Strategic Thought

RM in your Role >

 Business Manager

Business Manager is a very generic term that we are using to describe an individual with management responsibilities such as a business or portfolio or program manager. Managing the risk in your specific area of responsibility is vital to providing the executive level of an organization with up-to-date information on which they can make and base their decisions.

The management of risks within your business area (as well your peers managing the risks that they are responsible) ensures that risk information can be shared throughout the organization, and that where risk or opportunity may impact more than one area, it can be communicated and acted on in advance.

Here are some of the benefits that an Enterprise Risk Management system can deliver to you as a Business Manager:

• Management Dashboards through ARM provide an overview of business/program performance in your area and how it relates to risk.
• Formalized escalation processes enable your managers to escalate risks and issues when they need to, while performance analysis reports give you the assurance that the issues that are not being escalating are being managed effectively.
• Project/Program risks can be integrated with WBS (work breakdown structure) schedules to allow for analysis giving you confidence that your projects will be delivered on time. This capability is also applicable to other impacts of risks such as cost and technical performance.
  
• Analysis and forecasting tools allow you to see the risk exposure not only now, but how it may change in the future and how your mitigation plans and mitigation dollars are impacting against this exposure. This is commonly done for the life-cycle of the project or endeavour to help reduce or avoid margin erosion and also to help in a bid process.
• The ARM knowledge base provides the lessons learned from your business and other projects so you never make the same mistake twice, and importantly share the best way to mitigate a risk.
• As a business or program manager, you need to know which projects and initiatives to keep funding at current levels, which to apply further resources and those which should be terminated. ARM allows you to do a portfolio or business level aggregation of this information to help in decision making and deliver capital efficiency for the stakeholders.
• Sometimes you may have situations where the same risk impacts different parts of your program or business breakdown structure. This risk may be an ideal one to solve once, and thus maximize the ROI. ARM gives you the capability to share risk knowledge, which improves your competitiveness.