Someone once confidently told me that Scrum was a complete project management method that dealt with stakeholder management, risk analysis and all the usual PM stuff and did it better than every previous methodology.

I’ve considered this assertion at length. Scrum does protect from change and scope creep ruining your project. Scrum does protect from a lack of communication. Scrum does protect from team under-performance. However, I’m pretty certain that scrum does not protect a team from risks from other sources.

I once ran a project which involved the amalgamation of one small company into another. A significant part of the project was the movement of a number of servers physically from one location to another over a weekend. The move had been ear-marked for a couple of weeks down the line but I happened to hear the FD having a heated conversation with the landord of the building we were moving out of.

I have to put my hand up here and admit that I had been relying on constant communication with the team and had not been formally conducting reviews of the risks on the project on a regular basis but I sure as hell wanted to have one now! I called a meeting straight away and we draw up the risks involved with the move. Overwhelmingly the risks of keeping the servers on site were vastly out factoring the risks of moving the servers early and so that’s exactly what we did.

I’ll never know if that was the right call or not (such is the nature of risk management) but the project didn’t fail - so I guess it was. However, it did teach me that communication alone is just not enough and as such Scrum is not sufficient as a stand alone method to manage risk on large risky projects.