Setting Up Your Account

Getting started takes minutes. Sign up, pick a plan, create your first team, then add your sprints (or flow windows) — and, if you run quarterly planning, wrap them in a PI. This page walks the setup in the right order, because a couple of steps depend on each other.

Create your account

When you sign up, AgileNotes does three things for you automatically:

• Creates your organization — your private workspace.
• Makes you the Admin and a Scrum Master — you can do everything, and you’ll see the SM views by default.
• Starts your 15-day free trial on the Individual and Team plans (no credit card). On Scale, checkout happens up front.

You’ll land on an empty dashboard. Your first real step is creating a team — nothing else can exist until a team does.

Everything you need to manage your account lives under your avatar in the top-right: your profile, Settings, Organization (plan & billing), and Manage Teams.

Choosing a plan

The three plans split along breadth, depth, and scale:

For current prices and the per-team volume tiers, see the pricing page. You pick your plan at sign-up and can change it any time from Settings → Organization → Billing — see Settings.

Path A — A solo Scrum Master (Individual or Team)

If you run one or a few teams yourself, this is the whole sequence:

1. Create your first team. A team needs only a name and a framework (Scrum or Kanban). While you’re there, add your members with their capacity (so velocity and capacity math work), choose a color, and either connect your APM tool — Jira, Azure DevOps, Agility, or Rally — or choose to enter data by hand. Kanban teams also set an SLE (your “tickets shouldn’t take longer than N days” target).

   

2. Add your time boxes.

   • Scrum → create sprints one at a time: name, start date, and length in weeks.
   • Kanban → create flow windows instead — date ranges your work is sliced into.

   

3. (Optional) Group sprints into a PI. If you do quarterly or PI-style planning, create a Program Increment and add your sprints to it. Create the sprints first — the PI picker only offers sprints that already exist. Pure Scrum teams that don’t do PI planning can skip this entirely.

   

4. Start the daily loop. Track each ticket’s WIP status day by day and capture decisions, blockers, and risks as notes. The coaching insights and reports build themselves from there.

That’s it — Team → Sprints → (optional PI). No ART needed.

Path B — An organization at scale (Scale plan)

At scale, AgileNotes flips part of the order in your favor: instead of hand-building every team’s sprints, you define the increment once at the train level and it cascades down to create each team’s PI and sprints for you.

1. Sign up on Scale and complete checkout. You’re the Admin and an SM to start.

2. Invite your people now. Invite SM/PO for each team and RTE or Coach for the train. Each person’s role activates when they accept — and note that creating the train’s PI (step 5) requires an RTE or Coach role, so make sure whoever runs PI planning has it.

3. Create each team — framework, members and capacity, and APM connection — for every team on the train.

   

4. Create the ART (Agile Release Train). As Admin, open Organization → ARTs → Add ART, name it, set the PI cadence (weeks) and sprints per PI, and add your teams to it.

   

5. Create the ART-level PI. As an RTE or Coach, define the PI — its dates, how many iterations, and which one is the IP (Innovation & Planning) iteration. This automatically creates each team’s PI and the matching sprints (and lines up any sprints you’d already made by date). This is why, on Scale, you usually don’t pre-build sprints by hand. (ART-PI planning is an RTE/Coach action — see Scaling with ARTs for the train-wide views it powers.)

6. Run the train. Teams work their sprints; the RTE watches the Program Board and cross-team dependencies. Because the ART is the source of truth, each team’s PI dates are read-only.

In short: Teams → ART → add teams to the ART → ART-PI (which generates the team PIs and sprints).

The setup-order rules that trip people up

A few dependencies are worth knowing before you start clicking:

• A team must exist before anything else — every sprint, flow window, and PI belongs to a team.
• Make sprints before a team-level PI. A PI is a container; its picker only shows sprints that already exist and aren’t attached elsewhere.
• At scale it’s the reverse — the ART-PI creates sprints, so you don’t pre-make them.
• Kanban uses flow windows, not sprints, and only gets PIs and capacity planning if you turn on “participates in PI Planning” (for SAFe Kanban teams).
• Two actions are role-gated: only an Admin can create an ART; only an RTE or Coach can create the ART-level PI.