Updated with latest version as presented at the Canberra Agile & Scrum meetup on July 20, 2017. Previously titled "Using Agile techniques to manage risk more effectively".
Given that the "Waterfall" process model has been dominant in the IT industry for many decades, how many IT and project management professionals are aware that it's inventor warned the world in 1970 that Waterfall is "risky and invites failure"?
From a risk management perspective, is waterfall ever an appropriate choice for complex IT initiatives given what we know now?
In this session we will outline how, as a risk management strategy, using the waterfall model for non-trivial systems development initiatives is systemically high risk as compared with the Iterative Incremental Development (IID) model that has been used in pockets of the IT industry since the late 1950's. Today, many organisations use the IID strategy under the umbrella term of 'Agile'. The majority of these employ Lean Product Development patterns that were first described in the Harvard Business Review in 1986 using a metaphor borrowed from the game of rugby i.e. 'Scrum'.
If you are not using a disciplined agile approach, are you facing more risk as you approach a high-stakes deadline than you need to?
The varied contexts that we work in come with varied types of risk. For a green fields date-driven release, the primary risk may be cost and schedule related. For teams designing a new product for an emerging market, the primary risks may be business risk. For teams doing innovative R&D, the primary risk may technical risk. For a young team in a new technical or business domain, the primary risk may be social risk. In this session, we will use real world examples of such varied challenges to illustrate how risk-tuned Agile helped us to manage risk effectively.
Whilst we will always have to deal with risk to create value, the good news is that there are now many powerful risk management techniques that can be overlaid on top of IID to tune your development process to the type of risk you face. The question is: which ones are most appropriate for the type of risk you are facing? In this workshop we outline a series of powerful risk management tools that tune an agile development process to effectively manage the type of risk that you face.