Establishing a Delivery Risk Committee
The client and what they needed
The client, a key department in a central government body, realised that it was unable to identify, manage, and communicate cross-cutting risks across its portfolio of activities, and this inability consistently impacted delivery of its IT programmes. The client was unable to express the level of operational risk to which its users and customers were exposed.
The solution
On behalf of the prime contractor, Hand and Millar (H&M) led a blended team of contractors, civil servants, and contingent labour to establish and embed the monthly executive Delivery Risk Committee (DRC).
Risk identification
H&M put in place a cadence of horizon-scanning sessions with stakeholders to identify risks from a top-down organisational perspective. Using its in-depth knowledge of this government sector, H&M recommended appropriate executive owners for each risk and worked with the owners to develop informational papers about them. This approach facilitated active risk ownership and collective understanding of the risk landscape.
For the bottom-up view, H&M’s team undertook thematic analysis of delivery risks, making use of data aggregation and visualisation tools like PowerBI. The analysis provided insights into risk exposure on various delivery fronts such as schedule, cost, people, requirements, and commercial.
Having embedded this new risk identification approach across the organisation’s business leaders, H&M then set up and facilitated the executive Delivery Risk Committee, where cross-cutting risks would be communicated and managed throughout their lifetime.
Collaboration and collective responsibility
H&M designed the DRC to foster collaboration and collective responsibility up front by putting in place a rotating chair. This ensured that different voices and perspectives shaped discussion about strategic risks and guaranteed that each member of the community understood all of the key risks impacting the organisation, even risks outside of their respective business areas.
H&M also led the DRC in being an early adopter of in-meeting e-polling within the organisation, using this collaboration tool to ask attendees about the quality of the discussion and its outcomes. This supported the DRC to rapidly evolve and optimise its activities to add maximum value to its members.
The benefits
H&M’s solution for identifying, communicating, and managing organisational delivery risk enabled the organisation's business leaders at all levels to make clear and well-informed decisions about where to prioritise human and financial capital to de-risk activities across the portfolio.
It also helped the client organisation tackle thematic and systemic issues within its portfolios, which became easier to perceive, understand, and mitigate via the DRC.