Risk Management On Agile

Risk identification and assessment, along with the identification of risk measures, Should be incorporated into iteration planning by the product owner during the project Vision Definition phase.

The RAID log Should be reviewed by the team and updated during the Retrospective meetings.  This way the team could move some high-risk items to earlier sprints so that they are resolved as quickly as possible.

At a team level, I would recommend that responsibility for risk management is distributed among everyone on the team and it should be discussed regularly. Ideally on a daily basis, in the daily stand-up and during the sprint in all other sprint activities.

As previously stated the RAID log needs to be continuously monitored and updated throughout the life of the project. It should also be shared with the project stakeholders via the different communication plans previously agreed with the team at the start of the project.

The Product Owner will be responsible for:

• Development and implementation of a Project Risk Management Plan.
• Organization of regular risk management sessions so that risks can be reviewed and potential new risks identified.
• Assessment of identified risks and developing strategies to manage those risks for each phase of the project, as they are identified.
• Ensure that risks given an A grading are closely monitored.
• Providing regular Status Reports to the project team noting any ‘A’ Grade risks, and specifying any changes to the risks identified during each phase of the project, and the strategies adopted to manage them.

Some examples of common Project Risks that any project could face are:

• Key subject matter experts not available to provide feedback: you should agree on a schedule of tasks and timescales with SME's & Managers to mitigate this.
• Unplanned Holiday: Ensure that you assign a Project Manager with a comprehensive project management approach and communications plan that will be able to mitigate and reorganize tasks quickly.
• System outages &/or Failure to integrate with systems: Set the team to ensure that they run scenarios to work out how long you can afford to be down for as often as possible. This should help identify where you may need to build redundancies into certain parts of the process.
• Project management tool problems & issues: Create a backup schedule of information to ensure no vital information is lost.
• Delays to stakeholder approvals impact the project &/or Delays to financial approvals impact the project: Create a comprehensive project timeline with frequent baseline reviews. Included in the project plan, subject to amendment as new details regarding project scope is revealed. Frequent reviews will help to avoid delays for approvals.