If you’ve ever been on the project from hell, you may be able to relate to the resulting extra costs, lost time, excess waste and lost customer satisfaction. Implementing agile properly can help reduce the occurrence of such shortcomings. The beauty of agile is that it is already tailored to reduce risk and therefore increase the value of the product being developed whether in a manufacturing or software environment.
Parts of an agile framework that promote risk mitigation
1 – Sprint Durations: We all know that the agile framework is founded on sprints and multiple iterations. We can tailor those sprint durations from 2 to 4 weeks once we complete the agile release planning. Is your project likely to be high in risk? Try reducing the duration of your sprint to the lower end of the range. The reason for this is that you are building in more frequent cycles for each of your deliverable features. Further to this, you get to revisit your planning cycle more frequently and determine the accuracy of your agile team velocity in less time, making it more predictable and therefore reducing risk over time.
2 – Retrospectives: At the end of each sprint you are meant to go over all the events and processes that went well and not so well. You then carry these results forward in to your next sprint as your “lessons learned.” Since you will be doing this for each sprint, the frequency of those retrospectives gives everyone on your team the opportunity to tackle ineffective processes, and the chance to implement more effective ones. This reduces your risk of being wide open to possible wasted initiatives.
3 – Backlog Grooming: The ongoing process of backlog grooming for your Product and Sprint backlog allows the possibility of revising and reviewing the priority and importance of the features your team will build into each iteration. This is primarily the Product Owner’s responsibility, but it is supposed to be done in conjunction with the inputs from the rest of the agile team roles and stakeholders. The more frequent the backlog grooming takes place, the more you are able to reduce the risk of ROI loss by not implementing lesser valued features, and implementing immediate returns from your agile solution.
4 – Promoting Transparency: When all stakeholders are engaged in a project, and being at the utmost expression of their intents and expectations, there is less risk for all team members to go off track and building an unwanted set of deliverables. Much of the transparency comes from what is gathered through the accumulation of the events that take place during the sprint such as: Sprint Planning, Standups, Sprint Reviews and Retrospectives. Each of them allows everyone in the agile team to know exactly what is going on and the risk of delivering anything less than what all stakeholders expected is lowered.
5 – Frequent Deliveries and Sprint Reviews: When we get to the end of each sprint it typically represents a similar implementation as one project management life cycle at a smaller scale. The development team is expected to deliver all backlog items that have reached their definition of “done.” Since all backlog items that were completed and demonstrated are added on to the existing product, there is no underlying wondering on how or what the finished product will look like. It is delivered at the end of each sprint, whether as the initial product deliverable or the increment of that initial product with additional features. Since we do this frequently on agile projects, the risk of wasted features is reduced once the product is delivered. Customers get instant gratification since they will get to use the product immediately.
Most risks can be avoided, as much as the agile framework will help prevent them from manifesting. The points to consider then making sure that the risks remain at bay, are to make sure that stakeholders are engaged to the greatest extent possible. It is imperative that the stakeholders involved are genuine and without hidden agendas. This would allow for quick turnaround to address risks and issues presented.
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