GAQM CSM-001 Certified Scrum Master – Chapter 03 – Scrum Aspects

Minimizing Risk in Scrum

When we think about risk related to scrum, again, it’s important to understand that the goal in risk management is not just minimization of risk, but really optimization of risk. Given an organization’s tolerance, given the kinds of projects we’re working on, how do we align the level of risk and risk management activity to the solutions that we’re trying to deliver? So there are basic capabilities built into the Scrum framework that help us deal with risk by having a very flexible environment that allows us to facilitate change and re prioritization of requirements. It enables us to reduce overall risk related to changes in the business environment.

Because we have open transparent practices and lots of opportunities for feedback through things like the Sprint review and grooming of product backlogs, we can reduce mismatches of expectations to solutions. By having appropriate team ownership and collaborative effort in helping to assess and estimate tasks for delivery of certain user stories, we’re able to effectively reduce the estimation risk associated with levels of effort. Because we don’t always know all of the risks that are out there. We practice transparent practices so that people can identify additional risks, additional tasks that are needed to be able to produce the various results that are needed. And then ultimately, in order to avoid over investing in a solution that won’t in fact produce value, we’re going to do iterative delivery.

So we’re only going to invest in this particular Sprint to produce this particular set of value and risk results. And that by using iteration and various Sprints to produce solutions and by delivering potentially shippable solutions every Sprint, we reduce the investment risk associated with time to value for the business relative to the project investment.

Lesson: Scrum Aspects Summary

In this chapter, we talk about some of the core aspects of scrum and how they play out as a scrum master in helping to support your teams. We talked about the core roles in the organizational structure of a scrum team. We talked about the product owner, the role of the scrum master, the role of the scrum team themselves, as well as other stakeholders.

We talk about business justification and how we use a business case to fundamentally describe the business value proposition for the solution, how that plays down into project vision and eventually into the prioritized product backlog. We talked about quality and how we manage quality throughout the lifecycle of Scrum, not only in how we produce user stories that meet definition of done and that actually support the appropriate acceptance criteria, but also through consistent refactoring and good practices in design that help us reduce technical debt and improve the quality of our ability to make change downstream.

We talked about change management in the context of being able to facilitate change and in fact invite change from customers based on changes in requirements and simple opportunities that present themselves. Lastly, we talked about risk and how to effectively identify and mitigate risk throughout a project.

Scrum Aspects Summary

The role of the Scrum master is to facilitate success for the Scrum team. And so part of what we have to think about is how we’re going to manage really the big issues of any particular project as we work in Scrum. How do we manage risk? How do we ensure that we can make changes to solutions based on new information or new requirements or new priorities of customers?

How do we ensure that our solutions actually produce quality, sustainable value? How do we ensure that we have appropriate business justification for the project activities at all? And then the big question who’s got what? What are the appropriate responsibilities and authorities of the different roles? And how do they work together to produce an effective Scrum team?