Mastering Distributed PI Planning

“If you do it right, if you have the right people, and if you have some nerds and lots of engineering DNA, it really works on the tool side" - Stephan Neck

If you’ve ever believed that failing once in remote PI Planning means catastrophe, this episode of SPCs Unleashed proves otherwise. Mark Richards, Ali Hajou, Stephan Neck, and Nikolaos Kaintantzis discuss how their early horror stories—teams flying to the wrong city, frantic breakout links—led them to design stronger approaches for future PI events.

Key Highlights

• Fail Forward: Mark shares why the first distributed attempt bombed—and how reflection turned it into a gold mine of learning.
• Engineering the Experience: Ali’s meticulous tip sheets and distribution-list tactics show how to orchestrate a seamless remote event.
• Trust Before Tools: Stephan and Niko emphasize that real alignment arises from respect, empathy, and creative team rituals.
• Agenda as a Design Task: Spreading sessions over multiple days, blending synchronous and asynchronous touchpoints, and scheduling “handover time” across time zones.
• Leader Visibility: Dispersed teams need more leadership presence—Gemba time is crucial, even if it’s virtual.

Actionable Insights

• Customize Your Toolkit: Match your collaboration tools to your security constraints, culture, and level of remote maturity.
• Establish a “Summon” Method: Instantly ping relevant players with at-mentions, shared boards, or specialized scripts.
• Prototype Your Flow: Small-scale tests of your agenda can reveal hidden friction points before the big day.

Conclusion
Distributed PI Planning isn’t a fallback option; it can be a fresh opportunity for stronger collaboration. By preparing deeply and focusing on human connections, you’ll discover remote sessions can be surprisingly powerful—even under pressure.

Transcript

Mark Richards: 0:01

You're listening to SPCs unleashed a shaping agility project that emerged from the 2023 Prague safe summit. The show is hosted by Swiss SPC, T Stephan Nick and Niko kaintances, Dutch, spct, Ali Hajou and Aussie safe fellow, Mark Richards. We're committed to helping SPCs grow their impact and move beyond the foundations taught during implementing safe each week, we explore a dimension from the frameworks, competencies. We share stories about our journeys, the secrets we found and the lessons we've learned the hard way. Good day, and welcome to SPCs. Unleashed this week. We are here, and it's beautiful. We're all here. Ali, is my goodness, two weeks in a row. Ali, what is going on with that? Oh, yes, we're going to talk about distributed pi planning. And, you know, devoting a whole episode to it really happens. Because when we talked about pi planning late last year, we had like, one little question that came up with about four minutes to go about distributed PR planning. And everybody was like, Nah, it's a whole episode. So we're going to do a whole episode on distributed PR planning, and as always, we're going to start with true passions in the space Ali. Why don't you take us away? Sir,

Ali Hajou: 1:19

yes, sir, absolutely. Sir, this. I think this episode is going to become a very practical one, which is just one containing tips and tricks that are easily copy and pasteable. Especially for me, I have a little bit of a weird, a weird view, and hence a weird passion on this topic. I have really, really good experience on totally over engineering and overdoing pi planning. Or, let me rephrase, remote pi plannings, things you know, this session would go so smooth. Everyone knows exactly what to do. Is actually even pulled in calls, rather than people have to join calls. It just, I'm have a weird stance in on this. But you think, once executed, well, that's it. It becomes the standard, which is horrible, because every other session needs to be running as smooth. But it's, it's my passion.

Mark Richards: 2:30

So the hardware guy wants to over engineer things. Stephan, what about the sports and military guy?

Stephan Neck: 2:40

Yeah, one needs a good challenge, or, as Richard Rommel coined the term, a crux, right? And if you have a challenge on the crux, you need to find feasible approaches and practices. So let's talk about challenges and the crux of it, distribute the PI play

Mark Richards: 2:59

and Nick hurt. Yeah, most of

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 3:01

us has have a pretty safe life, and me too. It was a developer, and I really hated remote. I was one of the first developers having me assuring and offshoring stuff, and it was always so difficult. And meanwhile, I'm happy working remote and having remote pi plannings to make them great is some kind of my passion for the people the states. You know this, no, again or again again. So just make them great, the PI plannings remote. And for that, I think you must master the tools. So I'm thankful for COVID. Oh, no, go ahead. Cut this now. Because of COVID, the tools also progressed, so it's much more easier. So master the tools is one thing, and the other thing is the people thing. So know how people human function, how they are so and both are my passions, using tools, using them well. And know what people need to stay focused and still stay happy and stay engaged. All right,

Mark Richards: 3:59

so let's, um, let's get into war stories. And I thought a great place to start would be thinking about first PR planning. And I remember my first distributed PR planning, right? And and I've done, I think I stopped counting at about 200 PR plannings that I'd helped with, but it was quite a few years ago now that the first time we tackled a distributed PR planning, and it was two cities, both in Australia, half an hour time zone gap. And let me just say that, you know, I may have done more than 200 PR planning, so I've only ever had two that failed. And the first time I tried a distributed one was one of the ones that failed. And no, it was a it was like, to be truthful, they probably shouldn't have been in the room for PR planning anyway. There were so many things that were missing in terms of preparation, but the moment where you realize that. You know, half the people had flown into the wrong state, and the people who needed to be talking to some teams had flown into a different city, the people who should be talking like the subject matter experts had flown into the wrong cities, you name it. And the whole thing fell apart, and we basically wound up canceling it after the first day, because the teams had nothing to do on the second day, and you know, that would

Unknown: 5:24

have been into the wrong city, yeah, literally,

Mark Richards: 5:27

because what we had was, they've gone, we're not going to put everybody in one city. But we had people from, you know, Brisbane, from Sydney, and they'd gone, look, you know, we'll just settle on two cities and either fly to Melbourne or to Sydney, and they kind of left it up to people which one they felt they wanted to go to. Wow, they've literally gone the wrong places. And it's one of those things. I mean, I've been through, and I'm sure you've all been through chaotic PR plannings, but the magic is that, you know, you've got everybody there, and you find your way through the chaos in the moment. And magical stuff happened. And I think we probably could have saved that one if we'd we'd all been in the one place, as opposed to in crisis spread across two places, struggling to keep them synchronized. So that was my first experience with distributed PR planning. What about you, Niko?

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 6:24

It was the greatest horror I've ever had. So somebody asked me, oh, Niko, is COVID, and this time everybody was at home, so not having satellites in different location, everybody was home. And they realized, I think a week before, oh gosh, I think we need support, because if I'm alone as an RT having 10 teams that could be difficult. Yes, that could be difficult. Not only could be that would be a little bit difficult. So they asked me if I can handle three teams as a coach for the Scrum Masters. I didn't ask so much because I thought they will be prepared, because I had so many community of practices talking about how to make it better. This, this whole, how do we call it dispersed? Bi maybe where everybody is somewhere else, and then arrive there, and I've seen, oh gosh, they are not allowed to use cool tools. They had really confluence, just confluence, nothing else. Okay, it's handled well, okay. How do you handle breakout rooms? Oh, we have for each breakout room a separate meeting, because the tool they had wasn't able to make breakout rooms. So okay, so now I have four links, the main loom, the three teams, and have to jump around with a one minute delay in between. So, yeah, that's, that's okay. So I was sitting there having no clue where people are. The agenda was some kind of, yeah, it was there, but you hadn't the feeling of like Mark You said, if you are the same room, archs have the skill to see the room, even if it's somewhere, somewhere on the side. You don't need only the like, good teacher, good teacher. Realize what happens in the whole room, not only what happens in front of them, and I felt completely blind, or with one eye, I only was able to see one thing. And the hard thing was, when I tried to find my teams, they weren't there. So I called in, and so, okay, nobody's there. Then I start chatting. Where are you? Oh, we have a client meeting. Nobody realized that. Okay, so I went the next team. So yeah, we finished earlier. So what I was there, just jumping around. Nobody were there. No idea how to find them. So it was really great horror. And that's why I said in the beginning, you must master the tools. And yeah, if you are a bank or an insurance and you love security, yeah, okay, then you will have horror pi plannings, because some tools are not so good, good like the others. So horror, Mark. Horror, okay,

Mark Richards: 8:44

so that's two bad first ones. Is somebody gonna lift us out of this?

Stephan Neck: 8:51

Let me try. Let me try. Mark, I would label my first real, big, distributed pi planning, blood, sweat and tears.

Unknown: 9:00

No. Oh, happy them

Stephan Neck: 9:03

that comes after. I remember March 13, 2020, you need a crisis to get better. COVID struck us. I was at Porsche in Stockholm. We were preparing kind of a large solution with five trains in parallel, some smaller ones, two bigger ones. And comes March 13, they closed down the factories. They closed down the offices. We had to go home, and we were in full swing preparing the PI plannings that should take place end of March, chaos. We said, Okay, we have to postpone. And now the my DNA kicked in, the engineering DNA kicked in. And we said, between me and the coaches and artists, no way we will have a PR planning. Let's switch and everything you mentioned mark and Niko. So we had to talk about communication channels, about tools. They had MS teams, but it was not up to the standard, right? The sheer mass of people, it couldn't handle it. We talked about, how can we set up something that is an information radiator for everyone, not only in a train, but over those five trains. So we had to talk about Miro mural stuff like that. And I was really lucky. I had a team of artists and coaches who were really dedicated. And I have to point out one guy, Holger, he took the lead so he He was caring about Miro was up and running. We had all those channels. We had several channels for the team, several channels for each train. We had an overall channel. We had channels for each individual business owner. So I wish I could show you this Miro board. I still have it, but due to an NDA, I can't show you this. This is really my pride. I had a team who had some blood, sweat and tears for four weeks, and comes April, we had that pi planning, and as you say, Mark, that wasn't my work. It was the work of the whole team and everyone who participated in the end of that pi planning, which was distributed also over time zones, with people in India, people in the US, who received accolades from the COO of Porsche digital, who said, I never, ever had such a transparency. Thank you very much. If you do it right, if you have the right people. And if you have, and I'm with you, Ali, if you have some nerds and lots of engineering DNA, it really works on on the tool side, oh

Ali Hajou: 11:52

yeah. And just just spending a little bit more time, actually, a lot more time in in the preparation. It just really, really works, I think, for for remote pi planning. So just, you just have to, especially in the beginning, whenever or whenever it's the first time. Because that, I think if I could share my first one of my first distributed pi plannings. I'm not going to, no, I'm not going to talk about one that was sort of distributed in terms of locations where we could still come together, because I had that one before. But no, I'm going to zoom in on to, indeed, one of those pi plannings that happened in April 2022 What am I saying? April 2020 you know, we were in these in a very similar, slash, same situation, art launch, a pretty big train, actually, about 160 people or so in it using sort of a pressure cooker effect. So, you know, everyone was trained. We, you know, preparing backlogs, you know, the whole shebang and then all of a sudden, you know, by company decree, we're all going to work from home for good reasons, as you've all understand, we were flipping out. Obviously there's like pure panic, but pure panic while having our senior leadership around the train stating, you know what, we need the structure to keep in touch with each other. So we're just going to continue. We're just going to do it remotely fun. Fact, the people were using Skype at the time, the sort of migration to Microsoft Teams still had to happen. Office 365 was just sort of rolling out slowly. Within this company, JIRA was completely new. You know, they everyone got a JIRA account. So they use JIRA for obvious reasons, got a JIRA account. But then, you know, there are a few people involved in preparing backlogs. So for them, that was very, very new. And there are all kinds of tools that we've introduced just to make, let's say, Make bi planning remotely work. But yeah, people were not we're not used to the tools. So the thing is, with with a couple of people, and one specific colleague as well, I'm going to plug him as well, Rick de COVID. We just spend days and nights preparing everything, and we created a huge manuals that were dynamic, had click through links, so that, you know, by on every in every session that we were in, there were all kind of click through links to the right, JIRA page to the right, whatever, let's say, folder in Microsoft team. Teams. The same thing as you mentioned, Stephan. Teams had their own channel. We had agreements on how to reach out to teams. We had templates on how to mention sort of a dependency with another team, so that we didn't forget. You know, it's just like writing post it. Whenever anyone write post it, they typically write like, one or two words, super unclear. Nobody has an idea of what we're trying to write down. But same thing with dependencies, you know, it's it seems to write down, I from this team, need to have this kind of a deliverable at this kind of time, from this kind of team, would that be possible so that people would understand directly how to respond or what to respond on but we've really over engineered it, and it went smooth. It went so smooth. I'm just still thinking about it. And like, you know, there is, of course, there are always quarrels, but from the process side, that pi planning went just flawless, and people could just spend their time and their brain power thinking and talking about, you know, the content, rather than trying to figure out, Oh, what do I need to do at the moment? Do I need to be in this call or in that call? Which was, it was, it was fantastic,

Mark Richards: 16:20

right? So moving along from, you know, first experience, and boy, we've all been through it a few times since then, you know, for our weekly jiggle this week, Niko like took us to new and strange places. It's no longer cartoon characters and Star Wars characters. A jiggle for the week was if distributed pi planning was a cologne or fragrance, tell me more, and that was a really interesting one for me, because I'm suddenly asking chatgpt for perfumes and colognes that give you the concept of blood, sweat and tears as the thing they evoke. And like imagine a perfume for blood, sweat and tears, but I got a surprisingly long list. So I wound up with ombre leather by Tom Ford, which is described as evoking a well worn Leather Jacket after a long day of work. And that for me, is distributed PR planning. You can make it amazing. Boy, it's a lot of work. So Niko, as author of this particular torture test, I volunteer you to go next.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 17:37

By the way, it was torture for me too, because one thing is find the question, and the next thing is answer it yourself. And then I realized I'm not the guy that works. We are the nose. So I start doing word word playing. And then I said, Okay, mine is distributed channel, channel number five. So you need many channels, orchestrated channels, to make the people the business owner. Happy, that's why channel number five,

Mark Richards: 18:05

oh, that's creative. That was really, really bad. My wife. My wife loves bad puns.

Unknown: 18:16

Microsoft Teams, channel number five,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 18:20

yeah, that's very that smells like leather and blood.

Stephan Neck: 18:24

Yeah, I had, I had different thoughts going through my head when I read the the jiggles. And I thought, Okay, this year with the PR planning, how do you attract people to join, to onboard, to collaborate, to communicate, right? And, yeah, I came up with the one perfume I'm using as well, tear from from Hermes. How do you create the sensation? Why do you put on a perfume you you want to smell nice, right? You want to attract people. So API planning, and I'm I was listening to you Ali as well. If you want to be lucky and have a good date with your people in PI planning, and if it's distributed, you have to attract them, right? And luck is only then, if you have enough preparation and it meets the opportunity of PR planning, that's why I took there from Hermes.

Ali Hajou: 19:20

But I mean, Stephan, you attract people with your charm and with your you know your gravitas.

Stephan Neck: 19:28

Guess what? Ali, after a day's work, you don't smell well. You don't attract people anymore. You need some perfume,

Ali Hajou: 19:37

smelling like an well worn leather jacket. Yes, after that long day,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 19:44

the highway to hell. No,

Ali Hajou: 19:47

yeah, Niko, every time I'm just astounded by your sort of creative questions. A perfume. I mean, I was thinking about. Distributed pi planning is obviously something that you do not necessarily want, per se, because a face to face one is something that that just works way better. But you know, if there is no other option, then perhaps, you know, let's do that distributed one. So because of that, I thought, you know, which kind of perfume or fragrance, or whatever would it be? Think it would be distributed pi plane will be much more of a diluted but mildly effective body spray, rather than a perfume, cologne or that kind of stuff. Because it's, you know, it's there. You can smell it. It works, but it's not that effective. For a night out.

Stephan Neck: 20:41

He's going full in body

Mark Richards: 20:42

spray. Wow, look, I'll tell you, I thought about deodorant on the way through, right? How do you make sure it's not too smelly? But,

Unknown: 20:52

yeah, that's what I went for.

Mark Richards: 20:55

All right. So moving back to something slightly more serious, if I think back to, you know, my first one, the utter fiasco, you know, teams and remote calls on teams, tools like mirror and mural, none of that existed back then. And you know, one of the things that was challenging for us was that there were only a certain number of rooms that had VC capability. And, you know, when crisis hit, it was like, you know, which rooms are possible, and did we have the right booking at the right time for those rooms so we could actually get people talking? And, you know, there's been a huge shift. There's one thing COVID did for us, right, the acceleration of distributed collaboration tools and the way technology in the distributed world has shifted has been phenomenal. If you think about your first experience and the journey you've been on, perhaps to nearly four years later. Now has technology and your ability to leverage it and the problems you can solve for that changed your experience from those first months. Stephan, why don't you take us away?

Stephan Neck: 22:05

We talked about preparation, and let me summarize that before I answer the question, how has technology changed my experience or our experience? I think it's a leadership thing, right? Leaders show up first, and leaders eat last. So a lot of preparation. Night shifts, you have to be prepared. And I'm full in sync with you, Ali, right? If there's no good preparation, how can you exemplify what you ask the people to bring in for API planning, and we all know traditional PI planning on site face to face is already really strenuous. Two days you're dead flat, but you're happy you achieved some committed pi objectives. So it's a leadership thing, and what has changed for me, not perhaps technology wise, or the amount of work, if you do that, well, what has changed? And I've seen that over and over again. You have to keep alignment over those two days, with the help of technology, with the help of communication and the right logistics. And then it requires the discipline from all attendees. And for me, it's you exemplify through the preparation, how it's done. You exemplify as a RT, as business owners, as art triad, and even as team coaches or POS how you want it to be. So leaders are constantly leading through the distributed peer planning, and that has changed dramatically for me, and I suggest that if you are in this position that you don't need distributed peer planning, at least have a distributed one where people sit in their offices and you are not there in person to really experience what is the discipline and what is your actual culture in your train or in your trains, because you can talk about culture if you don't have a different behavior, if you don't have this discipline, and if you are not focused for two days on the right stuff, you probably never experienced that. So for me, distributed PR planning is really a good is also a good training grant, and that has changed for experience

Mark Richards: 24:28

wise. Let's poke at one aspect of leadership, PR planning, distributed PR planning and technology just along the way through. For me, when I think about people trying to do distributed collaboration, there's really the haves and the have nots. The haves have a corporate mural or mural account, and the have nots work for organizations that think that teams is good place to collaborate, right? And, you know, I mean, I've seen people be incredibly creative, uh. Using the task planner in teams as a post it brainstorming tool, or doing shared editing of a PowerPoint document using boxes as posters. Boy, I've seen some stuff, but what's your experience been in terms of leaders actually taking ownership, of making the investment and making the right distributed collaboration tools available for their peers? Available for their people is that, have you seen that really commonly in Europe? Or, if I may,

Ali Hajou: 25:29

I've I think the think people's appetite slash tolerance for tools just increased in the end, irrespective of the the type of tool, you know, there's still some people who you know, you know their earn their own personal traits sort of filters through, which is, you know, I'm the loudest person in the room, which is already annoying whenever you are in a face to face setting. You know, in a room together, it's even more annoying whenever, you know, everyone is dialed in into the same team's zoom call or whatever call, because, you know, that's just how these tools work. They sort of isolate one audio input, which is from the person that is talking the loudest, and then sort of takes out the rest, which basically means everyone else should, should remain quiet, which is just just very tough. But I think the we just all started to understand a little bit more on how to talk in online calls, Zoom discord, as we are using or teams or whatever, whatever equivalent. But yeah, the technology itself didn't change that much.

Mark Richards: 26:51

Nick I was bouncing out of his chair over there.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 26:55

I don't know if it goes the wrong direction or the different direction, but Mark, what also is important is not only the lack of want to invest in technology. It's also stuff like, we have to agree on data protection. We have to see where data is, etc, to make my case is during COVID, the long discussions were, are our data safe? And what happens? People started working in private equipment just because it wasn't possible with the equipment of the company. And now imagine what happens with data if it's on the private equipment. Yeah, some people managed. Some companies managed to get the cool tools, or they didn't manage. And it's not only not one to invest. It's also in Europe at least, or in Switzerland at least, the fear of what happens with my secrets, with my data, with privacy stuff? And then let's stick with uh, stones, instead of technology, half

Unknown: 27:49

hour situations.

Stephan Neck: 27:52

And to add to that one, one observation I made since 2020 people are more focused and more disciplined, per se, if you do this distributed PR planning, because you need those means. So those who talk loudest and often sometimes have to concentrate more on how to handle the tool, and they give space for the others. And what I've heard from senior leadership and top management over and over again that was very disciplined. It was very focused. We got a result. They didn't care about the tooling that was our duty to prepare that that their focus was really covered by how we ended up with committed pi objectives and the transparency, if I need to see something in detail, yeah, then I have to deal with the means and the tools that I've got. And as you mentioned, some cultures can deal with less tools. Some other cultures, like the German engineering DNA, ask for lots of tools, and it has to be 100% accurate. That's the culture you have to perceive and that you have to bring in, and you have to be you have to abide to that there are expectations behind it, right from attendees, even up to the top management, why are you doing it? And they will understand, yes, there's a significant investment around the PR planning. But that's the magic. If you want the magic to happen, you have to invest that's

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 29:29

so interesting. Mark asking us for technology in re answering about culture and people. But the interesting thing on my side is it really happened that technology forced us to think about how we do communicate. How do we collaborate? So it broke the patterns, the communication patterns we had. So Ali. Ali said about about the loudest now is now not so loud anymore because he or she has to struggle or to integrate themselves. They cannot get the room because they don't have a room anymore. It's a different. And a space you're walking. So what happens with technology, on my side, was it gave us the chance to reflect about how we communicate in the PI planning, and also about how people communicate. So for instance, when you go in a breakout room, physically, how do you get your attention? You just go nearby the group, and then you try to find your way to look to the one in the eyes who is talking. And then a natural dialog appears. This is not possible with remote setups. So if you go to a breakout room, it happens rearrangement of the of the of the of the squares, and then everybody stops talking. To really think about, how do we do communication together? And that was really a cool experience. So technology forced us to be more human and think about, how do we we function, and how do we communicate so well the so far away,

Ali Hajou: 30:54

just to a small, small, small, little addition over there, I think we just, we found tricks to do. So that's eventually I was working with an RTE who created all types of distribution lists, sort of email or security distribution lists, how you call those things? Just to be able to use teams in a proactive way, in the sense of there is a session just started up, but I need all of my specific people in that session. So what do I do? I invite not every single person. No, I'm going to invite an entire distribution list. This means all of a sudden, 15 people, or maybe 25 people, will get an invite to join a call or using a distributed timer. I'm very much of a fan of timer, which is an open source one called coronagraph.io, which is a distributed timer. There's a person that can, you know, pause, start, it, whatever, and there's a URL that you just share with whomever needs that timer, and everyone sees at the same time, so you have a distributed clock and this small little tricks that just allow everyone to collaborate. It's just, and I like those kind of small little tricks, yeah,

Mark Richards: 32:12

I think certainly for me, the people who've gone to the effort, let's say teams, and let's be honest, right? Teams is the dominant interaction platform for PR plannings that I see the people who do a lot of work on their channel configuration and actually using channel based calls as opposed to meeting invite based calls, and have, you know, different channels with different memberships, so that you can do cross cutting communication effectively, and, you know, just that little stuff like that, and, and maybe, and if there's sort of one big central mural or mirror, and this is, I quite often see, this is, there's one shared board for everybody at the PR planning. And then people often have local boards or local spaces, just little things like put the URLs for the teams channels on the board, so that if you're a bit lost and you want to go and talk to somebody, you're just clicking something on the board instead of hunting for it. And it's all those little kind of bits of attention to detail, but, but let's, let's come back away a little bit, right, and maybe moving ourselves towards some of the downsides or the things that can go horribly wrong. And if I go What's the biggest pet peeve I've got about a distributed PR planning is when you walk past a room and or you drop into a room and what you've got is the scrum master, or the product owner has JIRA open on screen, and the shared screen is a JIRA ticket or an Azure DevOps ticket, and you've got this poor team who's going to spend two days watching their scrum master or their product owner type tickets into JIRA, right? And, you know, just stab me now if you want me to go and do that regularly. So if I think, and it's easy to do, right? Is people go, Well, of course, we're going to have to load it in eventually. Why would we ever look at the fact that there's two way integration with a lot of the good collaboration tools? You know, at that point it becomes a very mechanical thing. And it's probably the biggest thing that I'm looking for with the distributed PR planning is, how do you avoid it just becoming a very mechanical exercise because PR planning. I mean, it's got mechanics, but it's not meant to be mechanical. Niko,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 34:29

yeah, and if I go back to what I said before, because of COVID and the distributed stuff, we start and think about what's the main goal, what we want to achieve. So before, when people just one guys was tapping in JIRA and all the others standing around, it was some kind of thriller happening. But if you're working remote, and one guy is typing and the others are just waiting and don't see what sky is doing, it feels completely strange. And then you start realizing, okay, it's not about feeding up JIRA. It's about. Is visualizing. What we are doing is finding, is writing story like chunks. It's finding dependencies. So it really started that you find, you try to think about what is important for API planning, and it's not having now the JIRA ticket, it's having it later. Now you need the communication and distribute. It showed that it's really it showed it because it was boring before it was a little bit like a happening. You stand around, you see, you watch him doing mistakes, you laugh about him, and now you're completely somewhere else. So it was really difficult and the same, if you, if you, if you, I, by the way, distinguish between, do I have a distributed pi planning with different locations, or have a distributed pi planning, everybody's sitting in the home office and for let's call it satellite pi plannings, where you have satellites with people being being there. What was the first thing I realized is people don't realize how much they disturb others by just talking. So if you are in a group and you have a different room. They're also in your group. You don't realize, if you're in the main location, how much you talk and have side words, side talks. And then one of the things we tried to bring in is some kind of communication protocol. So it's really important to realize, skip the side talks, or have a better infrastructure that you don't hear the side talks. And this was an eye opener for me when I first time volunteered to choose to go to the satellite location before I was always in the main location, and I thought something is wrong. They don't really talk with us. They are so quiet. And that was one time the satellite location, and I realized it's difficult to talk if you are the minority, it's difficult to say something, because you always think I interrupt them. And when you hear the pause and you want to say something, meanwhile, they also hear the pause longer. So let's start continuous talking so you just stay quiet because you think you interrupt them. You Yeah, you're some kind of passive and then introducing protocols, what to do, asking people, are you still here? I have your questions, and going room by room. So hey, Munich, hey, Sydney, or whatever. Do you have questions? It's really an important thing. So cut off site. That's called side call. Side talks, include them, invite them, ask them. Is one of the thing I do now, and this was one of the anti patterns, just ignore them. Somehow it feels like being ignored.

Stephan Neck: 37:28

I can second that a Niko, it's easy to hide behind the connection and then the comm technology and have your side talks, whatever. And this leads to a tendency of less global optimization. Again, have clear rules. What is the goal of day one, you want to have all the skeleton skeletons out of the seller so you can talk about them in management review. Day two, committed set of pi objectives, right? So we had a rule make day one as haptic as possible, even distributed and fully electronically supported. Have a Miro board. JIRA is not an issue, or whatever tool you're using. You have day two to do so, because if you don't have plan adaptations or have to change you, then can do that stuff after you've talked to the to the business owners about business relevance. What is it that we should achieve so have clear rules. And again, as you said, Niko, Scrum Masters, team coaches, artists, even even arthritis. You as leaders. You enforce, enforce those rules. You ask for that and say, Hey guys, come back. We are talking about this one, and make it as transparent and as visual as possible. That's why I like a Miro board. Even if you have everything in the tool, get this representation for everyone who is participating in the PR planning, no matter how what the type of distribute it is.

Ali Hajou: 39:03

And I think, I think, I think tools need to help you in that. Because, yeah, it's already been mentioned in a whenever you're sitting in a room, altogether, you have it, you know, you have chats. You cannot really dive underneath the table and then not participate. But whenever we're, you know, all joining a Microsoft Teams call. It could be that somebody who's joining or joining that same call, you know, it's a team breakout is actually not there, you know, it's logged in, yes, but the person's actually painting their bedroom door or something like that, you know, doing something completely different. What I do notice is that tools like teams, they have this, the little bell icon at the at the top left corner of the teams window, which basically means, if there is a notification, in the sense of somebody. Mentioned your specific name using the at the rate, I think that, you know, there's a little bell icon over there, and we figured out that's actually pretty powerful. Because people are, you know, they receive a notification on their phone. They receive a notification in their in their application, if they, if they turn that on. Of course, it works actually pretty well. So what if we create a huge list of togglers, like a toggle so it's like a small little button. The moment that you click the button, what would happen is an automatic script would just post somewhere in a different channel. It would post the at the rate name of the person that you've just clicked, plus the at the rate, name of the person who clicked the button, which basically means the the person that's that that is requested would receive a message that Niko has pressed a button, which is just a small little reminder that somebody needs me. And I figured out that just it increased participation so much, because no active participation is really the the way to destroy your, your, your, let's say, the flow of the this distributed pi planning. It's just, you know, making it a little bit more personal, because somebody has asked for me. They want to talk with me. And it shows up in a very annoying place with, like, a small, little red, you know, red icon just next to the bell icon. It little dopamine shot happens all of a sudden, and like, I'm needed. It just the Yeah, participation really skyrocketed.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 41:39

Perfect, cool things. It's exactly what I meant with, which meant with we changed the kind of communication so you don't just appear somewhere and I want to talk to you, and you rearrange all the rectangles. You find a way to say, I need you. In my case, switching out to good patterns. In my case, we designed this in the mirror board so you place your your icon to the board of the other people and told them, I need you. One of you, please come to my room. And then I was expecting somebody entering my breakout room. It's exactly what they mean, and it's even a better example and a great example. Thank you, Ali for sharing. So

Mark Richards: 42:18

let's get absolutely mechanical for a second. Let's talk about agendas. And you know, if I think about, you know, how does an agenda shift? We had guidance, and say, for many, many years that went, here's a distributed PR planning agenda. And then all of a sudden, you know, the whole world is doing distributed PR planning after distributed PR planning. And you know, it shifts. And I if I think about the probably the client I've seen that it's done its best and the amount of polish and iteration they put into it, it was also the client that used to get me to facilitate their management review at seven o'clock in the morning, because, you know, across the three time zones that they were planning in, that was the best time for all their executives. But one of the things that I saw them do was they got very focused on what are the moments of synchronization between our various time zones. They also got very focused on going because quite often the cross team communication is going to cross a time zone, we need to be doing more pre planning to identify where the cross 10 connections are so that we can incorporate that into the way the agenda is going to play out. And taking advantage of it, they also end up spreading it out over. At one stage they'd spread it over four days, just literally in terms of finding the rhythm that work best for their people. What are some of the and I appreciate sometimes it's a time zone question. Sometimes it's just literally everybody's dialing in from their home office. But if you think about things that you often see shift in an agenda. Stephan, what stood out for you?

Stephan Neck: 43:59

Yeah, what you just said Mark resonates big time in my head. It's those smaller joint time frames you have. So creating the agenda for distributed pi planning is a design task way ahead of pi planning. So find those smaller joint time frames and then derive is it still a two day three, day four, day even five day pi planning, right? It depends on how many time zones. Hand over time slots, not only having the agenda, but hand over time slots to create information coherence between the different locations and the different locations and time zones. My big learning. You're not the big we call it sampano in EMEA. You're not the big director. You need proxy people, RTEs, architecture, business owners at different locations. And again, summarizing, in the end, you summarize this agenda with some. Working agreements, either they're already in place, like the bell Ali, right? You know, I can push that and I get the respective group of people to be notified. Or for this agenda, is there something different than we did it the last time? That will be the biggest changes that I always try to anticipate, and I ask questions when it comes to preparation time. Is it in place? Are we? Are we comfortable with that? About

Mark Richards: 45:31

You? Ali, how do you I re engineer your agendas?

Ali Hajou: 45:35

I have no idea. It's every you know, I'm just going to be super frank here. It's every time. It's a little bit of a challenge to figure out what works. I haven't really found the best way, but I've had a bi planning that was indeed spread over three days, especially for, you know, whenever a train does a distributed bi letting for the first time, there's just, you know, communication just takes longer. It's just more difficult. So you stretch typically, day one of the PI planning is stretched over two days. Then had that. I had even a situation where pi planning was stretched over two weeks, which was pretty tough, but you had two half a days in one week and two other half a days on another week. It has its good parts. It has bad parts because it's also nice to be done with PI planning. It's like, you know, done with all of those alignments and potential scope changes and difficulties and blah, blah. So I, I wish, I wish I had a couple of really good patterns, but then I'd be lying. So it's just really trying to figure out the least worst option in the context, within the constraints that we have. Yeah,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 46:59

and I can just second all the things. So Stephan, it's really a design, as you said before, and that's why I personally don't give advices you have to do it this way, because they start believing me and say that's the only way you're doing it. And then, as an SBCT and fellow, they believe you can, yeah, your Jesus or whatever, you have to be right? That's why I always ask with ask them questions, what parts you need to do together? What parts can you do as internally in different time zones? And it, it's not really that's the answer. You really have to think about it. You have to design it for yourself in a remote setup. But that's why I never give them an answer. I try at the end, give many, many examples, but it's something you have to design yourself.

Stephan Neck: 47:45

And to second that Niko, don't copy paste right? The discussion starts for me in the RTE course, there's one breakout session where we talk about distributed pi planning, and I tell them, there is a template, don't look at it. What is your context, what is your challenge? And now the next 10 to 15 minutes, start designing, start coming up with a design generic template that you can adapt from each pi playing to the next one. I

Ali Hajou: 48:15

think, I think that's the that's the where the beauty lies in the creativity of the people that are involved to create the best possible event. You know, if taken seriously, to create the best possible event within the constraints that are existing, whether we had a train, had a train that had teams in Vietnam, we had teams in the US, we had teams in Canada. We had teams in various places in Europe. Just imagine trying to create a coherent agenda for that. It just, it's, you know, there's 1,000,001 constraint for every solution that you come up with. And and the art, I think it was the RTE or the CPO, I'm not really sure. Or maybe an architect that came up with the idea, you know, what draft plan review presentations can be done in sort of asynchronously, but it will be recorded. So the presentation that we that we typically do, you know a draft plan review just got a few minutes to summarize a quarter, you know, a quarter worth of words in PI objectives, which is already really, really short. Let's record it. And whenever you have recordings in Microsoft Teams a record button that generates directly a video file in Microsoft stream. Whenever you're in Microsoft stream, you can download the file, and we had somebody edit the video just very roughly into smaller, short chunks of, let's say, watchable material. It was put onto that same it was inside of Microsoft. Channel everyone at every moment in time, could see exactly what the results were from each team. Brilliant. Still required some work. Was that fantastic in the constraints? Yes, but it was still, you know, I think that's sort of the the gist of the game over here.

Mark Richards: 50:16

Let's get radical for a second. And remember, hit my mute button at this moment. It's like my dog is get very excited in the backyard, so I'm muting myself while you guys talk. If I think about when COVID forced us all to learn to do distribute it, I found two groups of people who loved the fact that we had to go distributed. One of those groups of people was engineers. Pretty much every engineer I knew went, Oh, fantastic. I can just sit and play games while some people make a plan. The other group of people were the ones who went, I don't have to hire a hotel venue, I don't have to pay for catering, I don't have to pay for flights. I don't have to pay for hotel rooms. Pi planning just got an awful lot cheaper and never going back. It's distributed forever. Now, I know I've been lucky enough to have a few clients who have gone back to in person, but I'm curious for you guys, and I'm probably going to go straight to Niko, because I suspect he's going to feel very similar to me on this. But is there still an argument for going back to in person PR planning?

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 51:29

Yes, yes, yes, yes. It's called trust threshold, and I told in the beginning I have an experience in pre coaching life as a developer and being distributed in case of a near shoring, offshoring. And what I realized there talked with many people, psychologists, too, is your trust shrinks during time and as a leader, as a manager, you need to find something that people encounter again. You can do this with remote so you can increase trust again by special events or whatever. But at the end, human beings need personal contact to get better trust. So imagine it's so easy write a stupid email, an angry email, and say, Oh, Stephan, you're immediate because they're the dead. But it's so difficult say that face to face in remote setup. And it's much more difficult saying this on the on in person setup. And by being in person, you you see, okay, that's also a human being. Oh, he smiles more than I thought. Okay, he's not really the nerd than I thought he is, or she is, or whatever. And in German, you say, sometimes I don't like him, which has the word smelling in it, I can, I cannot smell this person. I don't like him. Yeah, try to smell people through zoom, and that's why it's important to be together so you can do whatever you want, but you will lose trust during time if you do everything remote and people who don't trust each other, oh, then you have a performance issue. So just spend this money, because it really helps you have a trusted team with trust to each other. Yeah, it pays back.

Mark Richards: 53:12

Okay, that's a that's a plus one. How about you? Stephan,

Stephan Neck: 53:16

yeah, it's a plus one for me. If you look at studies, best communication is a group sketching in front of a whiteboard if you do it in person, best communication, Best Collaboration, if you have to do it in a distributed way, okay, that's then the option you have. But I'm still a stark defender of do it in person. And most of our clients, they do it at least once a year. They do it and they have the investment. They fly people in, they combine it with a summer barbecue, whatever right you want to gather the people, everything else is distributed. And what resonates in my head as well is when I ask copilot, what advantages of pi planning you need to address the needs of people? That goes back to the trust threshold. Niko, that's what we have to consider, right? And the other advantage is that, how do we get better when it comes to engagement and achieving goals. So yes, in person, yes, yes, yes. If not, try to create this environment that really fosters the same or supports the same challenges and fosters the same advantages you should have.

Mark Richards: 54:37

It's certainly, for me, it's the social aspect and the shared identity, because I find like, even if I've got, I've had a number of clients where all their staff are in the one city, but the only time that they're actually all in the same room is at pr planning. You see this team, right? And they all, you know, in a day before COVID, they would have spent all day. In the office together every day. And now most Australian companies, it's like a mandatory two days in the week. And you know, everybody tries to figure out ways to pretend that they're doing two days a week, but you never actually get the whole team in the same room face to face. And I'm seeing a lot of people start to go actually, there's a social element. This is the time that we actually see each other. We're together in the room as a team. We perhaps plan a team dinner. And, you know, that's one side to me, the other side to me, that I think is huge is and, you know, let's, let's play, play geeky words, right? GEMBA time. I've always felt that PR planning is GEMBA time for leaders, because as they walk around and listen to the breakouts and get involved in the conversation. You know, they're seeing the reality. They're listening to people, and they're listening to their teams be creative, to try and find ways through things. And it sets up a very special attitude at management review, because the leaders have got a day of game of time under their belt when they're getting into management review and problem solving. And I find quite easily industry. Easily in distributed PR planning that the leaders, you know, they don't want to disturb breakouts. They don't want to jump into teams breakouts and disturb the call. They're not getting that GEMBA time anymore. They're going, Oh, these are the bits of the agenda that I'm required to sign into. So I'm a huge fan, and every client that I've had, whether it's once every two or three pi plannings, or whether it's in every PI planning going to in person, it's been huge. Whilst acknowledging the cost savings of distributed I actually think for a distributed planning, you probably come out with a better plan, but you miss all of the cultural and identity and alignment, and, you know, evolution as a team at times, that's what suffers. Agreed, that

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 56:52

would be a nice, nice to finish. It's so cool. Yeah, that's nice summary. But,

Ali Hajou: 56:58

you know, I don't know, yeah, yeah, if I may, if I may, talk about that. Just one key takeaway, and that's it. I've scrapped the one that I've written down because I I've heard another one. Pi planning is the game by time for leaders. Copyright 2025, Mark Richards, that's it. That's, that's my takeaway. Got it,

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 57:20

yeah, in mind, we care about tools, people and collaboration, so mind the gap. It's the difference between do it well and try to do it well. Yeah, do it people, tools, collaboration

Stephan Neck: 57:34

and to allow gamba time for leaders, no sweating blood, no tears of joy.

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 57:40

Oh, that's also cool one.

Mark Richards: 57:44

I saw that one just now. I glanced down and saw your notes. I went, Oh, that's beautiful. Now, bringing distributed pi planning to a close. We it's quite exciting this week, in our new mode of, you know, topics that are interesting or we're passionate about. We're also very open to people going, Hey, can you guys do an episode on topic X? And Niko, I believe you had somebody reach out to you and send us a request, which is going to be next week

Nikolaos Kaintantzis: 58:15

exactly, and we will honor it and say next week's topic is retro, retros, retrospectives on art level, best practices for reflection on this level. So how do you do retros on art level?

Mark Richards: 58:28

So it's more than just inspect and adapt, right? Yeah. So if you're interested in that, folks join us next week. Otherwise, thanks for being there, being present, if you're still here, thanks for sticking with us. It's been fun for us, and we've had lots of fun laughing at each other as we go through and we are done for distributed PR planning.