Why benchmark? And how?

Being successful in business relies on taking full advantage of resources and aiming to constantly make progress and improve. Consequently, managers and leaders at all levels are becoming increasingly accountable to their stakeholders for the delivery of key outcomes in the most competent and diligent manner. Frameworks such as ISO 31000:2009 provide generic guidelines for the design, implementation, and maintenance of risk management processes throughout an organization, but the snag is, they don’t tell us how to generate performance scorecards or develop Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which are indispensable tools in the quest to establish, measure, and achieve the best possible performances within the business.

At last our book on How to Performance Benchmark Your Risk Management is out. It is designed to offer a practical guide to help you analyze the effectiveness of your risk management program. Applicable to all areas of management, university level study, or technical disciplines, it addresses the following:

• What is benchmarking?
• Why should we benchmark?
• What are Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Critical Success Factors (CSFs), Key Result Areas (KRAs), etc?
• What is the causal path between Risk–>Risk Treatment–>CSF–>KRA–>KPI–>Organizational objectives
• The difference between lag and lead indicators
• How to measure performance using a variety of tools (e.g.: Kirkpatrick’s four levels of training evaluations)
• Methods for developing custom KPIs
• Linking existing frameworks such as Balanced ScoreCards that an organization may have in place already to risk benchmarking
• Using word pictures to define performance

Between us, we have built risk performance tools for dozens of organizations including resources companies in Africa, the aviation sector in Asia, and the $30 billion Australian Department of Defence. We have worked together on a range of client projects at Jakeman Business Solutions and are also lead authors of Security Risk Management Body of Knowledge, which details the security risk management process in a format that can easily be applied by executive managers and security risk management practitioners. We can be contacted via www.jakeman.com.au will also find some useful templates and short guides, which can be downloaded for free.