Before having a crisis, ….The risk management

 

Article originally posted in LinkedIn (English and French available)

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/before-having-crisis-risk-management-vincent?trk=mp-author-card

In recent days, we have been able to see that the East energy pipeline project had all the characteristics of a crisis management. This project has indeed been criticized from all sides in the media and the reactions of the promoter allow us to doubt that such criticism had been taken into account in the social acceptance process of the project.

No doubt that sound risk management would have allowed to identify such situations and to react better in the circumstances. I always wonder when projects of this scale do not seem to have set up established risk management process. Yet this is what the best practices suggest; about this, we can draw from two large project management-related organizations such as the PMI with the PMBOK and Axcelos with Prince2.

The implementation of the risk management process, allows among others to identify all types of risks, better understand and ultimately to limit the negative impact of an event if it occurs and thanks to the preventive measures to reduce the impact (probability and/or consequence). Moreover, this process helps to identify and recognize the warning signs and thereby better prepare the organization for the management of crisis or emergency.

Risk management is a proactive approach that limits the need to revert to crisis management. This process must, to maximize efficiency, be implemented from the planning stage and thus offer more options to the organization. When the only choice is crisis management, we are left with a much more limited selection of options which are usually much more expensive.

The implementation of the risk management process is an inexpensive investment but which allows among other to limit the impact of painful incident.