Agile Risk Management Talk by Rowan Bunning

I attended "Agile Risk Management" presented by Rowan Bunning last night. Got to say, very well done Rowan for stepping in at the last minute. And I really mean the last minute, the scheduled presenter pulled out due to being unwell 24hrs before the event and Rowan came to the rescue. Rowan had given the same presentation recently, but still, I thought it was really good going, especially as I think we were a tough audience!

I picked up some good sound bites throughout the presentation.

1) If you want no risk, do not projects! Balance risk versus reward.
2) You can't eliminate risk, but you can manage it intelligently.
3) Impact map lays out the who, how and what of impacts were trying to have, as a mind map.
4) Creating a "safe fail" environment with iterations. Using multiple iterations, refine failed iterations making future success.
5) Risk Categories, business, social, tech, cost of schedule.
6) Which of the risk categories is most important to you?
7) Risk Discovery map. Assumptions, concerns and open questions. Used to facilitate risk discovery.

Rowan did a good interactive exercise around Risk Categories, separating the ground into sections depending on which Risk Category they thought was the most important to us. Once separated, we had to pair up and discuss why we thought our Risk Category was the most important. It was a great way to get people interacting and actively thinking and by having people only pair with other of the same view, it wasn't going to raise too many heated debates to be broken up before Rowan could continue.