[Music] [TEXT: Risk Myth Breakers @NIH]
[SFX: Shattering glass]
[David Fuller speaking] What is risk management?
Risk management is really a process of identifying vulnerabilities within your program area.
[Sussana Morales speaking] The idea of risk management is to consider risks as part of
your daily job.
[John McGowan speaking] You know, usually I'm not approached about what it is I'm approached
about how to do it effectively.
Risk management is not trying to put you in a box where you can't do risk related work.
It’s trying to open up the box to say all risks can be looked at for what we do effectively
as an organization but let's look at it in a responsible way to mitigate what we know
are concerns.
[Brian Trent speaking] Risk management is just a paper exercise and a waste of time.
[Alesha Holliday speaking] Personally, I believe that if you feel risk management is just a
paper exercise then clearly, you're not putting enough into it to understand the value of
the program.
[Brian Trent speaking] Risk management is an opportunity to find out what's going on
in your organization, what's going well, what's not going so well, and it also gives you an
opportunity to get in front of problems before they become major problems.
[Laura Larson speaking] We provide an opportunity to the program directors the ability for them
to understand what really risk management is.
[Naledi Simons speaking] Risk management opens doors.
It's a way to let others know what's going on in your part of the organization and to
get feedback on that.
It is an opportunity for you to lead from where you stand.
[Vy Tran speaking] Risk management is a way to place blame and put a negative spotlight
on my program area.
[Gregory Germino speaking] So, I've been involved with our risk management program since I've
come to the NIH over almost nine years ago and never in our conversations or discussions
or planning sessions in terms of risk management have we ever discussed putting blame on individuals.
The whole point of this is really to help individuals do their job best and do better
and I see the risk management program as a tool in helping us do that.
[Laurie Torchinsky speaking] Being a participant in the risk management program it really allows
you opportunities again to articulate what's important to you and what your program area
needs in order to thrive and it's really less about taking things away from your part of
the organization and giving more resources to those who require them.
[Alesha Holliday speaking] It's definitely not anything negative and if it is a serious
problem it's better that it be handled in-house and that you don't have to read about it in
The Washington Post before it's addressed.
[Sussana Morales speaking] Whomever thinks that this is a blame in someone's area or
someone has done something wrong it's looking at risk management the wrong way.
[Vy Tran speaking] Risk management is not about placing blame on a particular area.
It's about finding the opportunities and detecting early on what the problem areas are so that
we can make our organization better.
[Naledi Simons speaking] Risk management has no clear goals or tangible results.
[Katia Howlett speaking] In terms of how colleagues across NIH are looking at the clinical trials
reforms and activities, I think that risk and risk assessment has been a critical part
of our discussions.
I sit on a lot of committees where this is something that we discuss quite often.
There are results coming out of it.
They’re developing dashboards to make sure leadership has the information, that we're
aware that leadership are getting questions, so I think that those are the tangible results
that I am witnessing.
[Gregory Germino speaking] One of our for-instance risks that we've identified for our organization
is in fact our human capital.
The EVS is done every year to sort of assess the state of our employee engagement and their
perspective on what we're doing right as an organization, where we have perhaps gaps,
and so we use the EVS tool as one of our tools to assess the state of our human capital.
But one of our lowest ranking areas was in the area of holding people accountable or
being given feedback and so we see the PMAP as a means of being able to do that.
[Brian Trent speaking] We had a risk manager who noticed that we were having a number of
unauthorized procurements in our organization.
She took the lead in going forward and attempting to do an audit of all of our purchase card
transactions.
Our purchase card transactions at the time of the audit were at sixty nine percent compliant.
Over the next year and a half, we improve that through training and just general education
to nearly 90 percent of our purchase card transactions being compliant with the Federal
Acquisition regulations.
[John McGowan speaking] We were paying interest rates because we weren't paying our bills
on time because we didn't have our processes worked out appropriately, so that introduced
a risk of reputational risk which is one the highest risks at NIH which means your reputation
hits the paper for not doing things appropriately.
It also is a financial risk because we were spending close to $800,000 in delayed payments
for interest because we weren't paying our vendors on time.
By showing it in our risk management program, attacking it by putting appropriate strategies
and cost controls, and changing policy and procedures, we brought that down from an $800,000
loss per year to less than $13,000 per year
[Music]
[Vy Tran speaking] Part of risk management is really thinking about how we can do things
differently - how we can be innovative.
[John McGowan speaking] So it's all about anticipation and about thinking through the
implications of what you're about ready to do.
[Sussana Morales speaking] Everyone is a risk manager.
We should all be looking forward, looking for ways to efficiently improve our processes
and look for results.
[Laurie Torchinsky speaking] Risk management and the processes that are involved in risk
management - it's really about you and what you're gonna get out of it is what you put
in it.
[Vy Tran speaking] ...and everyone within an institute or an organization should really
strive to think about how to improve their function within an organization.
[Katia Howlett speaking] The more that we can support one another and have the goal
and mission in sight - I think that's the only way that we're going to be effective.
[Music] [SFX: glass breaking]