SAFe Roam Board
Document and assess project risks honestly and transparently by using a ROAM board for risk management in SAFe.
Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies
About the SAFe ROAM Board
A SAFe ROAM Board is a framework for making risks visible. It gives you and your team a shared space to notice and highlight risks — and to determine which risks to Resolve, Own, Accept or Mitigate.
Use this template to assess the likelihood and impact of risks, and decide which risks are low priority versus high priority.
The underlying principles of SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) are:
Drive cost-effective solutions
Apply systems thinking
Assume that things will change; protect options
Build incrementally with fast integrated learning cycles
Base milestones on evaluating working systems
Visualize and limit works in progress, reduce batch sizes, manage queue lengths
What is a SAFe ROAM Board?
A SAFe ROAM Board allows you and your team to highlight risks so that you can take action. After someone identifies and records a risk, you have to decide what to do next. For each risk you come across, you can:
Avoid it and take a different approach
Reduce the likelihood that it’ll happen
Share the risk by bringing in vendor expertise
Accept the risk (but keep in mind, this doesn’t mean you ignore it)
Mitigate the risk and take action to reduce its impact
This framework aims to help you Resolve, Own, Accept, or Mitigate risks.
Resolved risks: your team agrees that this risk is no longer an issue and everyone can move on
Owned risks: if a risk isn’t immediately solved, a team member may take ownership of the task to resolve later (follow up to plan mitigation or work on executing any further action that should be taken)
Accepted risks: some risks can’t be reasonably dealt with, so teams should fully understand why before accepting these risks
Mitigated risks: a mitigation plan can reduce the likelihood or impact of these risks
It’s important to keep your ROAM Board updated so your team is aligned across each level of risk, and aware of how risks are being handled. If your team uses Jira, import Jira cards directly onto your SAFe Roam Board.
Create your own SAFe ROAM Board
Making your own SAFe ROAM Boards is easy with Miro's template. Get started by selecting the SAFe ROAM Board template, then take the following steps to make one of your own:
During PI Planning, add risks to the Program Risks section. Remember that the number of sticky notes with identified risks may grow or shrink as your team decides on a mitigation strategy during the planning process.
After the final plan review, move all risks to the ROAM Board. Allocate each risk to the relevant category of ROAM: Resolved, Owned, Accepted, Mitigated.
Vote as a team to decide which risks are worth prioritizing. Agile coaches can run voting sessions to decide which risks should be considered high priority. A minimum of three votes is needed to consider a risk in the running as a high priority.
Review and adjust risks as needed. Risk profiles can change as plans and follow-up steps to action. Make sure a member of your team adjusts and updates the board during the weekly or biweekly PO (Product Owner) Sync.
When to use SAFe ROAM Boards
ROAM Boards are used during PI Planning to identify any obstacles to achieving team goals.
Risk and uncertainty are bound to impact any project in some way. Instead of relying on a classic risk management plan or risk log, an Agile approach (such as creating more user stories to add to a backlog) can lower the chances of unpredictability and surprise.
The ROAM method can also help relieve the Agile Release Train (the teams and stakeholders needed to implement, test, deploy, and release software incrementally) of any ambiguity.
What is a ROAM board?
A ROAM board is a framework for highlighting the likelihood and impact of risks, in order to decide which risks are low priority versus high priority. This framework aims to help you Resolve, Own, Accept, or Mitigate risks and increases the visibility of risk management to everyone on the team, which ensures that potential risks are not overlooked or ignored.
What does SAFe stand for in agile?
SAFe stands for Scaled Agile Framework and defines a set of roles, responsibilities, and guiding principles for everyone involved in a SAFe project or working at an enterprise level that follows agile practices.
When is the ROAM technique used to categorize program risks?
The ROAM framework is used when teams need to identify and manage risks and, as an Agile technique, is often followed by those involved in SAFe project management. Using a ROAM board helps keep everyone aligned across each level of risk and maintains awareness of how all identified risks are being handled.
Get started with this template right now.
Sailboat Template
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Meetings, Retrospectives
The Sailboat Retrospective is a low-pressure way for teams to reflect on how they handled a project. By defining your risks (the rocks), delaying issues (anchors), helping teams (wind), and the goal (land), you’ll be able to work out what you’re doing well and what you need to improve on for the next sprint. Approaching team dynamics with a sailboat metaphor helps everyone describe where they want to go together by figuring out what slows them down and what helps them reach their future goals.
Portfolio Template
Works best for:
Presentations, UX Design
The portfolio template is a way for you to showcase your best work in a visual manner. Think of your work portfolio as a way to present who you are as a professional and describe with more detail what you have achieved and what is your unique expertise. You will use a portfolio template as a way to market yourself to future employers when applying for jobs, universities, and training programs.
DMAIC Analysis Template
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Design Thinking, Operations
Processes might not seem like the funnest thing to dive into and examine, but wow can it pay off—a more efficient process can lead to serious cost savings and a better product. That’s what DMAIC analysis does. Developed as part of the Six Sigma initiative, DMAIC is a data-driven quality strategy for streamlining processes and resolving issues. The technique is broken into five fundamental steps that are followed in order: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control.
SMART Goals Template
Works best for:
Prioritization, Strategic Planning, Project Management
Setting goals can be encouraging, but can also be overwhelming. It can be hard to conceptualize every step you need to take to achieve a goal, which makes it easy to set goals that are too broad or too much of a stretch. SMART is a framework that allows you to establish goals in a way that sets you up for success. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. If you keep these attributes in mind whenever you set goals, then you’ll ensure your objectives are clear and reachable. Your team can use the SMART model anytime you want to set goals. You can also use SMART whenever you want to reevaluate and refine those goals.
Job Map Template
Works best for:
Design, Desk Research, Mapping
Want to truly understand your consumers’ mindset? Take a look at things from their perspective — by identifying the “jobs” they need to accomplish and exploring what would make them “hire” or “fire” a product or service like yours. Ideal for UX researchers, job mapping is a staged process that gives you that POV by breaking the “jobs” down step by step, so you can ultimately offer something unique, useful, and different from your competitors. This template makes it easy to create a detailed, comprehensive job map.
Euler Diagram Template
Works best for:
Business Management, Operations, Diagrams
Euler diagrams are valuable for showing different relationships between subjects by representing them with circles or "cells." Euler diagrams are frequently used in IT systems to show how objects relate to one another and how they interact. However, you can use them for any sort of explanation that needs to show connections.