When planning Program increments or sprints – How do you distinguish between a risk & dependency?

Let me back up here a little ..

If your working with Scaled Agile or any other large scale agile solution – you may have program increments (planning sessions for next 6 – 8 sprints)

If not, hopefully your teams do have sprint planning.

To complete specific tasks, you may have dependencies on some activities to finish first for you to proceed.

Ideally before / or during sprint planning you’d want call out these dependencies and raise them with concerned team / individual.

If the team / individual is not able to prioritize this activity soon enough for you to complete – then this turns into a risk.

Further, any unknowns you might be aware of, but have not been able to analyze should be called out as risks.

These however, are mostly result of inadequate planning and are a sign that this piece of work might not be ready to work on.

#Agile #Planning