Every Agile project I work on has recurring
retrospective sessions.
At times I highjack the retrospective
session and run this risk brainstorming activity instead.
I find it useful to run this
activity at the project beginning (on the first or second Sprint), and before major releases.
Introducing the activity
This is a collective thinking activity
to develop the team criticisms, awareness, and responsiveness for possible
challenges ahead of us.
Identifying risks
Use a color for each note and place
it on the top of the canvas.
The canvas
Below is the canvas drawing.
This one is on a shared GoogleDrawing document. This was useful for a distributed team. For local teams, I rather draw it on a whiteboard, or on a A3 paper.
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| the canvas |
Risk mitigation conversation
Let's chat (and take notes) for each identified risk. For doing so, we will follow the following order for each identified risk: prevention, detection and response.
- Prevention - What is in place that will attempt
to stop the risk happening in the first place? (eg: security, awareness
& training programs, qualified staff, planning, and/or procedures);
- Detection - What is in place that will let
me know if and when the risk does happen? (staff / customer reporting
mechanisms, financial reconciliation, fire alarms, audits);
and
- Response - If the risk happens anyway, what
measures do we have in place to lessen the impact? (eg: contingency
plans,
back ups, insurance, resolution processes). text from University of Victoria website
A canvas from a real project
Below is the canvas used on a real project I participated on. Note that you can either use one canvas per risk,
or have many risks on the same canvas. I prefer the later with many colorfull
post-its.
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