The CIO's Guide to Breakthrough Project Portfolio Performance Quotes

“While both Agile and CCPM offer ways to aggregate risk, CCPM advocates elevating this risk to the project and portfolio levels whenever beneficial, and whenever acceptable to the customer. In contrast, Agile focuses its risk aggregation on the scrum team, ignoring the benefits of aggregating risk to the highest level feasible. There’s no reason Agile projects can’t also benefit by aggregating the risk beyond the scrum team, to the project level.”
― Michael Hannan, The CIO'S Guide to Breakthrough Project Portfolio Performance: Applying the Best of Critical Chain, Agile, and Lean

“Interestingly, Agile’s scrum-team approach has its own way of aggregating some execution risk. For example, in a traditional “single task owner” approach, the risk of execution is not aggregated at all, leaving that task owner to add a lot of task-level buffer to self-insure and deliver on his commitment. In contrast, a 5-person scrum team aggregates the risk that any single individual will make slow progress, as the other four team members can often make up the deficit.

But why aggregate only up to the scrum-team level? Taking a lesson from the insurance industry, the more that risk can be aggregated, the easier it is to manage. Applied to projects, this will nearly always mean that it’s better to aggregate risk at the project level. As a result, an Agile project can improve speed by avoiding sprint-level commitments.”
― Michael Hannan, The CIO'S Guide to Breakthrough Project Portfolio Performance: Applying the Best of Critical Chain, Agile, and Lean