Introduction
Risk is mitigated by planning. While it's a bit more complicated than that, that's more or less the tune people sing when they talk about management. Nobody likes risks, they're speedbumps in otherwise smooth projects. They'll do anything from making one task take twice the time to complete to derailing the entire project. But a good manager, taking the time to identify and manage the risk can help make the whole process smoother.
The Agile Angle
Okay, that sounds good, you say. But there's just one small problem. Isn't Agile a philosophy that seeks to minimize planning, overhead, and documentation? Doesn't that mean you're forced to have bad risk management planning in Agile projects?
Not at all. It just means that the nature of the risk management changes a little bit, just like any component of a project management plan! You'll see this pattern a lot in Agile projects: The core requirements of every step of the project management process stays the same, what changes is how Agile trims the metaphorical fat.
Internal Risk Management
For the purposes of this blog, I'll identify two different kinds of risk management, to really highlight how risk management ties into the Agile ideology. The first of these is internal risk management. Internal risk management is risk management that's part of the project development process itself. To clear that up a bit, let me elaborate.
Agile focuses on a quality-built-in approach to development. Agile developers seek to deliver an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that is ready to ship. This means that while the feature a sprint focuses on may not be excessively robust or polished, it's in a "good enough" state to be released to shareholders and called the final product.
What's this mean for risk management?
I'm getting to it. What this means is that although Agile teams employ minimal planning and documentation, they're thorough in making sure that their feature works as intended. This means constant testing and feedback. These features and more mean that risk mitigation is literally inherent to how features are developed in Agile teams. I call this phenomenon internal risk management, because it's how the teams themselves manage risks that come from inside the team, like unruly teams, bad code, confusing software design, etc. In theory all of these issues are resolved before a stakeholder even sees the result pushed to production.
This isn't always the case, and sometimes more structured, professional review is necessary. Still, the nature of Agile means that these risks are at least partially mitigated from the start, which is a lifesaver for managers.
External Risk Management
This means that in a surprisingly large amount of cases, the biggest part of risk management for Agile projects is figuring out how to handle external risk. External risks are risks that fall out of the scope of the Agile teams, or even the company itself. These could be external factors such as environmental regulations, copyright infringement, and other legal concerns that could shoot a metaphorical bullet into the heart of your project.
So is Agile risk management unplanned?
Not quite.
It's true that Agile's very nature picks up some of the jobs of a traditional risk management plan, since responsibility is distributed across team members. But even when planning is kept to a minimum, Agile risk management still requires some amount of planning.
There's no single approach to managing risks in Agile, so keep that in mind. Everyone does things differently- and that's a great thing! It's one of the best features of Agile that everyone gets to play to their strengths. But in general, how much planning there is in an Agile project depends on how much risk there is. If the project is risky, or inherently sensitive, you're probably going to want to be a bit more careful, even if that added planning puts a little pressure on the rest of the Agile team.
Agile Risk Management Process
(FIGURE 1) ISACA. (n.d.). Retrieved April 1, 2024, from https://www.isaca.org/-/media/images/isacadp/project/isaca/articles/knowledge-center-blog/2023/incorporating_risk_managament_agile_projects_figure_2.jpg
Although it may seem so at first, it shouldn't actually be a surprise that Agile risk management isn't very different than traditional risk management. This is a pattern you may have noticed if you've read other blogs on this site: Agile just tends to change the how and when of things, keeping the core process intact.
It goes something like this:
At the start of a project, or when you receive new requirements, you're still going to try and identify risks.
You're still going to analyze the risk to gauge the impact and probability of it.
You're still going to figure out what can be done to try and minimize and mitigate the risk.
And you're still going to make sure that your team is aware of these risks as they actually work on their features, monitoring them and doing their best to avoid them.
This isn't much different than you're used to in traditional methods. How you might choose to handle this might vary. Some of this might be done ahead of time, much of this is probably going to be done at the start of sprints. Usually Agile teams will have a less rules-heavy and disciplined process of doing these steps than a traditional method, but the meat's all there.
Conclusion
So in conclusion, Agile Risk management is a lot of what you're already familiar with- just simpler, decentralized, and built into the development process from the very beginning! This aspect of Agile projects helps ensure that they're more structurally sound than traditional projects, allowing for less immediate oversight by a manager and leaving the risk management to the teams. Agile doesn't waste time, and gets right to work- every step of the risk management process is scanned down, trimmed of unnecessary documentation, and placed right where it needs to be to keep things effective but also keep the Agile train rolling.
Hopefully you found this article helpful! It's my hope that it will help you be a better project manager, assisting you with integrating Agile methodologies into more of your projects, helping your team be more successful!
References
Agile Risk Management. (n.d.). agileriskmanagement.org. https://agileriskmanagement.org/agile-risk-management/
Cobb, C. (2021, January 5). What is Agile Risk Management? How Is It Different? Agile Project Management. https://managedagile.com/what-is-agile-risk-management/
Simplilearn. (2023, June 15). Risk management in Agile: How to control risk in Agile. Simplilearn.com. https://www.simplilearn.com/how-to-control-risk-in-agile-project-management-article
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