Recommended preparations before using the Program board

The Program board is designed to be used for Program Increment Planning rituals as part of the SAFe planning methodology. Before you start planning work on your Program board, the plan owner should prepare for the upcoming planning session.

Groom your work before planning

By default, your program board includes all work in your plan with To do or In progress statuses. To focus their program board on the most relevant work, planners can tag work (both parent and child work items) they want to include using either of the following:

• a single-select or multi-select field or

• the Label field

You can use this field as a filter when you create your program board or update the filter of an existing program board.

Create teams and configure them in your plan

The program board plans work based on Teams. Before you start your quarterly planning ritual, you need to add teams to your plan.

Once your plan includes Teams, you need to associate teams with work sources to use capacity planning.

Create sprints for the coming quarter for all of your scrum teams

As a planner, you can schedule work items on the Program board in one of two ways:

• assign work items directly to a team’s sprint or

• schedule work items using the dates at the top of the columns

We recommend that you create all of the sprints you’ll need before you set up your Program board. When you add a team’s sprints to your board, you’ll need to add a team’s sprints to all of the columns at one time. You won’t be able to add three then come back later to add the rest.

Find out how to add sprints to your Program board.