Agile Risk Management

What is Risk Management (RM) ?
  • 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.
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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.
    • 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.
  • 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.
  • Risks are not blocked items, instead they are on the Scrum master's watch list, as a note for things which could go wrong.
  • 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.
  • 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


  • 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


  • 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.
    • 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


  • Individuals and interactions over Processes and tools
  • Working software over Comprehensive documentation
  • Customer collaboration over Contract negotiation
  • Responding to change over Following a plan


Scrum Framework

  • 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

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