ROAM Board – Risk Management

Risk management is essential during the life cycle of a product or even a company. The use of a ROAM board will help you to settle the risks.

What is the ROAM board?

The ROAM board is a 100% risk management model suitable for the agile world; And the use of visual management into an effective kanban board really help to better settle all the risks.

Identify types of risks

The first thing to do is to clearly identify the different types of risks. Here are the types of risks that we could often identify.

Technical risks

On certain products, teams may use recent technologies which may involve a large number of unknowns. What would an external intervention cost? Is it technically possible that the team can solve these problems by itself? We could also have any questions  about aging technologies.

Human risks

Over the life cycle of a product, human risks can be numerous and the team should not overlook them. Here are some concrete examples:

• if an expert resigns, is sick or worse, what are the risks?
• don’t we have two leaders who could have a conflict?

Legal risks

If the team has to take an external service provider but the latter does not respect its part of the contract, what should be done? How will the legal department manage these aspects?

Risks of delays

If the product is not delivered (even in its MVP / MMP form) on the scheduled date, what are the risks linked to a possible date overrun? Here are some possible possibilities:

• non-compliance with legislation
• delayed money gain
• delayed cost reduction

Other types of risks

If your teams identify other types of risks, don’t hesitate to highlight them.

Display your risk types

For the creation of our board, I can only recommend that you make a simple legend and use classic visual management tips.

Pour que le type de risques soient très visibles, je vous recommande d’utiliser des post’it de couleurs différentes.

So that the type of risks are very visible, I recommend that you use different colors of post’it.

ROAM board – understanding the acronym

Le modèle ROAM est un acronyme simple pour définir :

• Resolved: the risk has been fully resolved by the team and is now completely eliminated
• Owned: a person has settled the risk in order to fully or partially resolve it
• Accepted: the risk is accepted by the team who will accept the possible consequences if it should happen.
• Mitigated: the risk is partially managed to reduce the potential consequences if the team will meet it.

Indeed, this matrix is very interesting because it allows to bring the idea that a risk can be managed in a partial way; we reduce the consequences of the risk and / or the chances of encountering it without managing it entirely.

The ROAM board can be more complete

To make this model even more complete, the Agile Framing V2 purpose to use this ROAM board with the gravity / probability matrix. This allows to make a complete risk management board. The teams using this practice will have comprehensive risk management.

Feel free to go and see this concept of classification (severity / probability) of risks proposed during the agile framing V2: Risk board

The steps of risk management will be:

1. classify risks according to two aspects two aspects: type of risk and severity / probability
2. risk management: according to the ROAM board

Here is a complete board for managing your risks using these two concepts.

Conclusion risk management

This ROAM board associated with the severity / probability risk classification is really efficient. By using this concept purposed by agile framing, you will have an advanced risk management throughout the life cycle of your product.