Planning for Core Risk and Crisis Communications

Human beings on balance tend to underestimate risk, and even when they do not, tend give more weight and action to the most likely not those with the most catastrophic outcomes to the brand repuation, which is why a periodic risk management eview is a good idea.

Every business needs to carefully consider their risks and test and validate their approaches to dealing with those risks were they to arise, with a focus on protecting staff, customers and reputation. Business Continuity and staff welfare factors should be well laid out and a clear plan shared across the business for dealing with these risks.

Risk Management Framework for Food Service Business

Project description

Following high profile disasters in the food service sector, this company decided to review their risk operating model.
The brief was to review and redesign their existing process and highlight gaps per the risk profile, which we also developed with scenarios to develop and test. These scenarios were detailed, spanning legal and logistics, health and safety, staff and reputational damage, with clear and direct mappings to preventive actions for damage limitation in the event of adverse events occurring.

Core Implementation Touchpoints

Deliverables

Significant value was added and evidence based primary best practices were implemented when we developed an operational model and timelines per highest risk scenarios regardless of probability, which were then rehearsed and tested across critical roles and responsibilities for the most severe events.

Businesses with no online presence who needed to rapidly create an inventory online, take orders and also add the capability to take payments.

Core Implementation Touchpoints

Background

At the start of the coronavirus epidemic, several brick and mortar businesses who had steadfastly remained offline or who had maintained fairly low key, purely informational websites or whose presence only extended to having a ‘Google My Business’ listing found that they were in a situation where their businesses came overnight to a standstill.

Pubs and restaurants who up to then had operated 100% within the restaurant setting had no way of making an income. Noticing the buoyancy of the Deliveroos and Just Eats, with people continuing to pay for food to be delivered, many businesses came to an inescapable conclusion.

Varying their business models to deliver food was the only way to survive but perhaps might represent a diversification opportunity that would not only be useful for the future but would create resiliency for other waves of the pandemic or another lockdown, There was one problem – their websites, if they had them were not ecommerce websites.

 

They didn’t have any way of showing the full menu they could make available, make people aware of them and take payments.

Deliverables

As noted by Ronak Patel of readwrite, identifying the best payment gateway for your business’s needs is a challenges that requires consideration and an understanding of the potentials and pitfalls, including compatibility with your website, the ease, accessibility and process of integrations, costs and customer experience. We took away this headache and helped the business understand the best options for their situation and then implemented it.

• Rapidly delivered an online inventory with payments integration from trusted partners, which was easy for the proprietors to update as the need arose.
• Worked with businesses to define their new process as a short term workaround and beyond.
• Understanding what else they wanted for their websites.
• Hosting and support profiles.
• Promoting their business locally online
• Idenified best provider/gateway to take payments seamlessly and enabled taking secure online payments as well as credit cards

Case Study 17

Problem

Global Bank’s decision to offshore critical cross line of business functions required an indepth and detailed business transformation involving hundreds of people and a massive effort to define, build and deploy new technology platforms.

Core Implementation Touchpoints

Deliverables

Embedded off shore report team structure, process and new technology platforms, along with the requisite Business Architecture and supporting target operating models and graduated Standard Operating Procedures.

Case Study 18

Branded digital and web presence for retail brand

Having been in business for 20 years, this well known company decided the time had come to make some changes, and have a branded ecommerce website, online inventory and streamline their backend processes. The MD had been reluctant to make the necessary foray into the online marketplace but they knew it was necessary as the founder would be retiring and an outsider would be taking the reins of leadership along with the co-founder.

The new MD was very conscious of the gap in their online capability and was concerned they were losing out on market share in a sector where they were one of the very first to enter in a big way as an independent retailer.

They were especially wary as they had tried an e-commerce implementation a few years before which had gone badly wrong with the project managed offshore and communications that broke down.

Nonplussed by the by the number of providers and the array of choices for e-commerce implementations, they eventually chose as we were referred to them.

They really wanted to work with a company who understood them, their ethos and their company. They needed a company who understood their dreams and small beginnings and were very pleased to find us.

Core Implementation Touchpoints

Deliverables

We were able to deliver an e-commerce site and capability with attendant changes in operations, staff and tools for inventory management.

• New inventory system
• Branding Design for all channels
• New Ecommerce website
• Workflow management system

Case Study 15

Problem

Global Bank’s decision to offshore critical cross line of business functions required an indepth and detailed business transformation involving hundreds of people and a massive effort to define, build and deploy new technology platforms.

Core Implementation Touchpoints

Deliverables

Embedded off shore report team structure, process and new technology platforms, along with the requisite Business Architecture and supporting target operating models and graduated Standard Operating Procedures.

Your Brand’s Story – from Start to Finish

Operating Models – A People Oriented Discipline

Following negative risk and impact assessments from regulators and industry press, a global bank needed to upgrade their technology platforms to support new regulatory requirements, frequencies and data mandated.  We worked very closely and at a detailed level to understand the existing business architecture, standard procedures and shortcomings and areas of operational risk. We then, in concert with leaders of all operational teams, built new and standardised high level and very detailed operating models, ensuring that there were agreed operational timelines, clear exception processes and capability to respond to critical emergent events with defined and tested responses.

Core Deliverables

New Target Operating Models – What we did

Researched and reviewed existing business architecture with a view to making process innovations, to consistently prepare submission quality artifacts by the  mandated deadlines.

Rolled out and embedded new target ops models supporting global sites across several functions and for a large number of reports on a range of platforms in parallel, testing and validating processes, platform integration, roles and responsibilities.

Digital Transformation Agency driven by strategic and technical excellence

Process reengineering is the redesign and improvement of the operations of a business or particular functions within. It represents core change
and requires new operating models.

The Goal

The goal was standardisation across the globe of the Software and Systems Development Testing and Quality Assurance  Process. We were able to bring years of indepth experience and broad skills base as well as directive insights to this multinational FMCG company.

Process Reengineering Core Implementation Touchpoints

What we did

• Deconstructed key testing and quality planning, governance and delivery assurances processes, having mapped each process stream to parallel and subsequent life cycle processes and dependencies.
• Delivered Quality Assurance and Testing model for application development projects globally with improved future state business processes, tools and organizational structure for off and on shore teams, ultimately adopted as the Global Standard for Software Testing and Quality Assurance.