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.

Use a custom field or label to reduce the number of issues in your board

By default, your Program board includes all future work from your plan with To do or In progress statuses. To declutter the planning view, planners should tag work (both parent and child issues) they want to include for the upcoming iteration using either of the following fields:

• a custom field (single-select or multi-select) or

• the Label field

You can use this field as a filter when you create your Program board. You can also add or edit an existing board’s filter:

1. Select Plan settings from the left side navigation.Then choose Program board.

2. Find the board you want to edit, then select either Change filter or Add filter.

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 issue sources to use capacity planning.

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

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

• assign issues directly to a team’s sprint or

• schedule issues 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.