The importance of managing risky projects is sometimes underestimated, because risks ultimately have the potential to completely derail your project. Furthermore, poorly managed risks can not only damage your project’s success but also your company’s reputation. Poor risk management can also result in unwanted costs and is therefore an essential part of reducing an organisation’s overheads. With the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), risks can be identified at any stage. And when they are identified, we must address them.
So for example when identifying risks in Events, a common tool that is used in Scaling Risk Management under SAFe, is the ROAM board. This is typically used during PI Planning to identify and analyse risks and issues that could prevent a team from achieving their goals.
The goal of this technique is to:
Resolve and agree that the risk is no longer a concern.
🚀 Give ownership to a team member made accountable for taking care of the identified risk.
🚀 Accept the risk and ensure that all team members understand it.
🚀 Mitigate the probability or impact of all identified risks.
So during the PI Planning, we say look at what assumptions we are making about what needs to be done and what risks are attached to it. This is essential because failure to identify and act on those risks can negatively affect the Agile Release Train.
We ask ourselves:
🚀 What are the risks?
🚀 What mitigation options do we have?
🚀 What is the ideal resolution(s)?
🚀 How do we achieve a satisfactory outcome?
You may find at times that not all risks can be solved completely and that sometimes you may have to accept the risk. In this case it is important to consider all the potential consequences that are connected to that particular risk and have planned responses in the case that these consequences had to unfold. Another way to deal with such a situation is to categorise the risks and determine which risks should be made a priority in terms of their threat to the product/project, team and organisation overall.
The main goal is to make sure that the owner of that risk(s) is bringing in those satisfactory outcomes as soon as possible, and supporting the Agile Release Train at each and every iteration.
So why do we need to do risk management under SAFe you may ask. In response I’d say that risk management should not be something that is seen as an option but rather a prerequisite for any well-functioning and high-quality product development.
The benefits of effective risk management are that it:
🚀 Supports planning.
🚀 Encourages informed decision making.
🚀 Demonstrates leadership.
🚀 Ensures regulation(s) compliance.
🚀 Reduces overheads.
🚀 Improves communication and transparency between teams and members.
Interested to learn more about how SAFe can help you and your organisation handle risk management?
At Value Glide, through the application of SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), we are able to offer agile consulting, agile coaching, and agile training specialists who work with organisations to align business objectives with customer needs and wants.
As deeply experienced agile coaches and practitioners, our team is invested in continuous learning through each client engagement and uses the data and evidence we gather from each implementation to inform our training, coaching, and consulting services.
In a nutshell, empirical process control or empiricism.
If you are thinking of adopting agile within your organisation and have identified SAFe as a great agile framework to adopt, implement and improve your business agility, visit our SAFe Quickstart ART Launch program page or view our SAFe Consulting Services page.
If you have identified a need for an agile coach and SAFe coach to help your organisation adopt and implement SAFe, visit our SAFe Coaching Services page. We are committed to equipping organisations with the tools and knowledge to thrive in this ever-changing digital age, and achieve business agility through the Scaled Agile Framework.
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If you want to know more about SAFe and how to lead SAFe, visit our SAFE Training page for a host of options, from Leading SAFe to a SAFe Release Train Engineer course.
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