not only saves time but also enforces consistency across each PI planning cycle, even as new teams or ARTs join the process.
To further streamline execution, Smart Checklists for Jira can be embedded within any Jira issue. For instance, when planning features during breakout sessions, team members can break them down into checklist items, such as “Clarify business value,” “Estimate in story points,” or “Confirm cross-team dependencies.” Unlike subtasks, these checklist items stay within the issue, keeping boards clean and communication centralized.
Smart Checklists also support:
- Custom statuses (e.g., Planned, In Progress, Validated)
- Mandatory checklist items to block workflow transitions
- Role tagging and due dates to clarify ownership
By combining Smart Templates with Advanced Roadmaps and automation rules, you can transform chaotic quarterly planning into a repeatable, structured process. Instead of rebuilding the plan from scratch each time, teams start with a shared framework tailored to their Agile setup and adapt as needed.
This helps RTEs, program managers, and product owners focus less on logistics and more on alignment, value delivery, and risk resolution across the PI lifecycle.
Best Practices to Make PI Planning Work in Jira
Even with the correct tooling in place, effective PI Planning in Jira requires discipline, collaboration, and ongoing alignment. To make it truly work across distributed teams, it’s important to bring together visibility, automation, and structured planning habits.
One of the most impactful tools for cross-team coordination is Advanced Roadmaps. It gives program managers and RTEs a real-time view of work across multiple teams by surfacing epics, initiatives, and dependencies in a unified roadmap. You can customize your issue hierarchy (e.g., introducing Initiative or Capability levels above Epics) and filter by team, sprint, or feature to track progress across the Agile Release Train.
Alongside this, Confluence plays a critical supporting role. Teams should use it to create and maintain centralized PI Planning pages with details like:
- The planning agenda and logistics
- Strategic themes and PI Objectives
- Links to Program Boards, Jira issues, and reports
- Visual summaries (e.g., whiteboards or Miro embeds)
Keeping these pages up to date and linked directly to Jira issues reduces communication gaps, especially in remote or hybrid settings.
To drive ownership and accountability during planning, teams can set up checklist statuses to reflect the state of draft plans. For example, checklists inside team-level stories or features can help mark items as Estimated, Reviewed, or Confirmed. This provides visibility without overloading the issue with subtasks.
Automation rules in Jira can also support consistent planning workflows. For instance:
- Trigger a Smart Checklist when a story is created from a PI Template
- Auto-tag reviewers or update a custom status when planning checklists are completed
- Send reminders to update dependencies or review estimates
Finally, validate outcomes using Jira reports and dashboards. Tracking velocity, issue progress, or unplanned carryovers across multiple sprints helps identify planning gaps and improve forecasting in future increments.
These best practices are especially valuable for Release Train Engineers and program managers, who need to maintain clarity across fast-moving, distributed teams. The combination of Jira Cloud, Confluence, and automation ensures that visibility doesn’t end when planning does—it carries forward throughout execution.
Common Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)
Even experienced teams can struggle to get the most out of PI Planning in Jira. Many of the challenges stem from disconnects between processes and tooling, or from assuming the plan is “done” once it’s in Jira.
One of the most common issues is poor backlog preparation. If stories aren’t refined, prioritized, or aligned with PI Objectives ahead of the event, the first day of planning can devolve into clarification meetings instead of focused estimation and coordination. Teams should prioritize backlog refinement well before PI Planning begins, with clear owners (usually Product Owners) responsible for readiness.
Another frequent challenge is unclear objectives or misaligned stakeholders. Without a shared understanding of the business goals, team-level planning becomes tactical and disconnected from the overall objectives. Strong facilitation from RTEs and alignment on top-level themes are essential to keep planning anchored in business value.
Overlooked dependencies are also a recurring issue, particularly when teams rely on manual communication or forget to update Jira with new blockers. During breakout sessions, teams should review potential cross-team needs and surface them using Advanced Roadmaps or Confluence whiteboards. Leaving this out increases the risk of delays and hidden blockers during execution.
Finally, a practical yet impactful pitfall is failing to update Jira or Confluence during or after the planning process. Even well-run planning sessions lose their effectiveness if the work isn’t captured and maintained. When the backlog, PI Objectives, or Program Board become outdated, execution suffers, and teams fall back into reactive coordination.
Avoiding these pitfalls requires a balance of upfront preparation, real-time visibility, and post-planning follow-through.
Bring Clarity and Structure to Your Agile Programs
PI Planning is one of the most critical rituals in the Scaled Agile Framework. Done right, it creates alignment across teams, connects strategic intent to execution, and reveals risks before they turn into blockers.
Jira Cloud provides a strong foundation, offering traceability, structure, and real-time visibility into planning progress. However, the real value lies in how teams utilize it. Advanced Roadmaps, Confluence planning pages, and automation help orchestrate complex cross-team coordination.
Smart Templates and Smart Checklists add another layer of structure for recurring processes, making planning more consistent across Program Increments.
To take planning even further, our parent company Railsware recommends the BRIDGeS Framework – a structured problem-solving tool designed for product strategy, decision-making, and prioritization. Originally built for internal product discovery, BRIDGeS has helped teams at companies like Calendly and Tennishub align faster, make smarter choices, and build roadmaps that actually reflect user and business needs. Learn more about the BRIDGeS Framework
Combining Jira Software with tools like Smart Templates, Smart Checklists, and applying BRIDGeS framework, teams can move from scattered notes and sticky boards to repeatable, outcome-driven PI Planning. That’s what enables smoother execution, fewer surprises, and real delivery at scale.
FAQ: PI Planning in Jira and Agile Programs
What’s the difference between Jira Align and Advanced Roadmaps?
Jira Align is designed for enterprise-level PI Planning, supporting full-scale SAFe® implementation with Agile Release Trains, Lean Portfolio Management, and real-time dashboards. Advanced Roadmaps is a Jira Premium feature focused on cross-project visibility and custom issue hierarchies. Align is ideal for organizations with multiple ARTs, while Advanced Roadmaps is suited for team- or department-level planning.
Can I use PI Planning in team-managed projects?
It’s possible, but not ideal. Team-managed projects have limited support for advanced issue hierarchies, global custom fields, and roadmap configurations. Company-managed projects offer better scalability and integration with tools like Advanced Roadmaps.
How do I track dependencies between teams in Jira?
Dependencies can be represented using issue links, Advanced Roadmaps dependencies, or custom fields. To visualize them effectively, use the Program Board view in Jira Align or dependency mapping features in Advanced Roadmaps. Maintaining these links throughout planning is key to avoiding delivery bottlenecks.
Can I automate PI Planning templates across ARTs?
Yes. Using Smart Templates, you can create reusable issue structures, such as Epics and Stories, for each team and apply them consistently across increments. Automation rules in Jira can also trigger the insertion of a template or the creation of a checklist based on project, issue type, or workflow stage.
How do I visualize the progress of PI Objectives?
Track PI Objectives by linking them to Jira Epics or Features, then surface them in dashboards or Confluence status reports. Use Smart Checklists within issues to break down objectives into actionable steps and monitor completion status.
What happens if we don’t complete all PI Objectives?
Not all PI Objectives need to be fully delivered; however, missing high-priority items should be reviewed during Sprint Reviews and Inspect & Adapt sessions. Use outcome metrics, business value scores, and velocity trends to evaluate gaps and inform future planning.
Is PI Planning applicable to Kanban teams?
Yes, though it may look different. Kanban teams continue to contribute to the Agile Release Train, defining objectives, managing dependencies, and committing to outcomes. Their delivery cadence may differ, but shared visibility and alignment remain essential.
How often should PI Planning be reviewed or improved?
After each PI, teams should hold Inspect & Adapt workshops to review the effectiveness of planning, delivery confidence, and identify process gaps. Retrospectives can also highlight friction points in how teams use Jira or structure their plans. The goal is continuous improvement.
