A colleague shared a thought provoking article by Todd Lankford about Program Increment (PI) Planning and why he, Lankford, cringes whenever he hears the phrase. While I agree at a high level with Lankford's arguments regarding the need for teams to engage in continuous planning and the importance of breaking dependencies, as well as sharing the cringe factor felt when people clam to be Agile, I break with his thinking in the detail when it comes to PI Planning. The reason is that the article creates too many strawmen, an example of which is served up at the outset with an invented quote from a 'Manager in Agile Transformation':
“We are Agile! We have a backlog, and we host awesome PI Planning events.”
Lankford is correct in principle, that having a backlog, running PI Planning events, or name checking some Agile ceremonies does not an Agile organisation make. However, an argument is always in trouble when it relies on strawmen or worse, makes category errors to sustain its critique.
The original example of a category error, or category-mistake, was given by Gilbert Ryle in his book The Concept of Mind (1949), in which a visitor to Oxford University is said to have asked, upon viewing the colleges and library: “But where is the university?” The error by the visitor was to assume that a university is part of the category 'units of physical infrastructure' rather than 'institutions'.
Category errors abound in Lankford's article, as the heart of his argument against PI Planning seems to centre on creating an Agile mindset, helping teams to embrace change, and avoiding the arduous work needed to create an Agile organisation. As Lankford observes:
Program Increment (PI) Planning from the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) does not support an Agile mindset. All my experience with it tells me this is true. I have never seen PI Planning help a team embrace change.
Yet, SAFe is the default for those seeking Agile without having to endure a difficult change to their status quo. And SAFe sells itself as an Agile panacea.
As an historian I always advise; beware of generalisation. As a philosopher; beware sophistry (misrepresentation). The former, generalisation, is evident in the assertion that PI Planning is a framework used by organisations who want the baby without the labour pains. The latter, misrepresentation, occurs in pushing the notion that PI Planning is about creating a culture that embraces change. Thus, to quote Lankford's words back at him: 'Right there, the illusion begins.'
