Addressing productivity concerns in risk management through repeatable distributed collaboration processes

Traditional risk management (RM) focuses on a single project same time & same place. It emphasizes identifying, assessing, controlling and monitoring risk. Due to an increasing number of distributed projects and distributed teams, the RM paradigm has begun to shift towards group oriented RM any time any place. Although distributed RM provides major benefits in terms of productivity and shortening throughput time, it represents a challenge to coordinate the efforts of distributed teams working towards a common goal. We propose a repeatable process for distributed collaborative RM. This process consists of a set of collaborative activities, defined in terms of patterns of collaboration, chunks of facilitation skill (thinkLets), and the interdependencies between them. The process was developed and piloted based on experiences in a multinational service organization, an insurance company, and an international financial institution. The proposed process serves as a blueprint for further research on collaborative RM.