Best Practices in Risk Assessments

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Executive Sponsorship

Remember, this was mentioned a few pages ago. It is important. Executive-level managers must have a stake in this project. The project's sponsor must be enthusiastically supportive. This person will run interference for the team seeing their recommendations are implemented. Absent this degree of support, the team's efforts become merely an exercise. Senior employees and managers should be targeted to participate as team members as they are likely to be the repositories of much of the organization's institutional knowledge.

Scope

Risk analysis should include operational areas, but be mindful that a project of overly broad scope will likely fail. On the other hand, if the scope is too narrow, it will not be sufficiently detailed to be useful.

Experience Note 

Correct scope is like a good shoe, it has got to fit correctly or it is not useful.

Information Resources

Collect current organizational charts that include some idea of not only the job title, but also the job performed at that position. Obtain a copy of the organization's strategic or business plan. It is just a drill unless the project's results can support the business' objectives. Charts documenting the company information flow, asset inventory, organizational charts, process and transaction flows, and reporting structure should be in the possession of the team before the interrogatory/questionnaire process begins.

Select risk team members very carefully. Members should come from different business divisions, and their knowledge should be sufficient to address most general business topics and process areas. It is more important to assemble the team based on identifying the right people rather than who is available. The team's basic design is what provides the platform upon which the members do their work. Taking the time, thought, and energy to make that platform as sturdy as it can be is a good investment whether people will be working around the same conference table or scattered around the globe.

Team Management Dynamics

There are several approaches to team building and management. One view supports the idea that team members should not be stationary and should be rotated frequently. This is similar to the airlines model where crew members are usually working together only for the duration of the flight. On the next flight, a whole new flight team is assembled.

There is a belief that team members become complacent when they work together frequently and there is little chance of cross-checking one another for work quality. However, a 1994 National Transportation Safety Board study revealed that 73 percent of all incidents occurred on a new crew's first day of flying together and almost 44 percent took place on a crew's very first flight. What is the lesson in this study? One interpretation is that teams are most vulnerable to problems when they are starting, before they have had a chance to learn how to work together.

There are many reasons why stable teams perform better. Members develop familiarity with one another and with their collective tasks; consequently, they do not waste time getting settled in and getting oriented. Teams composed of professionals build a shared pool of knowledge that is more comprehensive than that of any single team member. Collectively, they learn which member is skilled in a particular area and they learn how to deal with members who are less skilled without disrupting the team's overall progress. Before a group can be developed into a successful team, there needs to be a team unit with shared responsibilities for clearly defined, worthwhile work. Leadership of the team can be successful if they perform well in these areas:

  • Define and compel the team's direction

  • Executive support enabling and empowering the team to do its job

  • The leader should have expert coaching skills

Leaders should be mindful of using rhetorical inventions to motivate their team members; they do not work in the long run. If the fishing boat captain tells the line-baiters they are fishing for tuna, it may motivate them for a while. But there comes a time, when they are baiting hooks and they never get to land the fish, they are just baiting hooks for others. They realize their work is trivial and unrewarding.

Team support structures must be simple, avoiding the belief that self-managing teams can work everything out on their own. Avoid the "bigger is better" team structure idea. Generally, a large team will hamper its ability to create something useful. So why do companies organize such large teams in the workplace? Emotional issues are usually to blame. Large teams distribute individual accountability and it is more politically acceptable; giving all relevant parties a voice, they will accept the final product.

Expert coaching skills can promote team effectiveness by helping members learn to work and manage themselves. Teams need leadership exercising authority to direct efforts toward goals, not mandating minute details. Sports coaches demonstrate different leadership styles during the course of the game. At the beginning of a game, the coach takes a more-motivational approach showing that the team has worked hard and has a chance to win the game if the members play together and at their best. During halftime, the coach moves more toward a consultative approach where the game plays are reviewed, successes and failures are analyzed, and strategy is revised based on how things are going. After the game, the team reviews the game, the coach emphasizes critical interventions, helping the team learn from experience and build their skills for future games. Good coaching helps a team develop a task-oriented performance strategy; bad coaching identifies a team's problems and tells members how to fix them.

Experience Note 

Teams sometimes have one member with a particularly strong personality who was able to sway decisions to her point of view. Regrettably, she had an agenda protecting favored programs that were not essential for business continuity resulting in a skewed risk assessment.

Good coaching can usually help a well-designed team succeed, but no amount of good coaching can make a poorly designed team successful. Well-created and developed teams are likely to have less need of coaching sessions as they encounter fewer problems outside their own capabilities. Those teams become skilled at coaching themselves and enter a spiral of increasing capabilities and effectiveness.

Experience Note 

In the absence of leadership, most teams will drink sand.



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Critical Incident Management
Critical Incident Management
ISBN: 084930010X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 144

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