Big Room Planning

Big Room Planning, also called Program Increment Planning in SAFe, is a collaborative event where multiple Agile teams come together to plan and coordinate work for an upcoming increment, typically eight to twelve weeks. This face-to-face or virtual gathering aligns teams around shared objectives and manages dependencies. The event brings together all team members, product owners, architects, and stakeholders to create synchronized plans. Teams present their individual sprint plans, identify cross-team dependencies, address risks, and commit to shared objectives. Key activities include business context and vision presentation, team breakout planning sessions, dependency identification and resolution, draft plan reviews and adjustments, risk assessment and mitigation planning, and final team commitments to objectives. This practice solves coordination challenges in large-scale Agile implementations where multiple teams work on interconnected products. Face-to-face interaction accelerates communication, builds social bonds, and creates shared understanding impossible through distributed planning. The event typically spans two days and results in team-level sprint plans, program-level objectives, a dependency board, and identified risks. Success requires executive participation, clear business priorities, prepared teams, and skilled facilitation. While resource-intensive, Big Room Planning dramatically improves alignment, reduces integration surprises, and increases predictability in complex development environments.