PI Execution & RTE Responsibilities: Part 4

My first 3 articles on RTE responsibilities were more inclined towards one of the biggest ceremonies in SAFe – PI (Program Increment) Planning.

You can find these articles here –

PI Planning & RTE responsibilities -

RTE Responsibilities: Part 1

RTE Responsibilities: Part 2

RTE Responsibilities: Part 3

PI Planning ceremony “tests” RTE’s Preparatory, Planning and Facilitation skills to the core. Next comes “PI Execution”, the “doing” part, where rubber meets the road!

PI Execution

Keeping overall ART objectives in back of his/her mind (Applying Systems Thinking), RTE along with Scrum Master and PO, starts aligning team right from the basic building block of the PI that is Sprints or iterations.

RTE overlooks overall iteration planning of the teams and ensures that iteration goals of the teams are aligned with Team’s PI objective and aligns to ART objectives. While RTE may or may not take part in team level ceremonies (depends on his availability) such as Iteration planning, Daily stand-ups, Team/Iteration demo, Retro etc. as a “Chief Scrum Master” it is RTE’s responsibility to guide Scrum Masters’, POs’ and teams’ in performing these activities more effectively.

I have not seen/heard many RTEs performing the role of “Chief Scrum Master”, instead they would just operate at Program level and seldom attends any Team ceremonies. I would personally urge RTEs to attend Team level ceremonies whenever possible so that they can guide the teams and also to get an early idea about trends and behavioral aspects of the team and re-assuring that teams are aligned to the PI objectives; besides this, it keeps the team motivated to see RTE participating at team level ceremonies.

Let’s take a quick look at important responsibilities of RTE during the PI Execution and what it takes -

• First and foremost duty of RTE is to bring alignment in ART; RTE needs to ensure that business vision and roadmap reaches to all the teams and teams are align to the PI objectives.
• Strong understanding of SAFe framework and Software engineering practice will help RTE to ensure that teams are following the SAFe principles and practices effectively.
• Support the Strategic Program Management team in ensuring governance standards from the client as well as serving organization are applied within the team.
• Creating/updating train wide overall plan that describes the Goal and Objectives of the train, Scope, Roles and responsibilities, overall governance, tracking and reporting, escalation matrix, Change Management, Training plan/requirement, Risks and issues etc. This sort of documentation would bring common understanding among all the stake holders involved in the train.
• As a Chief Scrum Master coach and support Scrum Master to optimize team’s sustained output/velocity and quality and maintain team’s motivation.
• Making sure that teams are working towards building something that would provide value to the customer and not mere concentrating on velocity.
• Encouraging collaboration among Scrum Teams, System Architect and System team.
• Conducting effective Program level ceremonies such as SOS, PO/ART sync, System demo, I&A, Prep activities for next PI etc. Let’s take examples of SoS and I&A -
• E.g. Scrum-of-Scrum (SoS): Ensuring that it is not status update meeting. Team is actively identifying the dependencies (using Program Board) and ROAMing the risks and dependencies as self-organizing teams or coming-up with action plan/escalation as appropriate and overlooking how team is progressing towards iteration/PI/ART Objectives.
• Effective Inspect and Adapt (I&A) ceremony: Inviting all the stakeholders, facilitating PI System demo, presenting Metrics and trends, Retrospective and conducting problem solving workshops. Take the feedback from demo and retrospective and add them to backlog.
• Help team in keeping the Program Board up-to-date.
• Ensuring that Iteration demos (Sprint Demos) are happening as planned and solution increments are integrated after each iteration.
• Ensuring NRFs (Non Functional Requirements) are taken care along and team is focused on continuously reducing the technical debts.
• Possess better understanding of component, application and feature teams and their inter-dependencies for better facilitation of discussion among the teams.
• Work with the Product Manager, Scrum Masters and stakeholders to identify, describe, track, prevent and resolve risks and remove or facilitate removal of impediments.
• Drive delivery and continuous improvement by utilizing feedback and metrics (Team’s Self-assessment, Burn-down, Velocity, defect rate, etc.) to identify areas of opportunity and improvements.
• Understanding vendor’s/supplier’s dependencies, and ensuring their availability for all possible program level/team level ceremonies.
• If vendor/supplier are following other methodology, ensure that their deliveries are aligned with the PI/ART level milestones.
• Conduct analysis of metrics and performance data to help the teams on the ART self-optimize and report progress.
• Provide regular and open communication across the program and stakeholders for transparency and awareness of progress and impediments.
• Create timelines, milestones, and cadence of increments and releases.
• RTE to be in regular touch with the SAFe Program Consultant / SAFe Coach to seek guidance on the metrics trends, coaching at Train and team level, have better understanding of SAFe framework, managing impediments etc.
• CoP (Community of Practice) is another area where RTE can share experience from his train while trying to understand and learn from his peers about best practices being followed in other ARTs.
• RTE can learn from or can join Lean-Agile Leadership forum to be part of leading the change, develop teams/fellow RTEs and help the leadership develop an area that promotes continuous learning and apply those learnings to work.
• RTE overlooks the overall progress and Kanban board of System team and DevOps team to ensure that there are no blockers for Dev teams from environment availability or continuous integration and delivery (CICD – Continuous Delivery Continuous Progress) perspective.
• Ensuring that team is in-sync with the miles stones and release planning.
• Following up with the System Architect, Program Management and PO to do preparatory activities for upcoming PIs, i.e. prioritizing Epics/Features, feature splitting and draft user stories.
• Following the agreed governance plan and updating the stakeholder with absolute clarity and transparency.