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Princess Risk

As Agile Open is drawing near, pascal writes about how we manage risk. We use a simple brainstorming process, filling the risk table from left to right (event/what , probability, impact, mitigation). This has proven very effective. I believe it also helps us to relax, and share our concerns. The biggest concern for me right now is meta – after organizing a couple of conferences (three xp days and now the second agile open), we risk becoming unfocused.

Pascal mentioned the princess risk – the risk that a princess arrives at the conference. To him it signifies risks we did not anticipate in the past. These things will happen. For me, the princess risk entry in the risk table now also signifies as a call for myself to stay vigilant. The probability is stated as 50%. After three xp days benelux and one agile open, we should really have updated it to 25%, as a princess arrived at only one of those four events… (we introduced the risk after the second xp days benelux, at which a Belgian princess showed up, and threw us into chaos).

Unanticipated risks happen. Preparing scenarios prepares us mentally – we are aware that there are things that will not go as planned. Last year there was also at least one good thing that happened unexpectedly for me. Agile Open helped someone change his life.

It changed mine too. Co-facilitating an experiential workshop on congruent communication made a deep impression on me. I couldn’t really believe I was doing that, and yet I was doing it :) . We’ve continued to develop this workshop as we are making the tools we use our own. We’ve ran it in various configurations, most recently at SPA and xp days france. We’ll be running it again at agile2006, where it has been accepted as a tutorial (“Balancing act – simple tools for feedback, communication and courage” – I would include a link, but the programme seems to be online as a PDF only).

I’m glad. Risk is only a Princess – Value is King (or Queen :-) ) at agile open.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 14th, 2006 at 11:38 am and is filed under people & systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “Princess Risk”

  1. me.andering » Blog Archive » Just a few nights of sleep before Agile Open Says:
    April 20th, 2006 at 3:44 pm

    [...] It seems we are not slacking off (as I feared in Princess Risk ). We had a standup meeting over skype yesterday, that gave a lot of focus. We have virtual ’standup’ meetings in a chat window. They last a bit longer than ordinary standups, passing the ‘talking stick’ is more difficult. But they are usually good fun, and quite effective. [...]