Risk at Program and Portfolio Level
Program and portfolio management can be used as vehicles for risk management. The approach recommended is bottom-up, where individual scrum teams report on a risk identified during a Stand-up meeting or similar gathering, and this risk is passed up the reporting line. Risks can also be identified at program and/or portfolio level that need to be cascaded downwards to project level.
What is suggested for risk management in risk-mature organisations is that risk management responsibility is managed at program level, and that risk management meetings are held at this level where project Product Owners and the Portfolio Product Owner attend and contribute. The output from such a meeting would be an updated Portfolio and Program Risk Register, which would include a column that indicates which projects are affected by the risk. This would eliminate the redundancy of having each project team running their own risk management meetings and keeping their own risk registers.
The team member who raised the incident could also be invited to the meeting and participate in the assessment and mitigation activities, based on the premise that someone who recognised a risk is the most likely person to describe a mitigation for it. The disadvantage to moving the risk management to program level is that the Scrum team do not get the exposure to managing risk that they would get if each team runs risk management meetings. They would, however, have more time to develop product, which is their first priority.
Recommended Further Reading
The following materials may assist you in order to get the most out of this course:
Course Contents
Section 1: Agile Project Management
Section 2: Using the Agile Manifesto to Deliver Change
Section 3: The 12 Agile Principles
Section 4: The Agile Fundamentals
Section 5: The Declaration of Interdependence
Section 6: Agile Development Frameworks
Section 7: Introduction to Scrum
Section 8: Scrum Projects
Section 9: Scrum Project Roles
Section 10: Meet the Scrum Team
Section 11: Building the Scrum Team
Section 12: Scrum in Projects, Programs & Portfolios
Section 13: How to Manage an Agile Project
Section 14: Leadership Styles
Section 15: The Agile Project Life-cycle
Section 16: Business Justification with Agile
Section 17: Calculating the Benefits With Agile
Section 18: Quality in Agile
Section 19: Acceptance Criteria and the Prioritised Product Backlog
Section 20: Quality Management in Scrum
Section 21: Change in Scrum
Section 22: Integrating Change in Scrum
Section 23: Managing Change in Scrum
Section 24: Risk in Scrum
Section 25: Risk Assessment Techniques
Section 26: Initiating an Agile Project
Section 27: Forming the Scrum Team
Section 28: Epics and Personas
Section 29: Creating the Prioritised Product Backlog
Section 30: Conduct Release Planning
Section 31: The Project Business Case
Section 32: Planning in Scrum
Section 33: Scrum Boards
Section 34: Sprint Planning
Section 35: User Stories
Section 36: User Stories and Tasks
Section 37: The Sprint Backlog
Section 38: Implementation of Scrum
Section 39: The Daily Scrum
Section 40: The Product Backlog
Section 41: Scrum Charts
Section 42: Review and Retrospective
Section 43: Scrum of Scrums
Section 44: Validating a Sprint
Section 45: Retrospective Sprint
Section 46: Releasing the Product
Section 47: Project Retrospective
Section 48: The Communication Plan
Section 49: Formal Business Sign-off
Section 50: Scaling Scrum
Section 51: Stakeholders
Section 52: Programs and Portfolios