1. Briefings.

Various roles present briefings on business context, vision, architecture, and process and acceptance criteria. 

2. Team Breakouts.

Part of the planning process involves team breakouts for detailed team planning. 

a. The velocity of prior PI iterations can be viewed on prior PI plans under Plan Details > Velocity.  tbd

• To determine velocity, on the dashboard under Trends tab, use the Story Points by Iteration widget. tbd

b. To select features for the PI:

• Plans > Quick Planner > Iteration Planning
• Select a PI from the top drop-down list.
• Click the title bar of the feature from the backlog lane and drag it to the PI lane.
• Typically, the top 10 features will be assigned to the first PI. The next top 10 features will be assigned to the next PI. 

c. Teams will generally create stories by decomposing features into stories. 

To break down an Feature into Stories, Click the Open child task breakdown icon () in your features's attributes. Assign details to the stories:

• file against a team category
• provide a brief description

When you add a child work item in Engineering Workflow Management a parent - child relationship is established between two work items, thus creating a hierarchical structure. This helps traceability and navigation. For a parent work item you can see its children work items as links and for a child work item, you can see its parent work item as a link.

d. To select stories for the sprint by team:

• Plans > Quick Planner > Iteration Planning
• In My Team Area, set the appropriate team.
• Scroll to the right to see the Sprints.
• Click the title bar of the story from the backlog lane and drag it to the sprint lane.
• Change the ranking of the stories as needed by dragging and dropping.
• Continue dragging the highest ranked stories into the first sprint until the sprint is loaded to the team's velocity.
• Select the next sprint and continue dragging the next highest ranked stories from the PI until the sprint is loaded to the team's velocity.

If unable to view stories, the Categories have not been assigned to the teams.  See Configure Team Area EWM

Also see Managing a Project with Quick Planner.

e. Add "PI Objectives" via Quick Planner.

• See Managing a Project with Quick Planner
• View PI Objectives. Project Dashboards > [Project name] > PI Planning tab

3. Identify risks

View risks on the project dashboard:

• Click Project Dashboards > [Program name]

Click on and update risks and impediments as needed.

To add additional risks, see Creating work items in the web client.

Add additional risks via Quick Planner. Plans > Quick Planner

4. Identify dependencies

Communicate dependencies to the user directly within the system.

You can view dependencies in the project dashboard, on the Dependency Management tab.

Blocks are recorded by establishing the blocks relationship from work item A to B (or equivalently, a depends on from B to A).

To create a relationship, open the work item, then click on Links. For a block, select Add Blocks. For a dependency, select Add Depends On.

To communicate to a specific user you can:

a. Subscribe the user. (ex. Dave the Scrum Master)  Subscribers > Subscribed By > Add

b. Add a comment to the user in the Story's Discussion section. (ex. "@dave - We will need a new service"). The user will automatically be notified of the comment.

1. Standard meeting follow-up items

This includes creating work items from meeting notes, soliciting feedback from absent members, and resolving any work item(s) associated with the meeting.

2. Update the timeline 

Add Sprint iterations to the timeline by dividing the time until the next PI by the agreed duration of sprints.

Creating timelines, iterations, and iteration types

3. Baseline the PI plan.

A snapshot captures the current state of a plan.  You can use the snapshot later to compare with the future states of the plan to identify trends. 

Taking a snapshot of a plan