We are excited to announce the launch of Falcony | Risks, an involvement-first risk management solution. This solution covers all types of risks and opportunities, complete with insightful dashboards.
This is the first blog post from our recent launch event held on April 17, 2024. More blog posts about other updates will follow soon.
Problems with Risk Management Spreadsheets
Can you guess the most common way to identify, track, and manage risks today? It's spreadsheets. They work well for listing and assessing risks at a single point in time.
However, risk management is not static; it's a dynamic process that should span across the organization, influencing almost all decisions.
While spreadsheets are great for listing risks, they present three main problems for overall risk management effectiveness:
- Managing tasks, measures, and controls: It's often difficult to manage these elements down to the grassroot level, requiring multiple emails and conflicting spreadsheet versions.
- Siloed information: Spreadsheets easily become siloed by team, department, or function, leading to miscommunication.
- Lack of historical view: There's no historical record of how risks have changed over time.
These issues hinder organizations from involving necessary parties in risk management in a preferred way. We've observed that management teams, both in large and small companies, are increasingly driving initiatives to integrate risk management into daily work.
Introducing Falcony | Risks
Risk management is often approached from multiple angles: strategic, operational, financial, safety, quality, legal, compliance, project level, and so on. The challenge is that these risks typically reside in different systems and spreadsheets, making it impossible or very costly to gain an overall view. Falcony | Risks makes this possible.
We can configure the system so that all risk assessments follow the same guidelines, such as a 5x5 risk matrix. Alternatively, we can allow different functions to use their own methods for risk analysis. Not all risks and threats are equal, so they require different methods of analysis, treatment, and control. Regardless of the approach, all risks are fed into a single risk register and dashboards that are easy to sort and filter.
We've designed the user experience to match the involvement needs of end-users. Falcony can be used on all devices to identify risks, both through pre-made risk assessment checklists and as risk observations. Pre-made risk assessment templates are a significant part of the value in Falcony | Risks.
With risk assessment templates for dozens of functions and areas (and more coming soon), the product is ready for immediate action without assessors having to start from scratch.
Functionalities of Falcony | Risks
Let's explore how risk assessment and classification happen in Falcony once a manager identifies a risk.
For different ways of classifying and assessing risks, we have ready-made workflows that include conditionality and automatically calculated fields. For example, if you identify a strategic risk, Falcony prompts you to classify it further and then assess it based on a 5x5 risk matrix, providing instructions along the way.
Risks are assigned and shared with relevant stakeholders based on the type and classification of the risk, and the department it belongs to.
What follows is a ready-made workflow to treat and mitigate risks with relevant measures and controls. We've also added residual risk assessment for after risk management actions have been completed.
Actions and measures are where the involvement philosophy comes into play with risk management. While it may not make sense for everyone to add new risks, it definitely makes sense to involve every relevant stakeholder in carrying out mitigating measures and risk controls to prevent risks from happening. The pricing has also been considered from this point of view. If we've piqued your interest, contact us to book a demo.
Let's delve deeper into risk measures and controls and how risk-related actions are managed within Falcony.
The normal chat-based communication works, 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. However, when there are many sub-tasks with separate assignees, chat isn't optimal for tracking them. This is where linked observations come in.
With linked observations, you can connect multiple actions to a single risk and assign each to separate individuals. Each assignee receives automated reminders for their tasks, and the original risk visually indicates which tasks 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 is a scheduling feature that allows administrators to create recurring schedules for different types of risk assessments. For example, safety risk assessments might recur annually and be required at every site. Scheduling provides admins with visibility into upcoming, open, missed, and completed assessments, and assignees receive automated reminders.
Opportunities and Risks
Especially with strategic risks, they are often related to opportunities that the organization has committed to pursuing. Assessing opportunities also relates to most management system standards. For example, all major ISO standards mandate that organizations plan and implement actions to address both risks and opportunities.
In Falcony, the simplest way to manage opportunities is to use our ready-made workflow where opportunities and risks are naturally linked. There's a multiple-choice field "Risk or Opportunity" where the risk assessor can select either or both. If the assessor picks "Opportunity," a conditional workflow is automated to describe, assess, and treat the opportunity.
We often say that opportunities are inverse risks. To put it another way: opportunities and risks are two sides of the same coin.
Risk Management Dashboard
We realized a long time ago that a "whole product" for risk management must include visual representations of risk in the common risk matrix format. Recently, we found a way to develop dashboards using Microsoft Power BI, one of the most widely used analytics software in the world.
The best part about Power BI is that it's often a solution customers and their management teams are already familiar with, ensuring that risk management dashboards are used more frequently. Power BI also allows customers to make changes to the dashboard if they wish. Even with our ready-made dashboard, all risks, visualizations, and statistics can be filtered, and there are powerful drill-down functionalities, for example, to risk matrices.
Besides risks, we offer two other views: one specifically for opportunities, including an opportunity matrix, and another for risk assessments to provide an overall view of their status (upcoming, in progress, missed, or completed). This is all ready-made, meaning customers can use this same dashboard 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 to Falcony
Our philosophy has always been that when customers introduce Falcony into their organizations, they should be able to easily match the system to their process requirements and significantly improve them, rather than having to change their processes to fit the system. For Falcony | Risks, this means we offer services to convert existing risks and risk assessment templates into Falcony. This way, customers can seamlessly continue their risk management process in Falcony, just as they did with spreadsheets.
Conclusion
Just like Falcony Whistleblowing and Falcony Ideas, Falcony | Risks offers a low-threshold way to get 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 us 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.
