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In John Stenbeck’s book “PMI-ACP and Certified Scrum Professional Exam Prep and Desk Reference”, he creates an Agile Project Management Process Grid containing 87 processes divided into 5 Process Groups and 7 knowledge areas.

Here are the five process groups in Traditional and Agile PM.

Notice how the Initiating, Planning, and Closing are the same between the three (using the normal verb form in Agile rather than gerund or noun form used in Traditional).   Monitoring & Controlling is shortened to Control, and then Executing is replaced by Iterate.    In reality traditional PM also goes back and forth between Executing (doing the project work) and Monitoring & Controlling (checking the project work), but this “back and forth” pattern is emphasized in Agile with the word “Iterate”.   So far so good; these two sets of process groups correlate pretty clearly.    Now let’s go on to the knowledge areas.

Note that this is just the order that the knowledge areas are listed in.    There are 10 knowledge areas for Traditional PM, and 7 knowledge areas for Agile.     How do these knowledge areas correlate?     Well, here’s my best attempt to put those knowledge areas in Traditional PM next to their Agile counterparts.

The Risk Management area in Agile PM covers the same ground as in Traditional PM.

Here are the three processes in agile Risk Management that fall under the Initiate Process Group:

• Process 5.1–Organizational Practices
• Process 5.2–Regulatory Discovery
• Process 5.3–Quality Standards

Why are these in the Initiate Process Group?   Because they are risk factors that exist prior to the existence of the project.    In traditional PM, the inputs to risk management that come from inside or outside the organization regardless of the contents of the project are referred to as Enterprise Environmental Factors.   They are environmental factors because they come from practices and standards that exist in the environment in which the project takes place.    They are enterprise factors because they are not peculiar to the project itself, but exist at the level of the enterprise.

The next three posts will cover these three processes to show how Risk Management can be started even before the start of planning for an agile project.

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