SAFe Release Train Engineer (RTE) Responsibilities: Part -1

My Last article (What makes good RTE) talked about all the technical and soft skills that RTE must possess to make a "good" RTE. It is important that companies look for these these skills when they are planning to hire/assign someone with the role of RTE.

Technical and soft skills are all good but what if RTE doesn’t know his/her responsibilities or knows just part of it ?!!

In my article (series) below, I shall try to touch-base on key responsibilities of a RTE.

Looking at huge load of responsibilities RTE carries out during and beyond a typical life-cycle of a Program-Increment (PI) while managing an ART (Agile Release Train), I am dividing the topic of “Responsibilities” in different parts as per PI life-cycle or SAFe ceremonies or the key stakeholders that RTE interacts.

Note: Since Solution Train Engineer (STE) carries out similar responsibilities in “Full SAFe” configuration especially in “Large Solution or Solution Train” context, most of these responsibilities applies to STE as well.

So, let’s start with PI Planning. Mind you, when I am talking about PI Planning, I am talking about bigger context here and not just the PI Planning ceremony or event as such.

I look at PI Planning as following –

• Tasks those needs to be taken care “Before” PI Planning ceremony, i.e. Pre-PI Planning tasks
• Actual PI Planning - PI Planning ceremony itself
• Tasks those needs to be taken care “After” PI Planning ceremony, i.e. Post PI Planning tasks

Now, let’s take a look at the responsibilities that RTE needs to carry out as part of Pre-PI Planning-

• Send out yearly (typically for 1 year) calendar indicating PI and sprint/iteration timelines for his ART.
• Next, identify key stakeholders those are closely associated with upcoming PI and ensuring their availability. These stakeholders could be Business owners, Epic owners, Subject Matter Experts, Solution/System Architects, Systems team, Scrum Master, Product Management group, Product Owners, Teams, 3^rd party vendors/suppliers etc.
• Pretty trivial and obvious it might sound, RTE should send out a compelling invite for the PI Planning with Agenda for Day 1 and Day 2 to all the stakeholders.

• Coordinate with Product Management Group/Business or Epic Owner for-
• Availability of Roadmap and Vision.
• Close coordination with Product Management group, ensuring clear understanding of ART level vison and roadmap.
• Checking and try to understand Business context for next PI.
• Train level Business/Architectural priorities are available.
• Epic owners and Product Management group are in sync and ART level/solution feature backlog is available.
• Help in deriving ART level MVP (Minimum Viable Product).
• Helping Product Management Group with right-sizing the features that can be executed in a single PI.

• Coordinating with System Architect/System Engineering Team for-
• Encouraging System engineers/architects to collaborate with Product Management Group and work towards prioritizing the overall Product backlog.
• Collaborate with System architect to understand the overall Systems view.
• Encourage System architect and Engineering team to collaborate with the Product Management Group to have a shared technical direction towards achieving the MVP.
• Ensuring high level NFRs (Non-Functional Requirements) are discussed and established.
• Ensuring that System Engineering and Architects actively participates in “Continuous Exploration” with Enabler/Architectural Epics.
• Support in establishing Kanban’s for respective teams.
• Ensuring System architects are getting all the required support to plan and develop the Architectural Runway to support the upcoming prioritized Business Epics/Features.
• Ensuring that System Architects are aligned and working closely with Enterprise Architecture while developing architectural runway.
• Establishing coordination with System Architects and Agile teams for any spike/POC work.

• Collaborating with Third Party/Supplier for-
• Ensuring the availability of Third Party/Vendor representative in PI Planning well in advance.
• Help ART identify the dependencies with Third Party.
• Ensuring that Third party’s cadence/milestone matches with that of ART milestone/PIs.

• Collaborating with PO for ensuring -
• Healthy Team level backlog and priorities are available.
• Clear understanding of ART level MVP and help defining feature level MVP.
• Features are identified and explored and high level user stories have been identified.
• With the help of PO, ensuring team level priorities have been socialized with Team.

• At Agile Teams & Train level to -
• Identify the teams and SMEs availability
• Negotiate with offshore/onsite management on resourcing.
• Help Scrum Master with capacity planning (as required).
• Understands team’s cadence.
• Understand Train’s cadence.
• Identify and manage dependencies among teams.
• Help with team/train level MVP planning.
• Flip Epic level POC/spikes/enables to teams to help Business and System Arch team with sizing and estimation.