Or “How can we reduce the impact of timezones on the PI Planning event?”
PI Planning events becomes more complex as more timezones become involved. I have now experienced events where, for example, we have teams and distributed teams in people in locations as diverse as France, USA east and west coast, Australia, and India (OK perhaps we should look at our team structure, but that is what we have:-/) for a single ART.
How do we do “respect for people” when if we are not careful we end up forcing everyone to spend some time together at a time where it is not normal for them to work.
A “normal” approach is to declare “we are only doing this for a couple of days so let's use US timezones in general”. With the traditional agenda for a PI Planning event this means many are working hours at weird hours.
We spent some time looking at this approach, decided we needed to do better, and developed an experiment. We noticed that there are two basic types of agenda items on the agenda - those that work better when everyone is involved, and those that do not. Items that benefit everyone being involved include agenda items such as the kick-off sessions, plan reviews, plan adjustments, ROAMing risks, and the ART Confidence vote.
Others such as breakout sessions do not. We looked at the breakout session in particular, since it takes a lot of the time. There is clearly benefit in doing this at the same time as well such as
We setup an experiment to mitigate these two issues:
From the release train engineers perspective, this felt like a bit of a risk, in that they weren't shepherding the process, but we figured it was a good experiment. It turned out that we need not have worried. The experiment was successful and I have since used this approach in multiple organizations with good effect. Feedback was very positive. Interestingly while some teams really did change their schedule for team breakouts to better support team timezones, a number of teams did not, and even they reported improved feeling about the PI Planning event. I suspect this was because we left the decision for time to plan to the teams and we were seen to listening to feedback from the PI Planning event.