ROAM is an acronym that stands for Resolved, Owned, Accepted, and Mitigated. If you aren’t familiar with ROAM, it’s a collaborative approach for emerging and navigating risks. While Agile approaches (when done well) inherently reduce risks because of iterative planing and increased transparency, the ROAMing approach can be leveraged by any team, team-of-teams, or initiative to increase the likelihood success even more. In this post, I’ll describe a typical approach to ROAMing and include a handful of quick tips for making it your own.
The Approach
Here’s a snapshot of a typical approach that leverages people being in a room together. Don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of ways to leverage the approach with remote participants. My goal, however, is to help you understand the underlying intent and benefits of ROAM. To do that, I’ll keep it simple and stick to describing a typical “in the room” approach.
Get the Right People Together
The answer to the “who are the right people” question depends on the perspectives that you want to explore. The right people could be a single team, a team-of-teams, a skillset group, or leaders. The right people will also likely change depending on the goal or where you are along the goal journey.
Create Four Workspaces
You can use four pieces of flip chart paper, you can break a wall into four boxes with blue tape, you can use four different walls, you can leverage whiteboards, … Each workspace gets a title – Resolved, Owned, Accepted, Mitigated.
Break Out the Stickies and Sharpies
The color of the stickies doesn’t matter, however, you could leverage color as an attribute if you want to easily identify particular roles, groups, or table groupings. My recommendation is the use 3M Super Stickies rather than any store brand. They stay put better and there are more size options. Combining sharpies and stickies adds a physical writing constraint that encourages people to be succinct, allows things to be read easier at a distance, makes for better artifact photos, and helps when using apps like the Post-it app that can capture notes from photos of stickies and export them into editable text.
State the Purpose
For example, “to help us get aligned on things that could prevent us from being successful.” In theory, the compelling reason to attend and any pre-thinking you want them to do should have been included in the original invite. People need to know why they should show up and reinforcing that again in the room is a good way to kick things off.
Start the Risk Generator
Explain what you mean by risk and have everyone silently brainstorm all the risks they can think of from their perspective and put them on stickies. Using a technique like “1-2-4-All” from Liberating Structures can be useful here to prime conversations and detect early alignment. Risks can be rewritten at any point and they can split or be combined as clarity emerges. Note, the ROAM board is still empty at this point.
Fill the Risk Parking Lot
When the writing settles down, invite the participants to come up and put their stickies next to the ROAM board. Not on it. This is the risk parking lot that the room will process together to get things placed onto the ROAM board. The pursuit of alignment happens when people have conversations. Having people put their own stickies directly on the ROAM board can have them thinking that the goal is to get the stickies on the board as quick as possible so they can be done and leave. That would be a miss.
Discuss and Decide Together
Go through each sticky and ask the group to propose where it should be placed on the ROAM board. Again, this is a time when risks can be rewritten, split, or combined. A good approach to handling any duplicates is to place a tick mark on one of them and place the others aside. The tick marks helps us remember that more than one person saw the same risk. A high density of tick marks indicates you have something that everyone is thinking about.
Add More Data
Each sticky in the Removed quadrant should have the date of the session listed on it showing the date that we all agreed the risk has been removed. Any stickies in the Owned quadrant need to have an Owner name and the date of the session. The Owner is responsible for doing the research that will ultimately allow the risk to move to either the Removed, Accepted, or Mitigated quadrants. The Owner is not the person that the group will blame if the risk comes true. They are simple opting in to lead the homework for the group. Any stickies in the Accepted quadrant should have the date of the session. Any stickies in the Mitigated quadrant should have the date of the session and how the risk HAS BEEN mitigated. If the mitigation effort has not been done yet, then the stickies should go in the Owned box. Thinking of a potential risk mitigation idea is not the same as a risk being mitigated. There is still work to be owned.
Filtering and Sorting
If you want the group to go deeper, you can have them identify Potential Indicators, Impacts, and Relative Likelihood for any Accepted or Mitigated risks. Potential Indicators are the red flags or signals along the way that we would expect to see if the risk is becoming a reality. Impacts are the outcomes that we would see if the Risk became a reality. Relative Likelihood is a simple grouping of how likely it is that the risk will occur. An easy way to go about this is to have the group sort things within their ROAM box into categories like High, Medium, Low. Put these attributes together and you can get some better info. For example, a risk item with clear Potential Indicators, low Impact, and low Relative Likelihood should get different attention going forward than a risk item with unclear Potential Indicators, high Impact, and High Relative Likelihood.
Debriefing, Wrapping Up, and Next Steps
Before leaving, debrief the session as a group, thank everyone for playing, and take photos of the ROAM board. You will also want to learn what what was most useful and what you might do different in the future. You can now put the data from the session into any other artifact that works for you. For example a Word file or Excel spreadsheet. There will often be a comment about the data entry effort. Let me just say that any perceived issue around the data entry related to doing this in stickies is negligible when compared to the benefit of the engagement and whole room alignment that happens in the session. As the Agile Manifesto says, we value individuals and interactions over processes and tools. If you are looking for a sticky to data time saver, there are several good ones around. My current preference is the 3M Post-it app.
Quick Tips
Here’s a handful of quick tips that can help your ROAMing sessions run a little smoother:
Tip #1: ROAMing with multiple levels in the room at the same time will produce better alignment around the risks than running separate sessions at different levels. Being able to say “we have alignment on risks” is a more powerful outcome than saying “we conducted multiple risk sessions”.
Tip #2: Have people write one risk per sticky and have them write either their name or initials on each sticky. You want each risk item to be independently moveable and you want to know the source of the risk so you can follow up if needed. When using the tick mark approach for duplicates mentioned above, it can be a useful idea to put the initials for each person on the back of the sticky if you think you might want to have a deeper discussion with this subset of participants at a later date.
Tip #3: Don’t use a rainbow assortment of sticky colors and a rainbow assortment of sharpie colors. Someone will end up using the same color sharpie on the same color sticky and you will get poor results. Keep the contrast high and go with all black, all blue, or a mix of black and blue.
Tip #4: Before the end of the session, define a reasonable cadence for the group to revisit the ROAM board. Over the course of your goal journey, revealed risks can go away, new risks can show up, and Potential Indicators could turn red. The entire group may not need to gets together each time, however, each key group that was represented should provide a person that can continue to represent the perspective and bring information back to their group. In a world of high transparency, everyone should be able to easily see the latest info on risks without having to attend a meeting.
Tip #5: If you use an “in the room” approach, keep the original ROAM boards and make them visible after the session. It serves as a reminder of the shared experience and that we need to keep our eyes on things. If you use an online capability for ROAMing, get things printed out and visible. No matter how engaging the session is and how accessible things are digitally, remember that things out of sight tend to go out of mind.
There you have it. A collaborative approach to emerging and navigating risks.
Let me know if you have any comments or questions. You can reach out to me via email at FrankS@FreeStandingAgility.com
Thank you for reading.
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