Issue and Risk Management in Scrum

Today I met with an organization who has three simultaneous development teams and is closely following the Scrum rules for managing risks and issues. I tend to think this approach is deficient, however. Perhaps it's the traditional Project Manager in me, but I have really come to rely on a well managed risk and issue log as part of my tool box. In fact, I would frequently spend more time in my issue and risk log than in my backlogs (in Scrum) or project files (in RUP or my company's methodology). I recently received this e-mail from "MN:"

From: MN
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2008
To: Santiago, John
Subject: Risk management

I was wondering how risk management gets done in scrum. Is this an explicit activity or is it sort of inherent in the prioritization process?

I have this voice in the back of my head saying: "Mike, you should be doing risk management..."
_ _ _ _
My response:
In theory, “Frequent risk and mitigation plans are developed by the development team itself. – Risk Mitigation, Monitoring and Management (risk analysis) is incorporated at every stage and with “genuinity”.

I always took a more proactive approach and kept a classic risk and an issue log complete with mitigation plans and results, so that I could help remind the team of past decisions and make sure items don’t get lost. Sometimes issues or risks would manifest themselves as actual backlog items. The reason I ask in our standups about work is being held up or roadblocks the team has is to identify Issues and sometimes Risks. During Planning meetings I watch for any backlog items that are uncertain, and those quickly become risks. It also helps to ask the team during Planning, “What problems do you think we could encounter?” They can usually answer that question, but can’t always answer a more formal question such as “What issues or risks do you see?”

How to Facilitate a Scrum Retrospective

From: MN
Sent: Monday, March 03, 2008 10:33 AM
To: Santiago, John
Subject: Scrum iteration retrospective

Our first iteration ended up going reasonably well. We moved about 20% of the original work back into the backlog, but the client readily agreed that these were low priority things. We'll have our first retrospective tomorrow morning at 9am, followed by our second iteration planning meeting.

I was wondering if you had any advise on how to conduct the retrospective....

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _


For the Retrospective, use whatever facilitation technique you are most familiar with, but as ScrumMaster you should keep the following points in mind:

• You want to encourage participation, don’t let anyone sit out quietly.
• Avoid undue influence on your part. As facilitator, your job is to gather other’s opinion. Save your own until you are sure everyone else has gotten theirs out.
• Encourage dialogue, but don’t let more vocal and opinionated folks drown out others, especially folks who are hesitant to talk.

Here’s a facilitation technique that might help:

• Give everyone two index cards.
• Ask them to write down five things that went well on one card and five things that went poorly on another. You can participate in this.
• Collect all of the cards
• On a shared visual space (whiteboard or flip-chart) start writing down responses for what went well.
• First read the item and ask if this is a new item, a duplicate, or if it amends another item. Let the group guide you, but you might make some suggestions to move it along.
• Repeat this process for What Didn’t Work Well, creating a new list.
• At the end, give everyone three Dots. Use stickers or sticky-notes as dots. They get to use these as votes for what to talk about further, perhaps items to adapt what we are doing as a team. People can put all their dots on one item, or spread them around as they see fit, but they have to vote with all three.
• From there, take your top items and discuss how to adapt your process in the next Sprint.

John

National Car Rental Praise and Complaints

Over the weekend I travelled to meet with family in Georgia. I have an Emerald Aisle membership with National Car Rental and had an interesting experience. When on business, I never pay attention to anything, I just expense the cost and am too busy to sweat the details. When it's my money, though, I get very annoyed about cost and truth in what these companies quote.

Praise:

• I love their company and the Emerald Aisle experience, where I get to pick from their crop of rental cars whatever I need for that trip without any difference in price. Since it was three hours to my destination I picked the Pontiac Vibe, hoping it would be good on gas (it was).

Gripes:

• When I made this reservation, I was quoted $84. Taxes, fees and indecipherable nonsense on Travelocity left me surprised at the end of the trip when my bill was $100. How long before someone files a class-action lawsuit? When booking the trip, National's website quoted me a higher price than Travelocity. Was the difference because National was telling the truth and Travelocity was obscuring the actual cost, or is there really a price difference here? Frustrating and confusing for a consumer.
• The car was 3/4 full on gas. No credit was applied for me bring it back slightly below Full. The guy who checked me out gave me a really skeptical look as I explained that I hand't noticed it was low when I left the lot.

How I get treated when I travel for personal reasons greatly affects who I book with when on business. National Car Rental and other agencies need to clean up their pricing policies.