#1. Riskopective: Back to the Future
What are the risks in your project?
Risk Management in many Scrum projects is implicit. Frequent short releases, inspect and adapt takes care of common risks - Technology, Business and Financial. Scrum teams work with a myopic view - where the focus is on the issues at hand and not at the risks that could become issues later. This works well for small projects, involving one or two self-sufficient scrum teams.
For large and long running projects, with multiple scrum teams thereby having multiple touch points and dependencies, explicit risk management is required to involve right stakeholders at the right time for project success. Although important for project success, risk management is still considered a 'waterfallish' concept with no events focusing on 'Identifying risks'. In most cases this is left to the one or 2 people (product owner or sometimes scrum master - through Risk Adjusted Backlogs etc.) with ad-hoc inputs from the team during Release/Sprint Planning.
Here's an approach that could be built into the Scrum teams for better Risk Management - by involving all team members in Risk identification. I call it "Riskopective: Back to the Future'.
Like other scrum events, Riskopective is a time-boxed event (~30min) and performed at the start of the release/sprint - can be be chained to Release planning and (or) Sprint planning meeting to match the natural rhythm of team. These are conducted just like Retrospectives - facilitated by the scrum master, where team together reflects and contributes. Its an opportunity for the team to identify the project risks and plan to manage them but unlike Retrospective (where team looks back at the issues) team looks to the future and identifies risks that could become issues later.
The key element to Riskopective is a technique called 'Premortem'. This technique was proposed by psychologist Gary Klein and referred as one of the favourites of Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman. Here the complete team goes 'back to the future' - basically time travels and considers the scenario where the current project has failed (it could be a sprint, release or product). With this assumption (failed project), each team member writes down the reasons for failure. The responses by the team members would become the potential risks. The beauty lies in how the 'Premortem' technique encourages people to find flaws (an unpopular trait) in the plan rather than being highly optimistic and committed to the plan (general expectations of organizations). This turning of the table in particular plays the important role in shifting the myopic mindset to long term and involving complete team to identify potential risks in the project.
So the next time you are about to kick-off a project, release or a sprint, pls ask the team "let's go back to the future" (a famous line from my one of the favourite movies - 'Back to the Future')...
What is your opinion?
Do you think Risk Management is an important element for project success - even those following Scrum? What has worked for you? Please share your thoughts.
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