Project specific.
Effective risk management needs to be project specific.
What’s so special about this?
This is where we truly separate ourselves because we understand how risk manifests itself differently from project to project.
Unlike off-the-shelf solutions, we get granular with our clients to identify project-specific risk generators that are unique to project locations, project-specific stakeholders, local environmental sensitivities, surrounding socio-economic realities, local community demographics, land-access needs, local regulatory regimes, local security concerns, power dynamics, expected project impacts, and much more.
In this way, we build for our clients a social risk management system that incorporates and addresses project-specific social risk triggers, generators, and impacts.
Critically, although our system is project-specific, it is still built on industry best practices and can be plugged into any larger ERM framework.
How is this different from the herd?
The gravitation towards benchmarking off international performance standards has been a positive development, but it has led a lot of project developers to believe that performance standards can be uniformly applied across projects of all shapes, sizes, and locations. This leads to the assumption that all risks are the same around different projects.
They are not.
Even those companies that recognize the existence of project-specific realities then too often rely on environmental impact assessments (EIAs and ESIAs) as a means to identify project risks. But, EIAs and ESIAs serve a regulatory function, not a strategic or tactical one.
Compounding the problem is that currently risk governance in general and many off-the-shelf risk management solutions (including software) tend to be very high-level one-size-fits-all solutions that limit their practical usefulness in solving risk at the project level.