How can you effectively manage risk in your organization?

In order to efficiently identify the risk one must be aware of the organizations business and the risk that may be applicable based on the type of business or product offered by the organization. Further, it become important to perform discussion with various business lines to better understand prodoct offerings and also identify any service that may be out sourced.

Risk identification is a holistic affair from an enterprise risk management perspective. It must start from functional teams through tactical to strategic levels. It is a development process and must start from top to bottom in its analysis of organizational process assets (OPAs). External risk factors must be looked at also. The OCEG approach of Learn, Align, Perform and Review (LAPR) or the age-old E.W. Deming's Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) methodology could help in managing internal and external risk identification across the organization.

To identify project risks in your organization, arranging workshop(s) with all the stakeholders is very effective method. You can use multiple workshops to brainstorm risks identification and finetune to validate those risks. Consider the full value chain of the project during these workshops, use/remember keywords such as schedule, cost, contract, etc to guide the discussion and also look into knock on effect to identity additional risks. Good luck!

To enhance risk assessment, conduct thorough evaluations encompassing both qualitative and quantitative analyses. Qualitative assessments provide insights into the nature and context of business risks, enabling segmentation to understand internal and external factors, controllable and uncontrollable elements, and distinguishing between urgent and priority concerns. Quantitative evaluations offer numerical analysis, providing a deeper understanding of potential implications. Scenario modeling anticipates challenges and develops proactive strategies. Understanding the causes and roots of risks enable informed decision-making and proactive risk management, considering risks multidimensionally for comprehensive assessment and management.

To have an effective response plan for your identified risks, you need to establish a risk register database in the first place. After risk identification, use further workshops to assign response plans to those risks. Update database with who will be responsible to handle those responses. Followup regularly to update. It is a continuous process to plan and update risk responses. Good luck!

Implementing controls is a subtle art. The controls must be well designed to be effective and must cut clean across the physical, technical and administrative to make for defense in depth or deep mitigation. While we can start off with administrative controls (policies and procedures), we must ensure compliance by design and by default for technological components of internal controls and enforce physical restrictions where necessary across people, process and technology.

I believe success of a risk management process depends heavily on how good review,monitoring and reporting system a company have in place. You need to have an active Risk coordinator who will continually monitor,review and report the current risk picture. Risk coordinator will conduct meetings(one to one), workshops with the stakeholders to review and update the status of existing risks, identify new risks. Also a dynamic risk database can be very helpful, to alert risk response responsible persons to update the status.

People, process and technology! These are the major drivers of organizations and its risk management controls. Administrative, physical and technical: these are the risk management controls boundaries. Then use-abilty, security and availability: these are the risk management controls considerations for security. Harmany and alignment with strategic objectives: very paramount.