Risk is always a threat to business. Every business is struggling to protect their venture from risk and to mitigate them effectively. This is a tough task, for sure.
What is Risk Management?
Is it the process of managing and mitigating the risk when it arises?
No, risk management is a bigger process, in which every single action is well-defined with best strategies and objectives.
Risk management includes processes like monitoring, assessing, risk impact analysis, planning for risk treatment, preparing corrective actions to mitigate the risk, educating the risk to the employees from preventing the occurrence and again monitoring for the risk.
That sounds tough, right?
Risk management becomes more complicated and varies from operations, business size, type of risks, impact of risks and frequency of occurrence.
For an IT based organization, they have more risks than other businesses as they must fight online and offline risks at the same time.
Again, back to the loop, does risk management contribute to IT project success?
Yes, that’s possible for sure.
Risk management for IT project success can be done gradually with a few steps.
The Evaluation Approach
It is always necessary to define, how are you currently evaluating the risk in your organisation.
The way to assess and understand your risk with manual methods is always different from the actual risk impact.
You must be sure on how you are planning to manage your risks.
This is a crucial decision to make.
The Management Approach
Once you have shaped up a plan on how you should manage the risks, then it is essential to communicate with the top management with the plan of actions you wish to see in your organisation.
Once the top management proposes their inputs into the plan, it is better to rebuild the plan to make it more effective.
Finding the Best Solution for Your Needs:
Manual or automatic? Obviously automatic, right?
It is a tough task to manage IT risk through manual methods or procedures.
So, it is always to go automatic or semi-automatic for risk management.
Find the best enterprise risk management tool, which can also incorporate cyber risk management for you.
A templatized tool can help you save your valuable time in monitoring, managing, and documenting your plans.
There are varieties of ERM tools that are used widely by organizations across the globe.
Measuring the Process
It is again necessary to measure your plans and strategies to learn what is working
for you and what is not.
The ERM tools are efficient enough to track the progress of each strategy you build to manage your risk.
You might have your own tools for cyber security, information security and other digital protections, but it is essential to see if these are well-working and are aligned with your business objectives and expected outcome.
This is possible through proper risk assessments, risk analysis, risk impact analysis and corrective actions for each type of risk.
The ERMs have all these manual methods templatized and made easier for business to take advantage of ERMs help us to see every KPI mapped into a colour-coded dashboard, to help businesses manage their risks more effectively, with less time, effort, and cost.
Continual Improvement
This practice should be continued round the clock.
As you measure the risk management process, you will be understanding the effectiveness of each initiative and strategies you have introduced.
As you see an under-performing KPI, you can start updating this plan. This is how you can work for improvement.
Using manual methods can spend your valuable time in identifying the under-performing KPIs, and this might consume up to six months.
ERMs monitor your KPIs actively and thus saves time and cost of six months.
Educating Your Workforce on How to Act at the Face of Risk:
Educating your workforce is equally important as measuring your risk management process.
You should communicate with your workforce to help them identify the point of risk and how to act when a risk is identified.
From the above proposed methods, an IT based business can build a best risk management program for their business, which complies with global standards and best practices.
Ensuring your risk management program is in place, is the next milestone for your business.
A risk management system should be connected to strategy management, business process management, asset management, supplier management, workforce management, cyber security management, HSE and compliance management.
You can only build a stable and sustainable risk management plan when each of the above-mentioned business aspects starts talking with each other, simply well-connected.