One of Flomatika’s flagship feature sets – The Governance Obeya, brings the cross-team concerns in one place, This blog talks about two widgets, each addressing a very important cross-team concern:

• Risk
• Dependencies

Before diving into the details of these widget I want to share the reason we have introduced them in Governance Obeya, by quoting our Product Manager, Tom Lim,

Governance Obeya is about bringing visibility on Initiatives. One of the key aspects to have visibility on is around the cross team concerns. What is it that Leaders need to be aware of that resides across multiple teams. To begin with we’ve started with Risks and Dependencies as they are the most common cross team concerns that many Programs or Value Streams face.

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Risk and Dependency Management in a Single View

Many might agree, it is good practice to identify and continually manage both risks and dependencies across the life of a program or initiative. Usually, they are documented in various methods and stored in disparate locations. Be it spreadsheets in a folder buried deep on a shared network; in a PPM tool which only a few team members have access to; or it may be recorded in a work management system which is difficult for your stakeholders to access. The problem is, information remains fragmented across various systems making it difficult for teams and stakeholders to have visibility to the information. We want to make this information more easily accessible, by bringing just the relevant Risk, Dependencies and other concerns of an initiative in one single view within an Obeya. 

Risks

When working on initiatives, you are likely recording all possible risks, but not all of them may be pertinent at a team of teams level. In Governance Obeya we want to help you surface the ones that require that cross team discussion. So that you avoid having to shift through all the noise and focus only on risks in a forum such as a scrum of scrum.

The Risk widget allows you to record and track the following details of each risk, in context with the scope of work defined in the Obeya:

• Risk name
• Brief summary of the risk
• The likelihood of this risk occurring
• Its impact on cost 
• Its impact on schedule, 
• Its current status – Open or Mitigated
• Team responsible for mitigation
• Risk exposure – Calculated using the Likelihood of the risk, the impact on the schedule in days and impact on budget in dollar value. 

We are looking at bringing in more insights in our Risk Widget by introducing:

• Risk burn down — To show how the overall risk exposure decreases as the team mitigates them.
• Risk Scatterplot — To visualise the Impact and Likelihood to better help you prioritise in your risk management.

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Dependencies

You’ll likely have your dependencies recorded in your work management system. In the Dependencies widget, similar to the Risks widget, it allows you to surface just the ones that are of concern at the team of teams level for the defined Obeya. 

When you record dependencies in Flomatika, you have two options, either to bring a set of dependencies from your work management system so that it can be visible in Governance Obeya or to record them directly into the Obeya. This helps get rid of the noise so that you can prioritise and manage dependencies relevant to your team of teams. You will enter the following key details to record and manage dependencies:

• Name of the dependency
• A brief summary of the dependency 
• Who is dependent on whom 
• Associate work item(s) to this dependency
• Severity of dependency 
• Its current status
• The date after which this dependency may block the dependent team

The recorded dependencies are presented in the widget along with the key details. You now have the ability to filter and sort them based on current status, severity, teams involved or other key details.

We are planning to add further enhancements such as ways to visualise the dependencies in a form of diagram that could give insights to which teams are heavily dependent on other teams, and which teams have a lot of dependencies on them.

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Closing Comments

Flomatika's Governance Obeya presents the details of Risk and Dependencies at the cross-team concern level in a single view, so any of your stakeholders and delivery leads can proactively manage and mitigate to increase the chances of success for your initiatives.

We have more ideas and concepts to help run successful initiatives, some are already live on the platform and some we will be bringing into the platform soon. Start your journey with Governance Obeya and get on top of your game.