The most important work in PI Planning happens in the week before it starts. If teams walk in without draft objectives that already connect to portfolio OKRs, you lose a big chunk of the two days relitigating strategy instead of resolving dependencies. During the event itself I watch the confidence vote closely. A room full of 6s and 7s is telling you something: either the capacity math is off or there are dependencies nobody wants to say out loud yet. That signal is worth stopping for. Alignd came out of that exact frustration — spending hours pulling together the data needed for that pre-PI conversation from five different places.

The first thing I learned is that by the time something has "gone sideways" you have usually already lost a sprint. So the real answer is: set up the ART Sync cadence so you catch it earlier. I use a simple severity model. If a dependency is threatening a PI Objective I escalate to RTE and ART leadership within 24 hours, but I come with a specific ask, not just a flag. The ask is one of three things: descope the story, pull in capacity from another team, or formally adjust the commitment.

I try to figure out what they are actually resisting first because it is rarely SAFe itself. Usually it is a specific ceremony that feels like overhead. So I start by asking what is painful for them right now: what decisions take too long, what meetings feel pointless, where do they feel like they are working blind. Then I connect SAFe practices to those specific things rather than selling the framework in the abstract.

The thing I watch for is whether the meeting is about decisions or about status. If someone is reading out Jira column states that everyone already has access to, that is a sign the sync has become theater. A good one surfaces two or three things that actually need a call made: an Epic that has drifted from the OKR it was supposed to support, a capacity situation that requires a reallocation. That is the thinking behind how Alignd formats the Portfolio Sync entry it generates — put the decision-relevant information first so the conversation can skip the recap and get to the actual work.