Roles and Responsibilities: Release Train Engineer
Scaling Agile practices to the enterprise level requires a carefully orchestrated symphony of roles, responsibilities, and processes. At the heart of this orchestration stands a pivotal role that ensures harmony, alignment, and seamless execution – the Release Train Engineer (RTE) in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). This blog is an insightful capture of the roles and responsibilities of the Release Train Engineer.
Who is a Release Train Engineer?
Imagine the RTE as the captain of a ship, steering the agile vessel through turbulent waters towards the shores of business success. The RTE is often considered to be the chief scrum master, due to the fact that just like the scrum master is considered to be servant leader for the agile teams, RTE is the servant leader for the Agile Release Train (ART).
The RTE facilitates ART events and processes and supports the team in delivering value. They are also responsible for communicating with stakeholders, escalate impediments, help manage risk and drive relentless improvement.
Roles and Responsibilities of Release Train Engineer
The RTE is primarily fulfills the following roles and responsibilities which are illustrated in the following figure
First Responsibility: Facilitating PI Planning
The first responsibility can be further explained with the following sub-set responsibilities.
1. Help the ART for PI Planning
The RTE helps the ART for PI Planning by ensuring readiness in the follwing ways:
- Strategic alignment and organizational readiness i.e alignment with the leadership and its mid-long term strategy and readiness with planning scope and context
- Teams and leadership preparedness with the content i.e. backlogs, what’s expected out of the event, pre-planning done
- Logistics management, readiness with equipment’s, facility, stationary etc
2. Facilitate the PI Planning event
The RTE is critical in facilitating the PI Planning event. They typically do the following activities to help that:
- Day 1
They start by introducing speakers who present business context, product vision, architectural vision and development practices and discuss the planning context with the ART. They also run coach sync meeting during break out #1 and manage draft plan review and management problem solving meetings.
- Day 2
The RTE facilitates
- Planning adjustments
- Team breakout #2
- Coach Syncs
- Final plan reviews
- Addresses ART PI risks, holds a confidence vote, plans rework (if needed), and ends the event with the planning retrospective and moving forward instructions.
Second Responsibility: Supporting PI Execution
1. Track Progress
- RTE help and assist PM in tracking feature delivery progress using ART KANBAN
- RTE coordinate impediment removal for teams and escalate problems that teams can’t resolve themselves
- RTEs use working solutions during system demos as the primary measure of progress
2. Facilitate periodic synchronization events
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. Support ART backlog refinement
RTE coordinates with the Product and Solution Management, Business Owners, Product Owners, and stakeholders to help ensure the backlog aligns with strategy.
4. Promote Devops and continous delivery
RTEs promote DevOps, and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline, including Built-in Quality and the Lean User Experience (UX) innovation cycle. Also, they play a pivotal role in coordinating releases and plan additional activities and milestones needed to deliver the solution, so it meets the definition of done (DoD).
5. Assist Business owners
RTEs assist the business owners by facilitating feature estimation, thus supporting economic decisions for epics and feature estimates roll up to epic estimates. They operate within Lean budgets and ensure that we adhere to guardrails.
6. Co-ordinate planning efforts with other ARTs
They co-ordinate planning efforts by establishing and communicating the annual calendars for iterations and PI.
Third Responsibility: Coaching the ART
1. Coach with powerful questions
RTEs are not expected to have all the answers, rather they should be able to ask powerful questions to uncover what is essential and then guide the teams with his knowledge and expertise.
Some examples could be:
- What is it that we are not seeing?
- what other options or possibilities that exist?
2. Coach SM/TCs in ART and team events and practices
RTEs coach SMs as a chief Scrum Master throughout ART events such as System demos, Inspect and Adapt and team events such as iteration planning and others.
3. Coach ART roles
RTEs coach Business Owners, System Architects, and Product Management and encourage collaboration between teams and System Architects. In addition, they foster Lean-Agile practices and mindsets for Agile Teams and the ART.
Fourth Responsibility: Optimizing Flow
1. Establish pull systems to optimize the flow of value
RTEs use tools such as ART kanban and other information radiators to ensure a optimized and smotth flow of value.
2. Establish ART flow measures
Metrics like the five flow measures and flow predictability are included, which helps in identifying how predictable Agile Teams and Trains deliver business value against their planned objectives.
3. Improve the flow of value
RTEs help improve the flow of value by
- Assessing and improving the practices associated with DevOps and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline
- Coaching the train to apply the eight flow acccelrators
4. Facilitate value stream mapping
This mapping highlights the total lead time needed to fulfill a request while spotlighting areas of improvement. RTEs help the ART by defining the development value stream’s steps, identifying handoffs, bottlenecks and delays.
5. Reduce or eliminate cross team dependencies
RTEs review patterns from the ART planning board and by applying Team Topologies, improve the organizational design of the ART.
Fifth Responsibility: Improving Relentlessly
1. Drive relentless improvement
RTEs foster the pursuit of perfection via the Inspect and Adapt problem-solving workshop. They support just-in-time improvement throughout the PI, leveraging the Coach and PO syncs, Communities of Practice, and promote the use of engineering and Built-In Quality practices.
2. Leverage the SAFe core competency self assessments
RTEs help teams and trains improve on the technical and business practices needed to achieve the larger aim of the portfolio.
3. Collaborate with the Value Management Office (VMO) and the LACE
RTEs help focus the ART on delivering value and operational excellence.
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