Agile and the New Standard for Risk Management
Mike Griffiths is a consultant and trainer who help organizations improve performance through shared leadership, agility and (un)common sense. He maintains the blog LeadingAnswers.com.
PMI’s latest publication, The Standard for Risk Management in Portfolios, Programs and Projects, has some great recommendations for agile practitioners once you dig into it (the electronic copy is free for PMI members).
It may surprise some people that a PMI standard is applicable to agile teams. To some, PMI standards represent all the non-productive documentation and big-design-upfront that agile was created to avoid. However, it is only process that carries weight; knowledge is weightless, so it never hurts to learn more about a topic then apply only what you need, where you need it.
This new standard has a wealth of great information about effective risk management and contains recommendations for iterative, incremental and adaptive environments that fit agile projects well. It starts with the best definition of risks, opportunities and threats I have seen:
“Risk is an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative effect on one or more objectives. Positive risks are opportunities, while negative risks are threats.”
Working with agile teams, people intuitively know threats belong in the backlog, but often opportunities are forgotten and not actively managed. This is a loss since opportunities are often closely related to the features and business benefits that make up the bulk of the backlog.
Encouraging people
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Published at Thu, 09 May 2019 04:00:00 +0000
