What's Next After ROAM the Program Risks?

One of the agenda in Program Increment (PI) planning is to ROAM the program risks, it's happened in the second day of PI planning after team members log their risks. During this session, team need to discuss and verify each logged risk and map it into these 4 category that define the word ROAM:

• Resolved: it has been addressed, no longer a concern.
• Owned: someone has taken responsibility to own it because it can't be resolved during PI planning.
• Accepted: nothing more can be done, everyone understands and accepts it.
• Mitigated: team has mitigation plan to adjust or reduce the risk.

There's a more detailed explanation from Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) website by referring to here, or can read my previous blog post on how I facilitated full virtual PI planning. I use Mural board as a collaboration tool to capture all risks and visualize the risks. Once everyone is able to access and log the risks there, then we map it to the category of R.O.A.M. The biggest question after a planning session is how to make the risks always visible for everyone and it's updated regularly by our team? Sometimes we fall into a trap that we only capture the risks, but not following up or managing it.

To address the above concern, I want to make sure everyone in the team can easily refer back and view the captured problem risks. And the goal is by the end of program increment, all risks are resolved. To make it happens, I enable some options and varieties for my team to choose, so here's what I did:

Option 1: Create ADO dashboard.

After PI planning ends, I uploaded all program risks into our Azure DevOps (ADO) system using work-item type as "Risk". This is really useful especially because our team is heavily using Azure DevOps for day-to-day operation. Once it's uploaded, I created simple query to extract the data and create dashboard as per shown below:

Option 2: Build Power BI report

I created an ADO analytic view with some field conditions to extract all program risks and use it as the source of Power BI report. In the Power BI desktop, I add some visualizations by putting pie charts that grouped by ROAM status, two cards to indicate a total of risk in "Accepted & Resolved" and total in Owned & Mitigated that still need attention, a 100% stacked bar chart to show percentage completion status, stacked bar chart to show risk by assignee, and a table to see detailed list of risk that will dynamically filtered based on other visualizations.

Personally, I prefer to build reports in Power BI because it's more interactive and has more interesting features. Here's how it looks like after I publish it:

Option 3: Still utilize Mural board.

The last option that I give is to use the existing ROAM board that we used during PI planning. It only functions as visualization in Kanban mode, and team can move the program risks between the available columns. Because there's no direct integration or API between Mural and ADO, so everyone is still need to update in ADO if there's any movement of the risk here:

Now we're ready with all logged risks in multiple tools that are visible for everyone, and we're ready to bring these risks in every alignment meeting like Scrum of Scrums (SoS) and Product Owner (PO) Sync. By practicing and demonstrating this risk management activity, slowly the team will understand the benefit of it and start to visit and update the risk progress. And the goal is by the end of program increment, all risks will become resolved and closed.