Roles and Responsibilities: Agile Release Train
The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a comprehensive blueprint that paves the way for organizations to navigate the complex seas of scaling Agile across large teams. At the heart of this transformative framework lies a vital entity – the Agile Release Train (ART). This blog is an insightful capture of the roles and responsibilities of the Agile Release Train.
What is a Agile Release Train?
Imagine the Agile Release Train as a powerful locomotive, propelling cross-functional teams towards a common destination of innovation and value delivery. The Agile Release Train (ART) is a long-lived team of Agile teams that align to a shared business and technology mission. ARTs are cross functional and each is a virtual organization (typically 50-125 people) that have all the capabilities needed to define, build, validate, release and operate solutions, wherever applicable.
These capabilities allow the ART to deliver a contiuous value of flow, as shown in the figure below.
Roles and Responsibilities of Agile Release Train
The ultimate purpose of every ART is to deliver effective solutions to the customer. The following figure shows the critical areas of responsibility of an ART.
First Responsibility: Connecting with the Customer
The first responsibility can be further explained with the following sub-set responsibilities.
1. Apply Customer Centricity
Customer Centricity is a necessary mindset for the ART and its constituent teams. An ART routinely focuses on customer needs and opportunities to benefit the customer.
2. Use Design Thinking
Design Thinking—enables an ART to create desirable, feasible, and sustainable solutions. By paying close attention to user personas, journey mapping and customer benefit analysis, an ART can discover new and valuable product capabilities.
Second Responsibility: Planning the Work
1. Align ART priorities with portfolio strategy
Every ART operates in a broader portfolio context and needs to align with the overall portfolio strategy. However, achieving the alignment also requires an established process that involves
- Regularly engaging with portfolio stakeholders at ART level
- Including ART representatives in portfolio interactions
Epic owners often serve as an important link between portfolio strategy and ART execution.
2. Prepare for PI Planning
These events include the ART sync, System Demos, and PI system demo. RTe helps the ART manage PI risks and dependencies using the ROAM technique and ART planning board.
3. Plan the PI
Teams create and agree on the PI Objectives that will guide them throughout the PI execution, generating alignment within the ART.
Third Responsibility: Delivering Value
1. Frequently integrate and test
Frequent integration and testing helps in uncovering technology and implementation problems early and gives the teams enough time to respond to the findings. Without this, an ART operates in excessive uncertainty and variability.
2. Develop in short increments of Value
An ART implements the PI as a series of short increments, each representing a small batch of integrated, tested, and demonstrable value. Each increment helps the ART to learn about potential challenges, get feedback.
3. Regularly synchronize and make adjustments
An ART has multiple checkpoints during the execution of PI, including Coaches sync and PO Sync. These events increase visibility into the progress and helps ART make timely adjustments.
4. Build a continuous delivery pipeline
ARTs need to establish a continuous deployment process via building a Continuous Delivery Pipeline (CDP). As a part of CDP, Continuous Deployment often involves purposeful system design that favors low coupling of capabilities, which enables the teams to deploy value independent of each other.
5. Establish release governance process
Each ART establishes a governance process suitable for its release cycle. This involves several activities, including:
- Aligning releases with strategic goals
- Validating releasable increments
- Ensuring compliance with standards and regulations
- Assessing customer impact
- Maintaining the supporting assets and activities for releasing
6. Release frequently and continually optimize the process
Releasing frequently helps reduce time-to-market. Also, when the releases happen on a frequent and reliable basis, it helps in establishing successful continuous delivery and governance processes.
Fourth Responsibility: Getting Feedback
1. Involve the customer in the development process
Direct customer input is an unmatched asset in the development process and including it helps an ART move at a much higher speed. It also helps the ART in avoiding the costly mistake of building capabilities the customer doesn’t need or cannot use.
2. Measure business outcomes and usage
ART must measure whether delivered solutions enable the desired business outcomes—the ultimate purpose of the ART’s effort. Studying customer’s use of solutions may reveal issues and opportunities that ART might be otherwise unaware of.
3. Perform routine A/B Testing
A/B testing helps the ART in effective decision making and improves their development speed. Instead of prematurely committing to certain functionality, the ART creates two or more options and validates them with users, thus gaining a real sense of which alternative is performing better.
4. Test User Experience
User Experience (UX) is essential to fully realizing the solution potential. But to provide productive UX, there needs to be an explicit, thorough UX design and testing strategy. The SAFe Lean UX article covers additional topics of enabling effective UX.
Fifth Responsibility: Improving Relentlessly
1. Measure competency, flow and outcomes
Every ART should regularly assess against key applicable competencies. They should also routinely measure ART Flow and apply Flow Accelerators to initiate forward momentum for ongoing flow improvement.
2. Inspect and Adapt at regular intervals
The Inspect & Adapt Event is the ideal time for the ART to identify significant, systematic improvements. AT every PI Boundary, an ART has the chance to look back at the last PI, identify problems and take corrective actions.
3. Make small improvements on the fly
Every ART routinely discovers small, local, and tactical improvement opportunities. It is best to address these as they occur and without waiting for the next I&A, ensuring small improvements on the fly.
4. Leverage Innovation and Planning Iteration
The IP Iteration offers an opportunity to allocate uninterrupted time to innovation and learning. This helps the ART to further advance its solution, technical infrastructure, and various processes.
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