Continuous Risk Management

This hands-on course teaches participants to apply the concepts of continuous risk management to their project environment. The course closely follows the risk management practices described in the Continuous Risk Management Guidebook and provides experience with methods, tools and activities that will build the confidence and skills to use these practices immediately.

Although the course addresses how to apply Continuous Risk Management in the context of the CMMI's Risk Management (RSKM) process area, it also provides participants a structured approach to follow when implementing and improving risk management in their organizations. The emphasis on the CMMI RSKM process area can be increased or eliminated entirely by the course instructors, depending on the needs of the course participants.

Members of the CMMI community including organizational change agents, Lead Appraisers, Lead Appraiser candidates, and Introduction to CMMI instructors will learn how to use the CRM approach to evaluate and implement RSKM goals and practices for getting to CMMI Maturity levels 3 and above (staged representation) or to implement CMMI Capability Levels from 1 to 5 in RSKM (continuous representation).

The course is composed of lectures, class discussions, and individual/group exercises that are based on a software-intensive project case study. Exercises and in-class activities are a large part of the course (roughly 50%) and are designed to assist participants in the learning experience.

The case study - the "Infra-Red Scientific Instrument Package" (IR-SIP) case - is woven through the course so that participants, working in small groups, get hands-on experience using proven methods and tools from the Continuous Risk Management Guidebook to identify all risks to the project, whether constraint- management-, process-, or product-related. The IR-SIP product is a software-intensive system within a larger earth satellite program with other, similar systems, and it includes multiple hardware, software, and interface issues. Once the risks are identified, participants learn to analyze the risks, plan mitigation strategies for the most important risks and risk areas, and then track and control the risks and risk mitigation plans over time.

At the end of the course, participants are expected to have all the knowledge necessary to:

• write and implement a risk management plan for any project in their organization.
• create a transition plan to put the risk management plan in place for their organization.

A three-day, on-site, variation of this course can focus on identifying, analyzing, planning, tracking, and controlling risks for a specific project, provided that more than half the participants are working on a single project, and that the remaining participants are willing to engage in helping the project members apply the methods and tools of Continuous Risk Management.

Who should attend?

• project managers, lead engineers, and software engineers involved in software-intensive projects
• CMMI Lead Appraisers, Lead Appraiser candidates, Introduction to CMMI instructors, and those implementing the CMMI RSKM process are in their organization (e.g., SEPG and EPG members)
• those involved in software-intensive projects from related disciplines such as quality assurance, hardware engineering, and testing
• change agents and technology transition agents

Topics

• Risk Management - overview & background
• Identify - creating risk statements and context
• Analyze - evaluating, classifying, and prioritizing risk statements and risk areas
• Plan - creating mitigation strategies for the most important risk statements and risk areas
• Track - collecting and presenting appropriate data on risk statements and risk plans
• Control - analyzing risk data and acting on it

Objectives

• understand and apply the concepts, principles, and tools of Continuous Risk Management
• develop basic risk management skills for each function of Continuous Risk Management
• understand basic concepts of tailoring Continuous Risk Management to a project
• be able to use the Continuous Risk Management Guidebook effectively as a reference

Prerequisites

People taking this course should have at a minimum 1-2 years of industry and project experience (preferably in a technical field). Though not required, those wanting to focus on how to implement the CMMI RSKM process area should have taken at least the Introduction to CMMI course, because this course will not teach the philosophy or structure of CMMI.

Materials

On the first day of the course, participants will receive the Continuous Risk Management Guidebook, a Software Risk Evaluation CD-ROM with risk identification interview videos, a course notebook, and an IR-SIP project case study.

Schedule

This 2-day course meets at the following times:
Days 1-2, 8:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.