Explore or Expire - a discovery journey during 7th RTE Summit

The RTE Summit organized by Gladwell Academy is the biggest large scale agile Event in Europe exclusively for RTEs or roles of similar kind, aka. Release Train Engineer, with the motto

"For RTEs by RTEs".

Source: 3rd RTE Summit

What is a RTE?

It came from Scaled Agile Framework, The major responsibilities are to facilitate the ART events and processes and assist the teams in delivering value. RTEs communicate with stakeholders, escalate impediments, help manage risk, and drive relentless improvement, an ART is across-functional virtual organization that is organized around value who is responsible of continuous exploration, continuous integration, continuous deployment and release on demand, in the target setup.

RTE is neither an operator nor a manager, rather a servant leader and coach for the ART, who supports decentralized decision making but aligned autonomy across 5-12 agile teams.

Why should I care?

Nowadays companies are built on IT, investment has rapidly increased worldwide, but unfortunately often without receiving the expected outcomes. It's not because people are not working hard, rather something is not working in the "system of delivery".

Source: Gartner Forecasts Worldwide IT Spending to Grow 5.1% in 2023

RTE is a rare but vitamin type of emerging roles that enables high performance in product development by optimizing the system of delivery, connecting strategy with execution through direct interaction with business owners and ART members, who optimize the flow of value in highly complex envrionment.

Why haven't heard about it?

Each industry has different level of maturity in terms of acceptance and expertise on this role. For example, in Telecommunications such as Deutsche Telekom, Volvo or ASML, the world's most important supplier to the semiconductor industry, they have up to 100+ RTEs, supporting tens of thousand people in product development.

Depending on countries, the awareness and acceptance vary as well, for example, in US and Netherland it is quite popularly established, while in German speaking countries it's picking up since 2019, especially after COVID19 and car manufacturing, Italy and Spain are catching up. In Asia, India and China the adaption is rapidly growing.

Where does participants come from?

Short answer, every major continent. The first time I was made aware of this unique event was back in 2017, later attended the 3rd RTE Summit thanks to the support of my manager at that time. 3rd RTE Summit video here, after 7 years, it becomes a brand of its own, attracting RTEs worldwide especially Europe.

Source: 6rd RTE Summit

The 7th RTE Summit has brought over 240 professionals together across US, Europe, Asia and Africa, covering a variety of industries such as Banking (e.g. nordea), Insurance (e.g. HDI,?Achmea, Aegon), Asset Management (e.g. APG, DLL Group), Telecommunications (e.g. Swisscom, Orange, Vodafone), Airlines (KLM, Airbus), Retail (REWE Group), Automobile (e.g. BMW, VW, Stellantis, BOSCH), Multimedia (RTL), Semiconductor (ASML), IT Services (DXC, CGI, Atlassian), as well as government.

What are takeaways?

• we are in this journey together

it's an amazing feeling that we are not alone in the large scale transformation journey, despite we come from different industries with different cultural background, but the challenges that we face, are very similar, we are all in the same boat, the goal is not to learn the next big thing like a big tech convention, rather exchange ideas and share best practices among the peers to solve real world problems in large scale.

• make "leadership competence" really practical

we need to really understand what people really want, what customer needs. Jurgen Appelo, creator of management 3.0, has encouraged the community to really think about what are the needs, desires, motive of leaders, employees, users, through a number of books what motivate us, he emphasized the importance of developing atomic habits, focus on behavioral change, and don't simply tell people what to do, that is not change management, avoid wishful thinking. Shift from command and control to management by guardrails, where behavior are fitting to its context.

• Evolution of leadership competence, use the behaviour debugging

In order to serve the others, we have to improve our skills as change agents, SAFe?Fellow and?SPCT?Carl Starendal?from Sweden has delivered the keynote towards end of day 1, the titled was “the transformation leadership Dojo - practical leadership tools for the RTEs”.

He has explored importance of leadership through behavior change, how leadership qualities have evolved over centuries and why nowadays transformational competencies are vital: make sure you words and actions are aligned.

He has explained nicely the differences between development behaviors, positive/negative conventional behaviors and destructive behaviors, how those behaviors help organizations to outperform, and empower teams. For more info check out here: https://discord.gg/ykytsu48P9

• Everything build by man can be changed by man, we can change it if we want

as change agents or RTEs, we need to always keep the “Rule Number 6” in mind “don't take yourself so g—damn seriously”! Said “pink panther”, aka. SPCT?Eelco Rustenburg, he said “RTEs have an unique perspective to look at data / organizational interactions differently, we are not just operators of the agile release train, but also engineer, who removes impediments on a larger scale, guide leaders and help teams.” Our job is to make people happier and improve flow, ask yourself how often do people show happiness in each PI? And how to relentlessly optimize? We must have the courage to challenge status quo if there're better ways, make today better than yesterday.

What workshops were there?

• Dynamic Agility

Is ART and Team always fixed? What are the influencing factors? In partnership with SPCTs Wolfgang and Cindy, we have jointly shared some insights about what we see at a topic: how to dynamically improve value stream network alignment, move from project to product, improve team interactions, embed DevOps capabilities within teams and grow and develop talents, avoid resilofication in the evolution journey, to accelerate flow of value through relentless improvements, make change digestible. There're some very relevant and useful insights from unFIX model?that I found very relevant and have connected it with real world through my TV experiences summarized on the slide below.

• 8 Flow Accelerators

During SAFe Summit 2022, Dean Leffingwell has introduced the concept of the 8 fundamental influencing factor of flow and how those drive organizational performance. SAFe Strategic Advisor & SPCTs Odile Moreau and Rune Christensen have further developed the concept through practical workshop that can guide stakeholders to identify, analyze and improve those 8 flow accelerators.

There were more workshops such as learning from aviator, Stefan Groen, captain at a large Dutch airline; the RTEs of APG Asset Management share what they do, what issues they face. Gianfranco and Patrick from Stone BA have explored motivation profiles, that are built based of the spiral dynamics evolutionary psychology studies. Stephane has delivered a workshop about how to measure effectiveness of Agile Release Train using new metrics. Christoph and Maarten have shared their research at Leiden University on impact of agile transformation on different aspects of organizations through years of studies.

To summarize,

The job of an RTE is complex with significant responsibilities, he / she is tasked with fixing the problems that have been uncovered by external SMEs, often without the full buy-in of internal stakeholders who may not understand the role and responsibilities of the RTE. In many cases, organizations engage an RTE to manage the dependencies, risks and symptoms rather than fixing the fundamental issues with systems and processes. The event is a great opportunity to share what we have learnt from practice and how to find the missing puzzles that delivers better value sooner, safer with happier customers, employees and leaders.

For more information on future exchange, check out the RTE circle community here:

It has been a great event, and thanks a lot for the organizer and whole team of Gladwell Academy who made this possible for RTEs to exchange our learnings, this is a never ending improvement journey, let's have some fun to discover, replace the fear for future through courage and strengthen our competences.

May the flow be with you.