Archives

Archive

Arbitrary selections in Risk Management are a liability.

We can see a day when a case will be challenged in court against a company that used Probability Impact Graphs (PIGs risk matrix) for their risk assessment. The questions that could be asked will be horribly embarrassing and very damaging to the PIGs risk matrix’s user. Likely, they will tend to prove that the approach constituted a professional negligence. Perhaps due to the breach of Duty of Care. Indeed Arbitrary selections in Risk Management are a liability. A preliminary list…

Read More

Risk perception, corporate prestige, psychological factors, alibi and denial.

Risk perception, corporate prestige, psychological factors are important sources of irrational decisions. Roughly ten years ago we were invited by a very famous and prestigious European Railways company to give a seminar to top management. NB: the company name is covered by confidentiality and we have also slightly altered the story to further protect the identities of the implied parties. European Railways companies are “state owned” enterprises. Thus their Boards generally have c-suite who either are administration veterans or politicians.…

Read More

Quinn Storm and Rolf Medicane gave us the opportunity to test the Balangero Asbestos Mine Environmental Risk Based Decision Making (RBDM) Restoration Design under Extreme Meteorological Conditions. Another success for CDA-ESM!

Two storm gave us the opportunity to test the Balangero Asbestos Mine Environmental Risk Based Decision Making (RBDM) Restoration Design under Extreme Meteorological Conditions. In the past (2009) we already reported in this blog about an interesting environmental restoration project that was entirely designed using RBDM.  As the project includes a large reforestation program, we have been updating our reports. In fact we just published and presented a paper on it at Tailings and Mine Waste 2011 Conference,Vancouver, Canada. Asbestos Mine…

Read More

Information Security, Cyberwarfare, Security Guidelines.

This year has seen an unprecedented number of highly visible cybersecurity events. Entire countries disappeared from internet during riots and revolts in North Africa, Egypt, Libya. Metropolitan underground e-mails and phones were obscured by the authorities in San Francisco to “protect us”. Reportedly the hacker group Anonymous has now threatened to take down the New York Stock Exchange‘s computers in what we at Riskope would see as a “logical” development of the Men against Machines War we described in a recent posting…

Read More

On time, on budget, in control, showing your leadership with sustainable capital expenditure, even during recessions and economic, financial crises.

On time, on budget, in control, showing your leadership with sustainable capital expenditure, even during recessions and economic, financial crises. This is not just a motto!  Riskope can indeed help you solve numerous issues related to that statement. For example: insurance denial situations, add value to you existing risk assessments, enhance risk registers, develop ERM in an ingenious way. We could spell out as follows a subtitle. Let us take the best advantage of what you possibly have and deliver…

Read More

What Fukushima (2010) nuclear accident, the Twin Towers (9/11) terror attack, deadly traffic accidents and Aquila earthquake (Italy), hurricanes have in common?

In this blogpost we attempt an update of Whitman’s and ANCOLD tolerance/acceptability curves. These link casualties from man-made or natural catastrophes, large dams failures to a “tolerable” annual probability. The attempt shows evidence for a G8-wide societal acceptability which has only slightly changed since the original studies by Whitman..   We have already discussed many times how well-balanced and sustainable decisions can only be taken if risks are compared to properly defined risk tolerance /acceptability criteria. Comparison of various risk…

Read More

Our clients beat the trends. We are proud to contribute to their leadership.

Our clients beat the trends. We are proud to contribute to their leadership. This blogpost discusses this issue. The trigger lied in reading a Deloitte’s report. As a matter of fact, we read with a lot of interest Deloitte’s report entitled: Tracking the trends 2011, The top 10 issues mining companies will face in the coming year. The issues We summarize below the issues highlighted in Deloitte’s report: 1 Financing 2 Volatility 3 Stakeholders engagement 4 Taxes, regulations and governments…

Read More

ALE, FMEA, FMECA, qualitative methods: is it really what we need!?

ALE, FMEA, FMECA, qualitative methods: is it really what we need!? discusses the evaluation of systems’ failure. An array of methodologies exist. Among these the are Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) and the Failure Mode and Effects Criticality Analysis (FMECA). Many Risk Assessment use Annual Loss Expected (ALE) as a metric for impact or consequences. Impact analysis of every potential defect on functionality The essence of FMEA/FMECA is the impact analysis of every potential defect on functionality of the…

Read More

Hosted and powered by WR London.