Risk ROAMing
ROAM is the SAFe protocol for handling risks identified during PI Planning: each risk is categorised Resolved (already handled), Owned (someone now owns the mitigation), Accepted (the team accepts the risk as-is), or Mitigated (a specific reduction action is added to the plan). ROAMing makes risk-management explicit rather than implicit.
The discipline matters because PI Planning surfaces dozens of risks across an ART, and without a structured handling protocol most of them disappear into the meeting minutes. The ROAM categorisation forces a decision per risk: someone resolves it, owns it, accepts it, or mitigates it. Each non-resolved category produces follow-up: owned risks get a name and a follow-up date, accepted risks get a record of who accepted them and why, mitigated risks get backlog items in the upcoming PI. The protocol turns 'we have lots of risks' into a closed loop with accountability.
Related terms
- PI planning
PI Planning is the 1-2 day event at the start of each Program Increment where the entire Agile Release Train — all teams, Product Management, Business Owners, System Architect — assembles to plan the upcoming PI.
- Program board
The program board is the visual artefact produced during PI Planning: a grid of iterations × teams showing which features each team is committing to in which iteration, with explicit dependency lines drawn between cross-team dependencies and milestones (releases, demos, external events) called out.
- Confidence vote
A confidence vote is the closing ritual of SAFe PI Planning in which every team and the entire ART vote 1-5 fingers on their confidence in meeting the committed PI Objectives.