How Constructive Agility Manages Risk
Constructive Agility guides you through embedding risk management into your development processes. Let’s see how.
Real Time Risk Management
The Agile 2 book explains how DevOps, Lean, and Flow techniques are fundamentally methods for inserting risk management into the actual development process, so that risk is managed organically instead of as a separate add-on set of controls or reviews. Instead, risk management is embedded in the form of automated tests and practices for managing the thoroughness of those checks. Basically, if something passes all the tests, then it should be good to go. Otherwise, the tests are insufficient. Risk management becomes a process of ensuring that the tests are sufficient.
Rapid Feedback
DevOps and other Flow-oriented approaches tell us that one must have rapid feedback between outcomes and one’s processes. That way, when things are a little off (or a lot off), we find out right away, and we can adjust. This is an old concept, but it is sometimes forgotten. It was central to quality control methods from early industrial engineering.
Constructive Agility guides you through defining processes that embed feedback loops. Not only will you measure outcomes and adjust when appropriate, but you will also alwasy be reconsidering what you are measuring. We guide you through defining outcome-oriented metrics and leading behavioral metrics, and help you to institutionalize the continous refinement of those metrics.
Awareness Of the Entire Flow
Everyone who interacts with a product value stream needs to have a basic understanding of every part of the value stream. That is essential to be able to understand how the different parts of the flow interact. Only then can people anticipate when changes to their part of the flow might impact other parts of the flow.
If people have a working understanding of the entire value stream, they will be in a much better position to predict risks that arise from interactions between different parts of the value stream. We help you to define behavioral norms that encourage everyone to take an interest in every part of your value stream flow.
Focus on Demonstration of Capabilities
Constructive Agility views product development in terms of the creation of a set of capabilities. Progress is measured by the successive demonstration of those capabilities. These demonstrations are unambiguous, and so there is great certainty about whether each capability has been achieved. In that way, risk is managed in the sense that one has a clear view of which risks remain at any point in time.