Agile Risk Management
What is Risk Management (RM) ?
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Risk management
is the identification, assessment, and prioritization of risks (whether positive or negative) followed by an application to minimize, monitor, and control the probability and/or impact of unfortunate events or to maximize the realization of opportunities.
Regular RM Process
- Identify, characterize threads.
- Assess the vulnerability of critical assets to specific threats.
- Determine the risk.
- Identify ways to reduce those risks.
- Prioritize risk reduction measures based on a strategy.
Some disadvantages
- A list is created to track all the identified risks.
- It basically is an ordered list, each risk will be ordered based on their impact on the project and the probability of that risk coming true.
- A mitigation plan is created for the risks at the top of the list.
- The problem with this approach is that it is not agile.
- This risk management is overwhelming and bureaucratic and experience tells us that teams has not the discipline to do this regularly by the book .
- Only focus on the importnat risks only, which are common to all projects and even more they rarely manifest .
RM Process in Agile?
Risk Identification in Agile
- Agile replaces explicit risk management with a continuous risk management.
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The whole team does this exercise on an iterative basis. The results are recorded on white boards or flip charts.
- Due to its iterative nature, it implicitly makes risk management a part of the project life cycle.
Risk Identification in Agile
- Risk gets addressed all the time as a part of daily stand-ups, iteration planning meetings, release planning meetings, retrospective and review meetings.
- Daily Stand up meetings: team members need to answer this: Are there any blockers in your way?
- Sprint Retrospective: allows catching all the risks associated with customer communication and requirements.
Risk Analysis
- Qualitative analysis using judgment, intuition, and experience in determining risks and potential losses.
- Short development cycles and constant reviews in Agile, make this feasible and effective.
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This is different from traditional projects where quantitative analysis is done and numbers are assigned to the damage which can occur.
Risk Mitigation in Agile
- Scrum Master main function is to eliminate or mitigate any blocker.
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Risks are not blocked items, instead they are on the Scrum master's watch list, as a note for things which could go wrong.
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Agile stresses the importance of the continuous communication of the problems.
- States that detect and talk about a risk is more than enough to mitigate it.
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A Scrum team could sort stories by value and risk and work on the risky stories long enough to correctly identify and mitigate the risk.
Disadvantages
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Agile can help with risks related to change in requirement, lack of communication and under performance by team members.
- However, risks which are external to the project need more than Agile to be resolved.
- Lack of understanding of Scrum at the customer
- Third party products don’t work as expected
- External factors which the project depends on won’t happen in time
- Data loss or corruption in team systems
- For this risks is recommended to manage them using a regular risk process to monitor and handle those.
What is Agile?
- A group of software development methods that builds software incrementally.
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Breaks projects down using user stories , prioritizing them, and then continuously delivering them in short cycles called sprints .
Agile purpose
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To teach teams to be Agile.
- While a new process can easily improve team productivity by a fraction, enabling your team to work effectively as a cohesive unit can improve productivity by several times.
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Agility is the ability to both create and respond to change in order to profit in a turbulent business environment.
- Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management
- To make the customer the one who funds the software development .
- A document can have plenty of information, but real knowledge is hard to put on paper.
Agile values
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Individuals and interactions over Processes and tools
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Working software over Comprehensive documentation
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Customer collaboration over Contract negotiation
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Responding to change over Following a plan
Scrum Framework
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Scrum is an iterative and incremental Agile software development framework for managing software projects and product or application development.
Events
- Sprints
- Planning Meeting
- Daily Stand Up Meeting
- Review Meeting
- Retrospective Meeting
Activity
Agile RM
By jlopez17
