It’s not a secret that we have considered a risk management solution for a long-time. Which is why we are happy to tell that we have finally launched Falcony | Risks - an involvement first risk management solution that covers all types of risks and opportunities along with beautiful dashboards.
This is the first blog post from our recent launch event held on the 17th of April 2024. More blog posts about other updates will follow soon.
Problems of Risk Management Spreadsheets
Can you guess, what’s by far the most common way to identify, keep track of and manage risks today? You got that right: it's excels and spreadsheets. And there's a reason for it. They actually work really well when it comes to listing and assessing risks at one point in time.
But risk management is not static nor is it even a project done once. It's a dynamic process or a system that should span across the organization impacting almost all decisions.
As great as spreadsheets are for listing and showing risks, there are three main problems around the overall risk management effectiveness. First, managing tasks, measures and controls all the way to the grassroot level of the organization is often difficult requiring multiple emails and conflicting version of spreadsheets.
Second, spreadsheets easily get siloed by team, department or a function influencing the miscommunication even further. And third, there’s no historical view on how risks have changed over time.
Quite obviously none of these help organizations to involve the necessary parties for risk management in a way the organization itself or the employees prefer. To make the mismatch even more problematic, we have noticed management teams of both big and small companies to drive initiatives around risk management to be more and more part of every day work.
Introducing Falcony Risks
Risk management is often done from multiple angles: strategic, operational, financial, safety, quality, legal, compliance, project level and so on. The tricky thing typically is that all these risks live in different systems and excel sheets either making it impossible or very costly to have an overall view of all risks. But Falcony | Risk will make that possible.
We can either make it so that all risk assessments follow the same guidelines such as 5 by 5 risk matrix or we can also allow different functions to have their methods for risk analysis. Not all risks and threats are created equal, so we know they require different methods of analysis, treatment and control. Whatever the way, all risks get fed into a single risk register and dashboards that are very easy to sort and filter.
We have obviously wanted to match the user experience with the involvement needs of end-users, so one can use Falcony on all their devices to identify risks, both through pre-made risk assessment checklists and as risk observations. Speaking of -pre-made risk assessment templates, that's big part of value in Falcony Risk.
With risk assessment templates for the dozens of functions and areas (and more coming in soon), the product is literally ready for action immediately without assessors having to start from tabula rasa.
The functionalities of Falcony Risks
Let’s say a manager has identified a risk, how does the assessment and classification of the risk happen in Falcony?
For different ways of classifying and assessing risks, we have ready-made workflows that include conditionality and automatically calculated fields. Let’s say you identify a strategic risk, Falcony asks you to classify the strategic risk further and then assess it based on a 5x5 risk matrix all along instructing how to do it as well.
The risks get assigned and shared to relevant stakeholders based on the type and classification of the risk and which department of the organization the risk belongs to.
What follows is, again, a ready-made workflow to treat and mitigate the risks with relevant measures and controls. And we have also added residual risk assessment when the risk management actions have been done.
Actions and measures are by the way where the involvement-philosophy comes into play with risk management. It doesn't make sense for everyone to play a role in adding new risks but it definitely makes sense to involve every relevant stakeholder to carry out mitigating measures and risk controls to prevent risks from happening. The pricing has also been considered from this point of view (and if we got your interest already, contact us to book a demo).
Let’s dig a bit deeper into the risk measures and controls and how risk related actions are actually managed within Falcony.
The normal chat-based communication works of course and you can see the entire history of comments and changes to each risk. Some risks take a lot of time to manage and it helps to keep relevant people in the loop, but when there starts to be more and more sub-tasks that have separate assignees, the chat is not optimal for keeping track of those. Enter linked observations.
With linked observations, you can link multiple actions to a single risk and assign each of them to separate assignees. Then each assignee will be automatically reminded to handle their own tasks and the original risk visually shows which ones are done, open or overdue. All tasks and risks are tracked in one place with two different views: table and card views.
Part of the Falcony Risks solution comes also the scheduling feature that allows admins to create recurring schedules for different types of risk assessments. For example, safety risk assessments might recur every year and are required to be completed in every single site. Scheduling will allow the admins to have visibility for upcoming, open, missed and completed assessments plus the assignees get automated reminders to those assessments too.
Opportunities and Risks
Especially with strategic risks, they are often related to opportunities that the organization has committed to push forward. But assessing opportunities also relate to most of the management system standards. For example, all the major ISO standards mandate that organizations plan and implement actions to address both risks and opportunities.
In Falcony, simplest way to manage opportunities to use our ready-made workflow where Opportunities and Risks are naturally linked together. There’s simply a multiple choice field “Risk or Opportunity” where the risk assessor can select either or both of them. If the assessor picks the Opportunity, a conditional workflow is automated to describe, assess and treat the opportunity.
We often like to say that opportunities are inverse risks. But to put it another way: opportunities and risks are the two sides of the same coin.
Risk Management Dashboard
We realized a long-time ago that a “whole product” for risk management has to include visual representations of risk in the common risk matrix format. And then recently, we found a way to develop dashboards in the most used analytics software in the world, Microsoft Power BI.
What’s best with Power BI is that it’s often a solution that customers and their management teams are already familiar with so the risk management dashboards get definitely used more. Power BI also enables customers to make changes to the dashboard if they want. But even with our ready-made dashboard all the risks, visualizations and statistics can be filtered and there are really powerful drill-down functionalities to for example risk matrices.
Besides the risks, we have two other views. One is for the opportunities separately including an opportunity matrix and the other one is for the risk assessments to have an overall view where they are going, which ones are upcoming, in progress, missed or completed. And this is all ready-made in a sense that customer’s can get this same dashboard into use regardless of which risk assessment they use. Customers can simply download the Power BI file within Falcony, open it and connect it to our database.
Bring your existing risks
We have always had this idea that when customers introduce Falcony in their organisations, they can easily match the system to their process requirements and make them 10x better, instead of having to change their processes to fit the system requirements. What this means for Falcony Risks is that we have services to convert the existing risks and risk assessments templates into Falcony. This way customers pretty much continue the risk management process in Falcony that they used to have in excels.
Conclusion
Just like Falcony Whistleblowing, and Falcony Ideas, Falcony Risks will be a new low-threshold way of getting familiar with Falcony. Start with one of your risk assessments, explore the benefits and expand to more types of risks on-the-fly.
Simply reach out to use and let's book a meeting to discuss more! Or start a free trial to see Falcony in action:
We are building the world's first operational involvement platform. Our mission is to make the process of finding, sharing, fixing and learning from issues and observations as easy as thinking about them and as rewarding as being remembered for them.
By doing this, we are making work more meaningful for all parties involved.
More information at falcony.io.
