SAFe PI objectives

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated August 1, 2024
  • 1 minute to read

    • Use SAFe program increment (PI) objectives to highlight the overall goals for a team or for an agile release train (ART) in a PI.

    SAFe PI objectives are created to summarize business and technical goals for the team or ART. During PI planning, the teams first create their PI objectives that they intend to accomplish in the upcoming PI. Program managers can then summarize the PI objectives into a separate set of high-level PI objectives.

    PI objectives can directly relate to a feature. But sometimes, multiple features can contribute to a single objective. This situation could require a collaboration between multiple teams.

    Although a team should ideally have around 7 to 10 PI objectives, there is no limit on the number of objectives that a team can have.

    PI objectives can be committed or uncommitted, either at the team level or program level. A committed objective is an objective that your team is confident about reaching. In contrast, an uncommitted objective is an objective that your team is less confident about reaching because of different dependencies or other factors. The work for an uncommitted objective is planned but it can vary within the scope of the PI.

    As PI planning progresses and is finalized, the business owners assign a planned business value (PBV) score to all the PI objectives. The score is on a scale of 1-10, where 1 indicates the lowest priority and 10 indicates the highest priority. As the teams complete the PIs, the business owners assign an actual business value (ABV) score to the PI objectives that are met. At the end of the PI, the PBV and ABV scores are used to compute the achievement values for each team and also for the ART as a whole.

    Using the planned and actual business value scores of the PI objectives, SAFe ART members can track the historical performance of the teams. By using that performance data, the ART members can then chart the SAFe predictability measure of the PIs. These reports provide visibility into the business value that the teams and ARTs provide on a PI-to-PI basis.