Jen's Agile Cliff Notes - Innovation and Planning Iteration

In an Agile Release Train (ART), we strive to wrap up our PI commitments made before the Innovation and Planning Iteration. Sometimes that doesn’t happen. What do we do? We have a buffer called the IP Iteration.

In this version of Jen's Agile Cliff Notes, I will explain in more detail about the Innovation and Planning Iteration.

• The IP Iteration is definitely used as a breathing room. We’ve sprinted the entire PI to meet our commitments!

• It’s a time to innovate and think of how we can better the product or learn more things.

• It’s a time to plan for the upcoming PI by taking a closer look at features we want to work on.

• It’s a time for Inspect & Adapt, where we see the entire PI’s system demo, we hold our retrospective and problem-solving workshop to determine where we can improve.

• But it’s also a guardrail in case we need it. It’s an estimation buffer for our commitments.

• We do not plan any feature work to occur during the IP Iteration.

We want the teams to innovate. We want the teams to plan for the upcoming PI. We absolutely want participation in our Inspect & Adapt event that happens during this time as well.

For further reading on what the Innovation and Planning Iteration is, here’s the link to the article on Scaled Agile Framework’s site.

As always, if you have any questions, you can always reach out to me, and I will be happy to help.