Risk Management Checklist
More successful projects with less risk
Traditional project management mitigates risk by plotting out the entire project in advance, trying to guess what might happen in the future.
Agile does it by observing what’s happening now. Agile focuses on delivering small batches of the highest priority work in short iterations so you can give your customers valuable working software. You base future work on how customers actually use the software, inspecting and improving your product and processes with every iteration.
By basing your risk management on knowns rather than unknowns, you do only the planning and mitigation that’s required.
KPMG New Zealand’s Project Management Survey 2017 found that traditional project management approaches aren’t working. Around two thirds of New Zealand projects fail and only 21% deliver on benefits.
Announcing the report, Gina Barlow, Director in the Advisory team at KPMG New Zealand, said organisations need to be more agile in the way projects are managed.
“The survey shows that current project management methods are struggling to provide efficient project delivery, so there is a need for project management to take a big step closer to business strategy and agile project management,” she said.
It’s a global trend. The 2018 Standish Group Chaos Report found that only 33% of software projects were successful. It reported that Agile projects enjoy a 60% greater chance of success than non-Agile projects.
You can use this Agile software project success checklist to assess how well you follow 11 practices that research shows predict success in software projects.
With Agile now best practice for software development, it is essential to understand how we can use Agile approaches and tools to manage and mitigate risk.
When we talk to organisations about the benefits of Agile software development, all too often we get the response that the current priority — Big Project X — is too important to fail and that Agile is too risky. This is despite the fact that their current methodology is not delivering what they need. The problem is often that they know traditional project management but don’t know Agile. Seeing how Agile techniques let you manage and mitigate risk will help you understand how an Agile approach reduces risk, rather than increasing it.
Once organisations see how they can reduce risk by working in an Agile way it becomes the obvious choice for Big Project X, as this case study shows:
Why a risk-averse CEO chose Agile for a mission-critical project.
In this guide we will summarise:
To help you check how well you're currently managing risk, and to guide future improvements, we've created an Agile project risk management checklist.
As Product Owner, it's your job to maximise the value your project delivers. Get a practical guide to using Scrum to deliver more.
"A great resource ... extremely thorough!"
— Jess Limbrick, Product Owner, Life Education
Together this gives you an Agile project risk management model. This model shows how different Agile approaches mitigate different risks, with each approach primarily affecting one of the areas identified, as well as influencing the other areas.
Transparency is at the heart of Agile project risk management. If we do not have a full and accurate view of the status of the project, the business priorities, the resource needed to deliver and the quality of the output, we cannot manage risk in the project.
This is a key problem in many software projects. That’s because it's not until the final stages of a project — the release — when we really get to examine the quality of the product. We rely on wishful thinking to carry us forward.
Consider the graph below. We can see that risk remains high in a Waterfall project right until the majority of the functionality is delivered. At the end we are able to get a real view of the risk, which may be high or low depending on how well our requirements matched market need and whether our work has been of consistently high quality.
Contrast this with the Agile project shown on the graph. Here we see that initially risk was high — identical to the Waterfall project. Using Agile the risk drops quickly and significantly as we start to deliver working, tested and deployable software. We can determine the quality of our work and take our software to a test market to determine the value our features provide to our users.
During an Agile project we can shift the focus at any stage. Should we discover that our users need feature X instead of feature Y we can re-plan and re-prioritise without any penalty to our overall timeline.
Agile works to make projects more transparent in a number of different ways. An example is the iteration timebox in a Scrum project. It makes transparent the work the team is doing and the amount of work that can be completed by the resource applied. It also enables us to inspect working software. Other examples of increased transparency include:
Limiting work in progress (WIP) is an effective Agile project risk management technique for ensuring your ability to deliver quality work on time.
Neglecting to limit the work in progress for our teams and organisations quickly leads to thrashing, as we constantly switch from one task to another.
We can see in the graph below (based on Gerald M. Weinberg's Quality Software Management: Systems Thinking) that as we have more tasks in progress at any one time productivity starts to fall to zero as we spend more time context switching.
With many of the Agile methodologies there is a focus on managing and reducing work in progress. Scrum does this using timeboxes. The amount of work in progress is limited by the size of the timebox (2 weeks for the majority of teams). The team takes on no more work than can be completed in that time. High-performing teams actively work together to reduce their work in progress by ensuring that each story (or increment of work) is fully completed, tested and ready to deploy before moving on to the next story.
In addition to timeboxes there are a number of other tools for limiting work in progress, including:
How to run a successful project kick-off
The Agile Project Kick-off Kit gives you the tools, templates and tips you need to get your project off to a successful start.
"Brilliantly done - very impressive."
— Jimmy Ling, Agile Delivery Lead, NAB
The Agile risk management model describes the relationship between Agile approaches and the risks common to software development projects.
For organisations, it demonstrates how Agile actively mitigates risk in ways that traditional methodologies do not. It gives you a decision-making tool for choosing your project management methodology.
For teams, it clarifies how different but interrelated Agile approaches and tools address the risks you face on projects everyday. It gives you tools for planning how you’ll manage and mitigate risk.
In the blog posts below you’ll get practical guidance on how to reduce risk through effective prioritisation, increasing transparency, limiting work in progress and reducing batch size. You’ll also get evaluation questionnaires to assess how well you currently use these techniques and case studies showing you how these approaches work in practice.
As Product Owner, it's your job to maximise the value your project delivers. Get a practical guide to using Scrum to deliver more.
"A great resource ... extremely thorough!"
— Jess Limbrick, Product Owner, Life Education
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