What are External Organizations
Whether you're dependent on your Marketing Team, another Business Unit, a key supplier, a third-party vendor, or an External Development Partner, we refer to all of these as External Orgs. These dependencies are common in large-scale planning and can be easily managed and tracked in piplanning.io to ensure alignment and visibility throughout the PI.
External Orgs DO NOT consume a team license.
Why It Matters
Imagine your ART is building a mobile banking feature that requires:
Integration with a third-party payment processor, and
Approval from an external security team.
Without a clear way to visualize and track these dependencies, they can get lost in backlogs or hidden in sticky note comments, only to resurface as blockers later in execution. With External Orgs and the ART Planning Board Swimlane functionality, you can make these critical dependencies visible and manageable from the start.
What You Can Do with External Orgs
By enabling External Orgs and updating your ART Planning Board, you can:
Create dedicated Swimlanes for external orgs (e.g. vendors, internal departments, or external partners).
Assign Dependency Sticky Notes directly to these external organizations.
Track progress and blockers at a glance, during PI Planning, stand-ups, and throughout the PI.
Ensure nothing falls through the cracks, even when collaborating outside your ART.
This visual approach supports Lean-Agile principles by giving external dependencies the same level of visibility as internal team work.
Administration steps to manage External Dependencies
Step #1 - Add External Orgs
This is how you add external orgs to be used in the PI Session configuration / ART Planning Board.
Navigate to RTE Cockpit
Select Organization
Click the External Org tab
Click Create External Org button to create external entities (e.g., "Payment Processor", "Security Team", "Cloud Vendor").
Enter the Name, click Save.
With our Standard plan you can manage one External Org. With the Premium and Enterprise plans, you can add unlimited External Orgs to be used in your PI Sessions.
Step #2 - Configure Swimlanes in the PI Session config
While configuring your PI Session under ART Planning Board > Settings you can Add Extra Swimlanes and Assign External Orgs to those Swimlanes.
Note
On the Enterprise Plan, you can add a separate swimlane for each External Org (e.g. one for your payment processor, and another for your security partner).