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Risk Management Best Practice 5 – Ongoing Risk Monitoring
Every organization is challenged by risks manifest through its many different day-to-day operations. To help monitor and manage these risks, most organizations employ groups providing performance and compliance risk assurance so that significantly adverse consequences are avoided. These groups typically carry out their function through the conduct of periodic, in-depth assessments of those areas representing the highest risk to the company. Such assessments are both costly and time consuming; their accuracy rapidly diminishing with the passage of time since the assessment’s performance.
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About the Author
Nathan Ives is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.
Performance measures record specified outcomes achieved either at a specified time or within a defined interval and so, by their very nature, are time dependent. Consequently, a performance measure alters the behaviors of those being monitored not only in relationship to what is being monitored but also to when the outcome is being monitored.
Over time, organizational performance measurement systems can grow to include hundreds if not thousands of individual metrics. While each metric contributes some value in establishing the overall picture of performance, not all metrics offer equal value in doing so. Some metrics contribute so little value that they may be more costly and distracting than their value warrants. Consequently, executives and managers should consider eliminating these measures from the overall system.
Over time, leaders can grow their performance measurement systems to include almost countless numbers of interrelated metrics. Ensuring these numerous metrics remain well aligned, their output quality and relationship integrity preserved, and their meaning well understood while continuing to be of value to executives, managers, and employees necessitates a method of inventorying the measures themselves and their underlying construction characteristics. In our experience, the optimal method for maintaining such an inventory is through the use of a centralized metrics inventory database.
A performance measurement system’s complexity and organizational impact can bring with it many people, process, and technology challenges post implementation. For several months following a system go-live or significant upgrade, the organization adjusts its processes, procedures, and behaviors so to achieve the best possible reflected performance. This evolution is not without its costs or problems.
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