PI Planning promised to solve the old tension between agile adaptability and business predictability. Neither too little planning like sprint-by-sprint work, nor too much like traditional project management. Just enough for a quarter. The idea was elegant: thread the needle perfectly between chaos and rigidity.
What we got instead was quarterly waterfall.
If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. We’ve seen this pattern in many organizations—and there’s a better way.
The Two-Day Planning Theater
SAFe expects PI Planning Meetings to get teams aligned on a shared vision for the quarter, help them plan & prioritize collaboratively, and plan how they’ll mitigate risks during the PI. But walk into most PI Planning sessions, and you’ll see the same scene: teams huddled around program boards, mapping features to specific iterations, estimating story points for work they won’t touch for eight weeks, drawing red string between dependencies that stretch across the entire quarter. They plan sprint 4 as confidently as sprint 1, sprint 6 as thoroughly as sprint 2. Two days later, they emerge with what looks like a masterpiece of coordination: every team committed, every dependency mapped, every story assigned to its proper iteration.
Only a few sprints later, reality breaks in. The API the other team promised turns out to need three more weeks. The customer feedback from the prototype changes everything about the user interface. The load tests show that the system won’t scale. Yet the program board still hangs on the wall, confident in its obsolete certainty, and teams get caught between learning what works and keeping old promises.
Worse yet, your leaders think PI Planning works. They see the team commitments, the program boards, the two-day planning events, and they think they’re getting predictability. Meanwhile, your teams burn out trying to hit targets that were wrong before the first sprint ended.
This isn’t about incompetent teams or poor facilitation. We’ve seen this exact pattern in organizations with excellent RTEs, engaged product owners, and experienced agile coaches. There’s something about the structure that, despite good intentions, pulls teams toward detailed quarterly planning.
The Worst of Both Worlds
This is where PI Planning shows its true nature: it grabs not the best of agile and waterfall planning, but the worst of both. From waterfall it inherits the faulty assumption that complex work can be mapped out in detail months in advance; from undisciplined agile it inherits the unwillingness (or inability) to forecast and plan beyond a few weeks, making longer-term strategic thinking nearly impossible.
The result is neither truly adaptive nor genuinely predictable, but rather a planning theater that creates the illusion of control while delivering the reality of quarterly chaos.
What Really Happens When Plans Break
Consider what happens when teams treat this detailed quarterly plan as a commitment rather than a hypothesis. Quality gets cut to hit iteration deadlines that were based on guesses. Features get shipped that no longer solve the right problems because the plan said they should be done by week 10. Teams work overtime not because the work matters, but because they’ve ‘committed’ to the program board, and changing course feels like failure.
There’s a Better Way
Smart organizations have learned to distinguish between what can be planned and what must be discovered. They use their quarterly rhythms to get aligned and figure out what they don’t know, planning the predictable work only after they’ve solved the hard parts through quick tests. Instead of committing to features in specific sprints, they commit to solving the hard problems early and planning the details just in time.
We developed our CAPED approach (Complexity-Aware Planning, Estimation, Delivery) as a systematic way to do this. You can have both adaptability and predictability.
We’re sharing exactly how this works in an upcoming webinar. If you’re tired of the planning pendulum–swinging between rigid quarterly plans and reactive chaos–you’ll want to hear this.
Breaking Free from the Planning Pendulum:
Why Smart Organizations Are Moving Beyond Agile vs. Waterfall
Tuesday, Sep 9 | 8:00-9:00 AM MDT
Register for this free webinar now!
We’ll walk through the four phases of CAPED and show real examples of how organizations resolve core complexity before detailed planning.
Plus, we’ll be sharing the most game-changing offering we’ve ever built for agile coaches, scrum masters, and change agents. Everyone who attends live gets an exclusive bonus that won’t be available afterwards.
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