AgileTHIS

There are several ways of reducing risk by introducing an agile project method. On of the key areas that you should focus on, is to reduce vaste in your productionline – software development as well! – Vaste is a general saying for funktionality that becomes obsolete during the projects lifecycle or when funktionality simply aren’t being used after launch or deployment. And vaste equals vaste omoney – money you could have used to continue implementing value and quality into your product.

Like the above, it is often said that agile projects are risk and business value driven – This means that if we take in a bunch of work with low risk - based on the priority by the business – we can focus on keeping and dealing with  the high risk issues in our product backlog. Eventually as the product is being developed more and more of the high risk issues will be scaled down to low risk issues. And why is that? Well, in the beginning of all projects there are alot of uncertainties attached to the individual project. The projectteam have good and clear goal for the next month or couple of sprints but after that it gets more and more diffuse – like watching through water in nice swimmingpool somewhere in Thailand You can easily see what lies right next to you, but 10 feet away it’s a blur – but at least you know, which direction you should swim…

So if we take a look at the economic risk of an agile project and a traditionel waterfall project, we can see 3 major factors that speaks for themselfs:

- In both types of projects there is a high level of economic risk involved at the beginning of the project.

- In the agile projects you have control as you go – through close contact, communikation and feedback with the customer – you adjust as you go along thereby reducing risk in the project every day.

- In traditionel projects were you deliver the product at the end of the project lifecycle you will not have the same kind of control of the risk, since the customer isnt as close to the product during development.

And if we again look at the cost of changes it shouldnt be much of a chock to everyone that the costs are very different when comparing the two projecttypes:

- In an agile project changes can be introduce in every sprint – since the customer is close to the project nothing should come as a surprise to them or the projectteam. So agile projects are all about fast and value creating changes.

- In the traditionel project you will soon learn that any changes after the project start will eventually be more and more expensive as time on the project lifecycle passes by.

Many people have asked me about LEAN and Value Stream Mapping – how can they contribute to our RISK management? Well, I will address this matter in another post, but you can easily have Scrum co-exist with LEAN, X-Programming (XP) or Continuous Integration (CI). But it is always good to have a look at your organisation and see where you produce value, and were vaste is being produced – you might even throw in a couple of kanban games to help people think about it

So a big question that are standing alone regarding risk right now is how to identify risk in your organisation. There are many exiting theories outthere to support this, but from experience I find most of them showing up at the daily stand-up – It’s at that time most impediments are coming up to the surface and also at that time you might be able to solve MANY of them as well – the stand-ups are so important because of the knowledge and mindsharing that takes place – dont ever underestimate that fact! In a later post I will go through some of the tools to adress the identifying of risk issues.

I hope you enjoyed reading!

/Chris.