SCRAM is an approach for identifying risks to compliance with the program schedule, it is the result of a collaborative effort between Adrian Pitman from the Australian Department of Defence, Angela Tuffley of RedBay Consulting in Australia, and Betsy Clark and Brad Clark of Software Metrics Inc. in the United States.
SCRAM focuses on schedule feasibility and root causes for slippage. It makes no judgment about whether or not a project is technically feasible. SCRAM can be used:
- By organisations to construct a schedule that maximizes the likelihood of schedule compliance.
- To ensure common risks are addressed before the project schedule is baselined at the commencement of a project.
- To monitor project status, performed either ad hoc or to support appropriate milestone reviews
- To evaluate challenged projects, to assess the likelihood of schedule compliance, root cause of schedule slippage and recommend remediation of project issues
Whilst the documentation is intensely bureaucratic, the concepts in SCRAM move beyond the concepts embedded in processes such as the DCMA 14 point checklist to asking hard questions about the requirements of stakeholders and how effectively risk has been addressed before baselineing the schedule.
The SCRAM concept is freely available. The SCRAM Process Reference Model (PRM) and a Process Assessment Model (PAM) documents are available for immediate download from: https://sites.google.com/site/scramsitenew/home
For more on schedule risk assessment and compliance assessment see: http://www.mosaicprojects.com.au/Planning.html#S-Risk
Pat Weaver
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