It was a pleasure to attend the 6^th Annual RTE Summit hosted by Scaled Agile Gold SPCT partners Gladwell Academy, held in Utrecht at the Railway Museum on the 8^th – 9^th November. As we all recognize, the RTE is critical to the success of the ART, and since its inception, the RTE Summit has been an important event for building and supporting those in this role.

As I reflect on the event, the overwhelming experience was one of community. Almost everyone I spoke to was a practicing RTE, a Scrum Master aspiring to be an RTE or an RTE who recently moved into a broader change-agent role. This common thread created a powerful learning network with individuals and groups giving advice, providing insights, and sharing knowledge. I learned a huge amount during the two days.

Additionally, as I reflect on the conversations that I was involved in, it is clear that the role of the RTE continues to evolve. There were discussions around hiring and line management, highlighting that the RTE often formally supports the development of Scrum Masters as well as the rest of the members of their ART. Other conversations considered the role of the RTE in supporting the wider enterprise transformation.

As always, it was great to hear experiences directly from the field. ASML shared how they created feature teams across hardware and software development, Essent described how they have evolved and optimized PI Planning, and Amadeus highlighted how their LACE provides the critical support network the RTEs require to be successful.

We were very fortunate to use this opportunity to pilot a new RTE Assessment and ran a workshop to gather the input we needed to build a set of growth recommendations to support RTEs in their own personal development. Watch this space for more on this in the future. Thanks again to Gladwell Academy for putting on such a great event.

Staying on the theme of driving improvements, one of the tools we provide to help with this is the SAFe Assessments. We are delighted to announce a new and improved Team and Technical Agility (TTA) assessment which is available today.

Team and Technical Agility describes the critical skills and Lean-Agile principles and practices used by high-performing Agile teams and ARTs to create high-quality customer solutions. This new TTA assessment brings significant benefits, including more straightforward statements, removing complex terminology, and focusing on desired behaviors and outcomes rather than simply the practices. Additionally, we have added sub-dimensions, shown in Figure 1, for additional clarity and to support data analysis.

The new TTA assessment can be downloaded from the Measure and Grow article and is also available to our SAFe community members via the AgilityHealth and Comparative Agility assessment platforms.

We hope this will help you on your relentless improvement journey

Stay SAFe

— Andy