PI backlog refinement? “Yes, please.”

“SimCorp’s main product is an investment management platform called Dimension, widely used by most of the major financials. Each of our 7 ARTs is tied to perfecting our delivery in some way. We ourselves are Agile Coaches, not RTEs… so we have a fascinating vantage point: we see the issues that our RTEs all run into. Some of these issues have to do with how SAFe works. So, we use their experiences to mold SAFe into something that serves their work better. We’re going to use the time we have at the Summit to show people what we’ve come up with."

”One such improvement we’d like to discuss is what we’re calling the Feature PI Backlog Refinement process. It’s an interesting addition to the PI planning event chapters in SAFe because in essence, SAFe doesn’t currently say anything about how you should get your backlog ready. It just assumes that when you meet up at the event, you do so with a prioritized backlog ready to be refined further. We’ve developed a process to refine the backlog during an ongoing PI to prepare for the next PI.”

"A second adaptation or module we’ve developed is what we’re calling Impediment Removal Process. Removing impediments is a lot of what RTEs do, and part of that competence is to assess locally developed solutions to see if they might be applied to globally felt problems – and even before that, to signal locally felt impediments and see if they might be systemic. Our adaptation develops this process.”