Challenge
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Enterprise Risk Management (OERM) coordinates the management and reporting of VA’s most critical enterprise risks. VA OERM sought to implement a common, enterprise-wide risk management framework that would; 1) increase the visibility of emerging risks and provide the opportunity to address the risks before they occur; 2) increase leadership’s confidence that they have a complete, common risk operating picture; 3) enhance the ability to address risks related to non-compliant business practices, integrity, and stewardship of financial resources that impact the quality of the Veterans’ experience, public trust, and compliance with applicable laws, regulations, standards, and directives; 4) gain efficiencies by breaking down risk management silos and redundancies, utilizing a common taxonomy, and set of tools; 5) increase risk-related information sharing to promote risk management best practices, continuous risk management, and lessons learned; 6) provide timely and complete risk information to leadership to help make decisions and focus priorities; promote ownership and responsibility for identifying, communicating, responding to, and monitoring risks; and increase risk awareness across VA, and 7) expand the Department’s capability to manage risk using leading risk management practices and tools.
Solution
Atlas Research teamed with Deloitte and Touche (Deloitte) to assist VA OERM with implementing a framework to provide governance, communications, training, processes, and tools to effectively identify, assess, respond to, and monitor risks in order to enable VA leadership to make informed decisions and focus priorities to better serve Veterans.
The Atlas Team helped serve as the primary lead for the VA’s ERM process, Risk Management Projects (RMPs), and risk management trainings; managed VA Enterprise Risk Register (VA-ERR); and produced risk reports. The team provided a wide-range of qualitative and quantitative risk analytic methodologies to assess VA programs, projects, systems, and administrative operations.
Result
The Atlas Team developed strategic risk assessment documentation and reports based on a comprehensive analysis of VA enterprise wide risks. The Atlas Team updated the risk register with identified emerging enterprise wide risks and developed risk interdependency analysis results documentation as a result of extensive analysis of existing VA enterprise risks.