Is Cross-Training an Enabler Work?

Are the Development Team trusted to self-organize, so that they can increase the quality and value of what they deliver in the future?

It sounds as though the Development Team aren't the owners of their Sprint Backlog.

How does the Product Owner define and account for business value?

What, exactly, are these "cross-training features" that you are tracking as Enablers?

It sounds like the senior leadership is looking to use the Enablers in the same sense as the Scaled Agile Framework - activities that support upcoming requirements, such as Exploration (research and prototyping that's never incorporated into a released product), Architecture (maintaining the existing code and infrastructure to continue to support quality attributes or to allow teams to maintain high performance), Infrastructure (changes to the CI or CD pipeline as well as the infrastructure in all of the different environments like production, test, dev, and so on), or Compliance (work needed to ensure that regulations and obligations are satisfied and managing any kind of objective evidence required).

In SAFe, technical debt would likely fall under an Architecture Enabler, but it looks like your tool uses a slightly different terminology. If you're using SAFe at an enterprise level, perhaps the senior leadership missed the fact that SAFe uses Enablers for "any activities that support upcoming business requirements". They provide examples of four buckets, that I named above, but there may be other types of enabling work.

You can also consider the stakeholders to the Product and Sprint Backlogs. Two stakeholders are the Product Owner and the Development Team. But senior leadership may also be a stakeholder, especially of the Product Backlog(s) of all of the Development Teams. They may be reviewing the Product Backlog at higher levels in order to perform release planning or strategic themes.

In your situation, the first step is to understand why senior leadership doesn't want these items to be tracked in the tool. If tracking them in the tool has been beneficial to the Development Teams, perhaps try to work with them to configure the tool to allow everyone to have appropriate views and reports over the information that they need. If there's still resistance, work with senior leadership and the Development Teams to find a way to plan and coordinate the cross-training that would fit in with the way they plan their Sprints.

@Simon - The development team is still the owner of sprint backlog but as I mentioned, there is no direct business value to the 'cross-training' work hence we have been asked to remove the features. The senior leadership pulls out a report out of ARC to see delivered features per PI or Quarter and maybe that's where they are seeing 'no direct business value'. See below for a couple examples. 

@Ian - The product owner defines business value through user stories but she does not create these cross training work items as during sprint planning we tell her that we will be spending 20% of the sprint to focus on enabler work. Our enabler work typically includes setting up CICD pipeline, exploring options for moving from mainframes to python, switching servers to using cloud servers etc.

@Thomas - We have cross training user stories something like these: Learning .Net Framework, Document all the KT materials on Confluence. 

Yes, we are using SAFe framework and our enabler definition does not fit in the framework's definition. For us, enabler is a technical work but may be they are over looking "any activities that support upcoming business requirements" which is something that I should discuss with them to come up with a solution but this helps. Thanks for your suggestions.

Thanks All. 

-Anuj