Business challenge
Risk mitigation is a major challenge that many organizations fail to fully understand or implement. Focusing on risk mitigation at the right stage of a project will increase the likelihood of successful delivery by more than 50%. Many solutions have to be re-worked because technical risks were not mitigated in the early stages of a development. Building a system on a soft foundation, typically, will mean a collapse later in the lifecycle.
Solution
Our consultants promote an approach that focuses on regular risk mitigation throughout the project lifecycle. During planning or assessment of an iteration or sprint, we help identify risks and implement plans that minimize those risks as early as possible. One way to reduce technical risk, for example, is to implement architecturally significant requirements in the beginning stages of a project’s lifecycle and prove that they work.
Our approach involves a full risk assessment every few weeks, and the development of plans that focus on producing executable code to minimize risk. Involving key stakeholders in these reviews helps address project-wide risks effectively.
Our mentors provide training, coaching and support throughout the implementation of our iterative risk-mitigation approach:
- Utilizing precise practices to conduct project health checks that determine the state of the project and identify risk
- Defining an integrated risk assessment plan to compute and prioritize risks by order of magnitude
- Separating risk identification from identifying risk mitigation and risk response strategies, and demonstrate how to build them directly into the project plan
Collaboration overview
Our consultants join your team and actively involve themselves in implementing an iterative, risk-focussed approach. We engage primarily with your project manager. Leading by example, our mentors facilitate:
- Risk identification workshops
- Iteration planning sessions
- Iteration assessment sessions
- Active mentoring of teams to guarantee a focus on risk mitigation
Ivar Jacobson International’s iterative practice—along with relevant guidelines, examples and templates—are all part of this package.
How this benefits you
By fully incorporating risk mitigation into your project lifecycle, you will:
- Mitigate risks early to give the project a solid foundation
- Ensure shared ownership of risk by the whole project team
- Enable continuous risk tracking, providing better visibility of project and team dependencies
- Be able to record risks and plot trends over time to identify issues that need to be addressed
- Integrate risk management into your project plan
Sample implementation
We were engaged by a customer who realized a more agile software project lifecycle would improve delivery capability and reduce risk. We were asked to modernize the client’s approach to software development by implementing Essential Unified Process (EssUP) practices.
Our team applied the Use-Case Essentials and Iterative Essentials practices. Just-in-time training and the involvement of Ivar Jacobson International mentors on two projects allowed us to achieve results very quickly. After the first six-week elaboration iteration, approximately 80%of known technical risks had been mitigated through just the basic flows of significant use cases.
The customer was intimately involved in all requirements workshops and initial design workshops, and stayed engaged throughout the entire project.
In the end, our client was delighted by the agile way of working. Defect rates on this project were considerably lower than on previous projects. And the final project finished early with additional functionality.
Effort used: Two days’ mentoring a week during inception and elaboration and one day a week during construction. In total there were about 25 mentoring days over three projects.
What we left behind
- A set of IJI practices, associated templates and guidelines
- A risk aware organization
- An IT organization that dramatically improved the quality of its delivered systems