Risk Management – Quick Organization of Randomly-Kept Data

The Situation

The company had been hit with a couple of untimely negative news stories in national, state, and local news. One was the result of a serious environmental event due to a pipe failure. Executive management conducted a risk assessment to identify potential future disasters having low probability, but severe consequences. Given that high-probability risks were already being mitigated, the intent was to prevent ANY events that could further damage the company’s reputation.

The Vice President of Central Services was put in charge of mitigating those low-probability/high consequence risks. While he was certain that risks were being addressed, he realized that the documentation (files, action item tracking, studies, etc.) were being kept in multiple dissimilar locations. Some managers were keeping information on network drives, some on scattered SharePoint sites, and some even on personal laptops.

The Task

Having recently become aware of the benefits of SharePoint due to the success of Case Study #1, the VP requested a SharePoint sub-site be built to aggregate the information. The SharePoint work was begun and within days the COO asked him to report out on the effort later in the month. The organization of documentation was now urgent.

The Action

We built a quick SharePoint sub-site using our ready-made template and within an hour began arranging the documentation we had immediately available.

We built dashboard pages for each of the six main risk mitigation efforts and then began fine-tuning the documentation and action item list for one risk area for which we knew the manager to be SharePoint-knowledgeable.

His risk area was a large effort. There were dozens of geographical locations for which actions were to be taken. Given that the actions at each location were similar (three action items at each location,) three detailed action items were built. Each action item included all instructions and steps for completion so that less time would be spent educating local managers responsible for completing the items.

The “send email when assigned” SharePoint feature was enabled and the nearly two hundred action items landed in the inboxes of the assignees once the three action items were replicated. The entire process took less than two hours – and much of that time was spent answering questions from the risk manager.

Once that specific risk was aggregated and rolled out, we finished adjusting the other five risk areas in a similar fashion and then conducted a conference call with the remaining risk managers. We used the pilot risk area as an example and began working to roll out the remaining risk organization efforts.

We also built a roll-up executive management report tool that aggregated weekly reports from all six managers and displayed the most recent week’s reports on the SharePoint home page so the Senior VP and COO could check in on their own when they wanted to. They could also now drill down into the granular data and action items as they wished.

The Results

The SharePoint (and all the associated documentation and collaboration) were ready by the scheduled report-out to the COO. All went well and the COO was now educated about the status of the risk mitigation efforts, and could remain as informed as he wished to be by simply revisiting the SharePoint site.