The RTE As Coach

Starting your career as an RTE?  The Release Train Engineer (RTE) in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®) is unlike any role you have taken on in the past.  Part facilitator extraordinaire, part process improvement guru, and part coach, the role will require you to bring out the best of these skills to serve the Agile Release Train (ART).  Many fledgling RTE’s I coach are quite good at the facilitation role, and many have the process measurement and improvement skills needed to support the pillar of Relentless Improvement.  Where many may struggle is in how to become the chief coach to the ART.  This article will try to give you a foundation to get started on that coaching journey.

Definition of Coach

According to Wikipedia (courtesy of Jonathan Passmore[1]) coaching is “…a form of development in which an experienced person, called a coach, supports a learner or client in achieving a specific personal or professional goal by providing training and guidance”. But, you say, I am not an ‘experienced person’ in Lean-Agile! That’s OK, all great coaches are students of Lean-Agile also, they just spend more time learning how to coach than their ‘coachees’. Coaching is a learned skill, especially when it comes to the Lean-Agile mindset. Many people call me an expert, which usually makes me uncomfortable. I always respond with “I just have more scar tissue than you do“. The most important aspects you will need to cultivate in yourself is a hunger to keep learning, a desire to use that learning to help others, and a transparency that says “yes, even though I’m coaching you, I won’t always have the right answer”.

Here are a couple of areas that can help you cultivate the coaching side of the RTE role:

Empathy

Understanding where people are coming from and their perspective. Do not mistake empathy with sympathy. Sympathy is feeling sorry for someone, empathy is getting down into the trenches with them to share the experience.

Servant Leadership

Servant Leadership is not meek and mild, it is bold and courageous. It is putting others first, not because of (false) humility, but because that is how you build winning teams.

Ability to find the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me)

Every person has intrinsic motivation, that built in desire to ‘do cool things’ Discovering what frightens, concerns, excites, and motivates each person is critical to engaging their intrinsic motivation and creating an environment where they can use that motivation to be successful in their own eyes as well as helping the ART move forward.

Reserving time for the Teams

You cannot coach if you don’t have time to be on the field with the teams. A good rule of thumb for an RTE is to have 50% of their schedule open (yes, block out on your calendar 50% of each day) to do Gemba walks, listen in to team activities, etc. This cannot be “when I get time”, it must be dedicated time committed to the ART.

Analogies/metaphors that matter

Many RTE’s find their ‘superpower’ is to use analogies, metaphors, or stories to help the principles and practices meaningful to the ART. Practice this skill by taking everyday life events and determining if there is a correlation to the principles or practices of SAFe ®. For example, I use the way that Google or Waze show you multiple routes to a given destination to teach Principle #3: Assume Variability; Preserve Options.

Exemplifying Lifelong Learning

You must practice what you preach. Create your own learning plan to increase your skills an RTE and make it transparent to the ART. Reading, studying, researching, experimenting, Communities of Practice, etc. are all parts of an RTE’s learning plan. Share your learning plan with others on the ART and encourage them to do the same. This is a big step towards supporting the Core Competency of a Continuous Learning Culture

Meet them close to where they are at

Many people, coaches included, state you have to “meet people where they are at”. I have found that you need to meet them close to where they are at, but there has to be some level of reaching out done by the person or group you are coaching. Think of a rope bridge across a deep chasm. The team is on the other side, apprehensive to cross. You need to meet the team at the edge of the chasm and reach your hand out to them, but they need to take the action to at least reach out to you to get their own engagement started.

Facilitate removal of impediments, don’t remove them yourself

This is a common misconception for a Scrum Master or RTE. Scrum Masters, or RTE’s as the uber Scrum Master, rarely can remove impediments themselves. What they can do is facilitate, manage, guide, steer, or otherwise encourage the removal of the impediment. Most impediments that cannot be solved at the team level require leadership or management to get involved; facilitate this removal rather than trying to become the manager to remove it yourself.

Focus Areas

The RTE as a coach will focus on four key categories, or Focus Areas:

Program

The RTE has a key role in directly coaching the Product Manager, System Architect, Business Owners and Stakeholders. The RTE should use a combination of these key aspects of the Program Team

Measurements

See the “Measurements” section of Relentless Improvement below, but the RTE is also key in finding Program Team specific measurements. Think outside the box to elements such as: effectiveness of the Backlog Refinement activities (do customer and business metrics tell us we are focusing on the right things?), engagement with the ART vision (do the teams view the vision as their own vision?) and others that help the Program Team focus on what matters, and minimize focus on non-essential elements.

Process

Process improvement is another key aspect of RTE coaching, Viewing the surrounding system in which the ART is working (the culture, practices, and expected behavior, not the products and solutions the ART is building) is a key first step. Stepping back to see the big picture is a start, but learning and applying tr

33ue systems thinking is needed to help understand the system that creates the actions and behaviors of those working within the ART. Only then can true process improvement be successfully engaged.

Roles

The RTE needs to gain a deeper understanding of each of the roles on the Program Team, from a standpoint of both the practices and process they utilize as well as the challenges and difficulties of each role. See the role through the other persons lens to better understand how best to coach them. You do not have to be an expert Product Manager or System Architect to coach them in vision, road mapping and architectural runway, you just need to help them articulate what they want and need to the ART and stakeholders.

Teams

Coaching the teams is a vital aspect of the RTE role, but it is almost always best done through other roles on the ART.

Scrum Masters

Scrum Masters are an RTE’s key vehicle for coaching the teams. Help the Scrum Master to step back and see the system they are working in and ask powerful questions to help them find improvement or coaching opportunities. A chief concern of an RTE is that they enable the Scrum Master to be seen as the coach of the team, and that the team begins to trust the Scrum Master as an ally in delivering value.  Many (most) process improvements led by the RTE are directly supported within the teams by the Scrum Masters.

Team and Technical Agility

You don’t need to be a technical wiz to coach the ART on Team and Technical Agility, but you will need to learn the basics to be effective. If you do not have a technical background search for beginner level blogs, books, etc. to learn the overview of how the technical domain operates. This is valuable to allow you to challenge the team when they are stuck on a particular mental model. Sometimes, just by throwing out “Hey, I read this article the other day about Continuous Integration when working with a monolithic application, maybe that applies here?” can break down those walls that teams create around what is and isn’t possible. If you do have a deep technical background, be careful not to give the answer to the teams, but rather use powerful questions and suggestions to gain the same objective of breaking down their current mental models or beliefs of what is and isn't possible.

DevOps

DevOps is a culture, first and foremost. Coach (through the Scrum Masters in most cases) that DevOps is not simply adding automation and CI/CD tools, but is really a culture of shared responsibility, transparency, quality and measurement. For example, the RTE can have a significant impact on the ART’s embracing DevOps by facilitating and teaching the mapping of the deployment pipeline and teaching the various aspects of the SAFe ® Continuous Delivery Pipeline. See the Value Streams” section of Relentless Improvement for more information.

Relentless Improvement

The key term here is relentless. A successful RTE is always happy, yet never satisfied. They call out and congratulate the ART on progress, but then help the ART discover that behind every Kaizen opportunity lies 2-3 more.

Measurements

RTE’s need to suggest or create measurements that will help the ART move forward, in both value delivery as well as process improvement. The RTE must help to find measurements that will help the ART improve while avoiding vanity metrics. Remember the phrase “Measure what matters”, or my preferred version “Measure what hurts”. If you are driving your car with a full tank of gas, the gas gauge is not the most important metric. However, if you are running on fumes and hoping you can make it to a gas station, the gas gauge becomes a critical measurement.

Value Streams

Key among an RTE’s skillets is facilitation and usage of Value Stream Mapping. An RTE must understand and be able to facilitate the 3 key reasons for value stream mapping (Identification, Organization and Optimization), but key among those is the Optimization. When launching an ART we use the Identification and Organization capabilities to get the ART started, and an RTE will need to continue to use these steps to optimize the makeup of the ART. But for true process improvement an RTE needs to learn how to facilitate Value Stream Mapping and learn to read the map to identify and help eliminate systemic and flow issues. This skill is critical to supporting a culture of Relentless Improvement.

Leadership

Coaching leadership at all levels of the ART is a big part of the RTE role. Remember to separate Leadership from Management. Management maintains systems, which is an important aspect of any organization, but Leadership changes systems. You will find leadership in all levels of the ART, you are essentially coaching the leadership part of the various roles in the ART

Influence to create a Lean Agile environment

A key role of a leader in SAFe ® is to create an environment where the lean-agile mindset can thrive. As an RTE you are instrumental in helping leaders see the opportunities and to influence their behavior and interactions with the ART to further this goal.

Leaders “must know what it is they must do”

An RTE must help leaders learn the basics of “what it is they must do”. Teach the principles and values, demonstrate them in your own behavior, and hold up a mirror for leaders to clearly see past their own mental models to see how they are really interacting.

RTE Focuses on the Process

The RTE should focus on the flow of value part of SAFe ®, not what value is delivered. Without this focus on Principles, Process and Practices, continuous improvement will suffer.

When an RTE becomes too involved in the actual product or solution delivered by the ART they lose focus on the process, and the process suffers accordingly. Think of a real train, it doesn’t have a steering wheel but is guided by the tracks. The RTE also does not have a steering wheel, but instead guides the ART by improving the ‘rails’ of process, supported by the principles and practices. An RTE should view their role as similar to a real train engineer who does not really focus on the actual cargo on the train but instead focuses on the predictable delivery of the cargo. An RTE encourages and inspires the Program Team to take ownership of the cargo. This does not mean that an RTE does not care about solving real business problems, it’s just that they realize their best influence on this delivery is focusing on the relentless improvement of the train itself.

Footnotes:

[1] Passmore, Jonathan, ed. (2016) [2006]. Excellence in Coaching: The Industry Guide (3rd ed.). London; Philadelphia: Kogan Page. ISBN 9780749474461. OCLC 927192333.