SAFe Program Board 101: Everything You Need To Know
“The people who plan the work do the work” is the unwritten rule of the Scaled Agile Framework.
Yet, this can be easier said than done when we’re looking at multiple teams of people needing to plan together.
Add in the complexities of large enterprises that face their own unique challenges - ranging from product development to budget to implementing feedback to final delivery - and suddenly the idea of how to bring teams together for planning can feel harder again.
If you’re familiar with the Scaled Agile Framework, you will already be aware SAFe is designed to facilitate better collaboration and communication between multiple cross-functional groups. The core way to do this with SAFe is Program Increment or PI Planning (Planning Interval Planning in SAFe 6.0)
A plan can take on so many different forms - even just between teams - but with SAFe it is easier to see what ‘good’ looks like when it comes to efficient PI Planning.
The SAFe program board or ART planning board (SAFe 6.0), is a critical tool and output of PI Planning. It is a visual summary of features or goals, cross-team dependencies, and other factors that impact their delivery. Not only does this help with transparency, but it also increases flexibility that, in turn, helps minimize delays and unhealthy dependencies.
What is often overlooked is that PI Planning plays a crucial role in setting teams or the entire program up for success - including implementing other SAFe ceremonies or events.
In this article, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about program boards, including why they’re important in the planning process and how larger teams can use them in PI Planning and beyond.
We’ll also explore exactly how Easy Agile Programs digitises the SAFe program board, not only allowing the people who plan the work to do the work, but also allowing you to plan the work in the environment where the work gets done - in Jira.
NB: while the program board is referred to as 'ART Planning Board' in the updated 6.0 version of the Scaled Agile Framework, it is the same artefact and plays the same role in PI Planning and beyond.
What is a program board?
What does your teams plan or schedule typically look like?
Would it indicate to you what work was being done? Who was doing it? Perhaps even an indication of when they would and any key deadlines these teams are working towards?
The headline here is that a program board is all of this, but also more.
The program board is a visualization of the work being committed to during the Program Increment / Planning Interval or PI. It is simultaneously the facilitator of planning as well as the plan itself.
A typical idea of a program board - especially for collocated PI Planning sessions - is literally a physical board on a wall.
It would show:
- Columns: marking the iterations for the increment
- Rows: representing different teams within that increment
- Sticky notes: describing the features that teams are working on or used to indicate milestones that they’re working towards
- Strings: between these features to indicate if there are any dependencies
But how does a program board help the planning process?
A program board facilitates better team collaboration because it streamlines project communication and planning, while also ensuring better communication between the involved teams.
Moreover, program boards help define the responsibility of each team involved in making the idea a reality, which in turn, helps to streamline the process as a whole.
During PI Planning, the program board supports teams to visualize and manage dependencies across the PI; giving them greater clarity of the work in detail, how the work relates to what the business is trying to achieve and to each other, what tasks need to be done, and crucially, whether there are any issues that may cause delays.
A program board is simultaneously the facilitator of planning as well as the plan itself.
To understand how program boards help with the planning process, let’s go over the different components found on them.
How to set up your SAFe program board for successful PI planning
According to Scaled Agile, there are two primary outputs of PI Planning:
- Committed PI Objectives
- Program board - with new feature delivery dates, dependencies among teams and relevant Milestones
So if you’re following SAFe and doing PI Planning you should finish PI Planning with a program board.
During PI Planning, not only do teams discuss and define the features and dependencies, but they also establish milestones across the PI.
This is where a digitised PI Planning tool can really benefit remote or hybrid teams doing PI Planning - the same information is planned in the same place.
Here are a few tips to help you create a SAFe program board.
1. Setting up the board itself
Not to be underestimated, the bare bones of the program board need to be set up.
There are two key elements here:
- Sprint or iteration columns:
- The right number based on how many iterations/sprints will be in your PI, including a final one for iteration planning
- Rows or swimlanes:
- One for milestones/events - typically the first
- One for each team
- May also have a swimlane for shared services, suppliers or other teams not in the Agile Release Train (ART)
Here is what this may look like:
If you were at this stage of your program board in Easy Agile Programs, your board would look like this:
In Easy Agile Programs, each team represented in a dedicated swimlane represents an agile board in Jira. So the issues that you will be scheduling for this team in sprints during PI Planning and beyond, will be reflected on their agile board and vice versa.
The start and end date for the PI and the number and length of your sprints can all be edited to suit your organisation’s workflows.
When you are in editing mode and are ready to schedule features, the shared team features swimlane also appears at the top to visually indicate if there is work to be scheduled across multiple teams.
2. Start with features and milestones
During PI Planning, Product Management shares the product/solution vision and this commonly also means the next top 10 upcoming features for the teams to take into the PI from the backlog. (We know from our customers that sometimes this can be a lot more!)
We also want to start by knowing which milestones we are working towards. Often these can represent product release dates, external deliverables or deadlines like preparing a demo or showcase for a trade show, marketing launches or events. Having these visualized on the program board helps teams to easily see what they are working towards, but also to inform prioritization of the specific features needed to help meet delivery of that milestone.
If you are working with a physical or simple digital program board, features and Milestones are represented by ‘sticky notes’ - placed in the appropriate swimlane and/or colour to indicate this information as well as the team responsible for it and the time frame:
So what does this look like in Easy Agile Programs at this point?
Milestones are highly visual
- Milestones can be customised to indicate start/end date and colour. They run across all team swimlanes so teams can easily see how their work relates to an upcoming deliverable or event.
- Milestones still have a dedicated place at the top of the program board but this can be collapsed if desired
Features are native Jira issues
- Features in Easy Agile Programs are native Jira issues, commonly epics. You can easily click on the issue key from the program board to see more information via the issue view.
- Features can be easily scheduled from the backlog into a swimlane through drag and drop, or created via the program board. To indicate when a feature is intended to start and be completed, simply drag and drop the edge of the issue:
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Want to bring your Program Board into Jira?
3. Identify dependencies
With the features done, the next thing that teams should look for is dependencies. Remember the strings we mentioned before?
Dependencies between features and teams are represented with string on a program board when it’s on a wall or lines between those features in a digital tool.
Sticky notes in a different colour, like red, indicate a significant dependency. For example that feature may have more than one feature relying on it to go to schedule.
To explain this, let’s consider an example.
Imagine Team X realizes they cannot develop a feature until Team Y develops an API thanks to the program board. So, what both teams can do is talk to each other and come up with a solution that works for everybody, leading to better collaboration among the teams.
After an agreement is reached, a dependency will then be placed on the board so everyone has the same understanding about the dependency, and how it’ll be resolved. A piece of string will be attached to each card to demonstrate this:
The nature of dependencies mean that something is required to be completed in order for something else to be done.
To be able to more easily see when dependencies are scheduled, Easy Agile Programs has a traffic light system of red, orange and green dependencies to indicate dependency health.
Dependency health is represented as follows:
- A red line indicates the dependant issue is scheduled in a sprint after the dependency (conflict)
- An orange line indicates the dependant and dependency are scheduled in the same sprint (a risk)
- A green line indicates the dependant issue is scheduled in a sprint before its dependency (healthy)
- A black line indicates the dependency exists with issues outside of the current view. Whether this is the current Agile Release Train / Program, or with a future or past increment.
This easily indicates to a Release Train Engineer or a Program Manager where they ought to focus and to be able to address any scheduling issues during planning.
Easy Agile Programs also allows you to visualize dependencies between issues within and across teams from the Team Planning Board. This provides a really focussed view of the work for a particular team for the PI, and how that work relates to other teams:
Program boards are needed for better collaboration
The power of the program board lies in having a single view of what a collection of teams are committing to - together - and exactly how that work relates to each other. It helps organize planning sessions by summarizing future dependencies across all teams and sprints. As a result, scrum masters, release train engineers, product managers and business owners can easily identify and prioritize cross-team conversations that matter the most.
Running a scaled planning session or PI Planning ceremony, especially for the first time, can be daunting.
But if you’re successful in developing a solid program board as part of your PI planning process, you won't have to worry about chasing down your co-worker or team member to meet deadlines. The key here is to make sure you’ve scheduled the most important features to take into the PI, identified cross-team dependencies, and have visualised any milestones or deadlines to ensure they can be realistically achieved.
The program board can become more impactful though, when it is more than just a plan. Building a program board in an online tool with the added capability of it representing the actual work that’s planned to be done means that it has a life beyond PI Planning; it becomes the living document of the teams progress and a means to identify when there are any blockers to that progress.
In order for agile teams to be agile and continuously and iteratively deliver value, they need to be equipped with a program board that can help them respond to any changes so that they can plan for success but also progress towards it.
Ready to take your Program Board off the wall and into Jira?
You can with Easy Agile Programs
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ProductRethinking our UI: How Easy Agile innovates for a better user experience
At Easy Agile, we’re constantly looking for new ways to improve our products, and one of the ways we foster innovation is through Dash Days—a focused period where our team steps away from daily tasks to experiment, explore, and reimagine how our tools can better serve customers.
During our most recent Dash Days, we took a fresh look at the user interface of two of our flagship products, Easy Agile TeamRhythym and Easy Agile Programs. The goal was to enhance interaction and discoverability, so users can experience the full value of our tools without unnecessary complexity.
Here’s a glimpse into our thought process, challenges, and the exciting solutions we explored.
The challenge
As Easy Agile TeamRhythym and Easy Agile Programs have evolved, we’ve introduced powerful features designed to give users more control and flexibility. However, as new capabilities have been added, the interface has become more elaborate. For us, this presents an opportunity—an opportunity to take a step back, simplify the experience, and help users unlock more of what our products offer.
To address this, we brought people from across the business together to brainstorm how we could improve the experience in both products. Through these sessions, we identified a few core opportunities:
- Discoverability: How do we make it easier for users to find and use the powerful features built into our tools?
- Visibility: What’s the best way to surface the right information and features when users need them?
- Consistency: How do we create a more uniform experience within and across our products to make navigation intuitive?
Armed with these insights, we then set out to explore solutions tailored to each product’s unique challenges.
A more personalized experience with Easy Agile Programs
For Programs, we focused on three “how might we” questions to reframe our challenges into opportunities:
- How might we create more focus on the actions users are trying to complete?
- How might we make navigation more intuitive and easy?
- How might we help users with more context about where they are in the app at any given screen?
Out of the many solutions we explored, the one that got us the most excited was the idea of an Easy Agile Programs Home Screen—a personalized dashboard designed to guide users based on where they are in their planning cycle.
Conceptual sketch of the Easy Agile Programs home screen This home screen could adapt based on where users are in their journey, offering relevant guidance and actions.
- For new users, the home screen could provide clear onboarding steps and easy access to help, so they can get started quickly and confidently.
- For experienced users, it could offer insights and key actions related to their progress, so they can stay focused on what matters most. Users might even see data summarizing their accomplishments, which makes it easier to share successes with their teams.
Whether someone’s brand new to the product or deep into execution, the home screen could be a great way to guide and coach our users—helping them answer questions like, "What should I be doing next?" or "What extra value am I missing out on?".
A more focused interface for Easy Agile TeamRhythm
For TeamRhythym, our three key “how might we” questions were:
- How might we provide more focus within the User Story Map during sprint planning?
- How might we improve the discoverability of issues without epics?
- How might we enhance the layout to highlight key features and improve overall usability?
With these questions in mind, we explored a range of ideas to simplify sprint planning and make it easier for users to prep, plan, and review their work, whether they’re using Scrum or Kanban.
Three steps to simplify sprint planning on Easy Agile TeamRhythm Sprint planning can sometimes feel overwhelming when you have multiple sprints competing for attention. To help users focus, so we explored the idea of introducing a focused view during sprint planning.
- This would allow users to zoom in on a specific sprint and the backlog alone, while collapsing others.
- Each issue would have its own row in the detailed view, and users can drag and drop either an entire row or drag individual issues to quickly rank them based on priorities.
- The sprint view will also hide epics that don’t have linked issues in the current sprint, giving users a cleaner view of what’s relevant to their current work.
Conceptual UI of TeamRhythm User Story Map's focused view for sprint planning 
Conceptual UI of TeamRhythm User Story Map's detailed sprint view We also looked at ways to enhance the User Story Map interface to bring the most useful tools and features to the forefront. By improving how key functionality is presented, we’re helping teams quickly access what they need, when they need it, enabling them to stay productive without interruption.
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Conceptual UI of a more condensed top navigation for TeamRhythm User Story Map This way, we can create a smoother, more focused experience for teams using TeamRhythm, so they can focus on what’s in front of them without being distracted by everything else.
Your turn. What do you think?
At Easy Agile, we’re always thinking about what comes next.
These ideas aren’t on our official roadmap just yet, but they’re the kind of innovations we’re excited to explore.
If you think these changes would improve your experience with Easy Agile TeamRhythm and Easy Agile Programs, let us know! Your feedback helps us decide what to prioritize, so we can continue building tools that truly make a difference for your teams.
WorkflowHow to set your Agile teams up for success
Agile is about empowering teams to take ownership, feel truly engaged, and foster a culture of collaboration. More than ever, teams are required to deliver with greater adaptability, speed, and engagement. The future is more ambiguous and complex, and Agile teams must know how best to respond to these changing conditions.
Agile experts John Walpole, Dean MacNeil, and Nick Muldoon share their success formula behind the high-functioning Agile teams at Lyft, Valiantys, and Easy Agile. You will learn:
- How to create a compelling 'why' that the whole team can get behind
- How to empower your teams
- The qualities of high-performing Agile teams
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Create a compelling 'why' that the whole team can get behind
I think Agile is not a silver bullet. We have people who look at Agile and say, "Oh, well, this is going to solve all of our woes." And it's not; it's certainly not a turnkey thing.
Nick Muldoon, Co-CEO at Easy Agile
Agile is not a silver bullet. It is not a methodology that will solve leaders, teams and individuals' problems. Agile is a continuous improvement journey of "adaptability in evolutionary theory; it's about responding to either a new environment or changes in your environment to again, not just survive but to thrive," said Dean.
Set your Agile teams up for success by teaching them to thrive by empowering them to lead change, make mistakes, build a solid foundation, and be open to learning, changing, and communicating the meaningful 'why' behind their work. You will see an explosion in Agile team success when you have a "cohesive team aligned to a common mission with a growth mindset."
Motivate your Agile teams by connecting their work with a meaningful 'why.' Schedule a meeting to ensure you constantly discuss their work's more profound purpose. Bring up a real-life customer example. John shared, "At Lyft, we share stories in a fortnightly meeting. We offer free accessible rides to those in wheelchairs or those who struggle to pay for a ride but need access to transportation to get to work or school.
"Bring your personas to life with these real-life examples, so it's front and center in your employee's minds," said John.
Empowering your teams
Culture eats strategy for breakfast
Peter Drucker
Your employees need to lead the change. "If you look at great leaders in recent Agile transformations, you might want to look at a company like Porsche," said Dean. Dean shares how Porsche has inspired Valiantys because "every employee at Porsche is leading the change. So they're all bought into it; they all have that sense of leadership to drive it.". Porsche's employees are leading the change because their leadership communicates the 'why' well. "Fun is number one when their CIO lists off the top three reasons 'why' everyone is so fired up about the Agile transformation. Because you can have fun on the job, your job is not supposed to be a grim duty. It's supposed to be something you look forward to."
"Empower your teams to make mistakes," said John.
Empower your Agile teams to fail and make mistakes through powerful questions. Leaders have to change their tone from "oh no, who do I fire?" to "what's the challenge? What can I do to help?". Express to your team that you're on a journey to learn as much as they are. In doing so, the leader humanizes themselves and becomes more vulnerable.
Leadership sets the tone. As a company scales, the responsibility to create the culture and the risk appetite falls more on leadership.
Qualities of high-performing, Agile teams
1. Create a solid foundation
Set your Agile team up for success with a stable team unit. Don't keep moving teams around; create long-term Agile teams to allow individuals to get to know each other and humanize one another. "I think stability is key to having the tacit knowledge keeping together and this open mindset where they're willing to learn; I love that," said Nick.
2. Open to learning and adapting
For Agile teams to continuously improve, they must constantly be learning and adapting. "You can't get that learning and adaptation if you keep just stirring the pot. Because you're going to keep scattering that knowledge, you want to take hold, and then, of course, you want to spread the knowledge to the organization then," said Dean.
3. Share feedback and do the retrospective
Ensure your Agile teams are demonstrating working product on a regular occurrence. If you're practicing Scrum, make sure you are doing the weekly sprint review. This allows the team to receive feedback from stakeholders and keep iterating and moving forward, ensuring they stay in movement. "Do your retrospective," said Dean." We're looking at what we delivered, and now we're going to look at how we delivered it." It is imperative that Scrum teams gather at the end of each sprint to discuss what went well, what didn’t go so well, and what can be improved on for next time. Otherwise, you invite complacency and stagnation into your Scrum process — the antithesis of Agile.
Using Easy Agile to set your Agile teams up for success
Easy Agile TeamRhythm supports your team's Agile practices in Jira. The user story map format in TeamRhythm transforms your flat product maps into a dynamic and flexible visual representation of work. Watch the highlights tour to see how Easy Agile TeamRhythm makes sprint planning, managing your backlog, and team retrospectives easier. Visit Atlassian Marketplace to start your free, 30-day trial today.
Agile Best PracticeSix Tips for Improving Team Collaboration
The 17th State of Agile Report shared that 93% of executives thought that their teams could do the same amount of work in half the time, if their teams collaborated better.
That's quite a statistic. We’ll leave it up to you to decide whether this reflects a lack of efficiency due to poor collaboration, or a disconnect between leadership expectations and the realities faced by development teams.
What we do know is that improving team collaboration has benefits and that improved collaboration is a key benefit of effective agile practices.
So if you think your team could work more effectively, here are six tips for improving team collaboration that we think will make your working life better, and help you deliver for your customers.
1. Agile Teams Are Cross-Functional
Cross-functional teams are the backbone of agile collaboration. It's Agile 101:
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
Manifesto for Agile Software Development
Ideally, your agile team should be able to deliver work independently. The skills and expertise of your team should allow you to handle diverse tasks without creating dependencies on other teams. You can take ownership of the software you're delivering.
The benefit of organizing into cross-functional teams is a greater shared understanding of your project, where you can each see how the pieces fit together. This type of collaboration supports the efficient flow of work and ensures that knowledge and skills are consistently shared.
2. Take an Iterative Approach
Or to put it another way, make it easier to fail fast, so your team can learn why, and correct your course. By breaking down large projects into manageable increments, your team can focus on delivering small, functional parts of working software at regular intervals. This approach goes hand-in-hand with continual feedback from users, ensuring that issues are uncovered quickly and dealt with just as fast. This shared team focus on user feedback, and the shared purpose and collaboration that comes with it, is a key benefit of agile development.
3. Maintain Regular and Transparent Communication
Daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, and planning meetings are all designed to foster regular and clear communication. You and your team should see these meetings as an opportunity to share ideas, discuss progress and blockers, and collaborate. If your daily stand-up is nothing more than a shopping list of tasks, then you're doing it wrong.
If your daily stand-up is nothing more than a shopping list of tasks, then you're doing it wrong.
Someone who has wasted too much time in shopping-list meetings.
Beyond team meetings, clear communication is important anywhere the details of your work are shared. Agile tools like Easy Agile TeamRhythm provide a central platform for prioritizing work and tracking progress. With a central source of truth that everyone can access to understand goals, priorities, and team commitment, collaboration can be more effective, keeping the team aligned and focused.
4. Conduct Team Retrospectives
Hot take: regular retrospectives are the most important agile practice your team can adopt.
Team retrospectives provide a structured opportunity to reflect on your work and discuss how it can be done better next time. This is team-led improvement because you and your team are in the driver's seat. Encouraging honest and open discussions during retrospectives helps build trust among team members and fosters a collaborative mindset. By continuing to work on processes and behaviors, you and your team can improve your performance over time and make your working life better.
5. Use Collaboration Tools
The right tools can make a big difference in team collaboration. The best tools provide a reliable source of truth that the whole team can access, in a place where the whole team will access it. It's a simple concept; a shared understanding of the work is supported by shared and willing access to the same information.
Choose a tool that makes it easy for you and your team to access information and keep it updated. If you're already working in Jira, an integration like Easy Agile TeamRhythm provides a better view of your work in a story map format, with goals, objectives, and team commitment all made clear. Team retrospective boards are attached to each sprint (or spun up as required for Kanban teams) so you have your team-led ideas for improvement tightly connected to the work in Jira.
No matter which tool you choose, make sure it will facilitate better alignment, streamline your workflows, and provide a clear picture of roadblocks and progress. By using collaboration tools effectively, your team stays organized, focused, and connected, no matter where each member is located.
6. Build a Positive Team Culture
It may sound obvious, but a positive team culture is essential for effective collaboration. Creating an environment where team members feel valued, respected, and motivated, encourages the psychological safety they need to share their great ideas, learn from missteps, and collaborate more effectively with their colleagues.
High-performing teams recognize the achievements of others, share constructive feedback, and support practices that lead to a healthy work-life balance. Make it regular, and keep it authentic. A positive culture not only improves team dynamics but also boosts overall productivity and job satisfaction.
Successful Team Collaboration
Effective collaboration can be the difference between your team achieving their goals, or falling short. By embracing agile practices like the regular communication that comes from agile planning meetings, to the learnings that come from taking an interactive approach to development, and creating time for team-led improvement with retrospectives, you can seriously boost your team dynamics.
Easy Agile TeamRhythm Supports Team Collaboration
Easy Agile TeamRhythm is designed to make your agile practices more accessible and effective, helping your team plan, prioritize, and deliver work with better alignment and clarity.
Built around a story map for visualizing work and retrospective boards that encourage team-led improvement, TeamRhythm facilitates sprint and release planning, dependency management, backlog management, user story mapping, and retrospectives.
Tight integration with Jira makes Easy Agile TeamRhythm a reliable source of truth, no matter where you and your team members are located.
Watch a demo, learn about pricing, and try for yourself in our sandbox. Visit the Easy Agile TeamRhythm Features and Pricing page for more.
Easy Agile TeamRhythm