Agile Risk Management

Mike Griffiths is an experienced project manager, author and consultant who works for PMI as a subject matter expert. Before joining PMI, Mike consulted and managed innovation and technology projects throughout Europe, North and South America for 30+ years. He was co-lead for the PMBOK Guide—Seventh Edition, lead for the Agile Practice Guide, and contributor to the PMI-ACP and PMP exam content outlines. Outside of PMI, Mike maintains the websites www.LeadingAnswers.com about leading teams and www.PMillustrated.com, which teaches project management for visual learners.

  Agile   Risk Management  

Risks and opportunities are ever present on complex projects. We can rely on them occurring much like we can rely on the tide coming in. How we choose to deal with them--our risk management strategy--greatly influences whether we rise with the inevitable tide of issues and navigate successfully or become overwhelmed by them don’t reach our goal.

Agile methods incorporate many mechanisms for dealing with late-breaking changes (an easily reprioritized backlog, short iterations, frequent inspection, replanning, etc.) that also lend themselves to proactively responding to risks. We can insert risk avoidance and risk reduction actions into the backlog to proactively attack the risks before they have an impact on the project.

This can all be thought of as part of maximizing business value. The process of frequently asking: “What should we do next: build a business feature or reduce a project risk?” is valuable and often summarized by the term “The next best dollar spent.” It reminds us to think about risk avoidance and mitigation as part of the value proposition and agile planning cycle.

So when planning work for the next iteration, we balance delivering business value with reducing risks. Sometimes we select a feature since it is the best return on our investment; sometimes we will undertake a risk avoidance or risk mitigation step since …

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