A national rail operator specialising in both the running of high-speed railway infrastructure and ownership of key stations across its route approached us to help them improve the way in which they manage risk. Their operational and commercial activities require contractual relationships with a wide range of partners, suppliers and other entities. Their aim was to not only improve their own internal risk awareness but also to improve the way in which risk is managed across contracts and partnerships.

As a first step, we delivered an interactive Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) training session for the operator’s risk management team which reports to the General Counsel. In this session, we provided the Risk Manager, Risk Champions and General Counsel with a comprehensive overview of topics including:

• What is Risk Management?
• Why manage risk?
• The Risk Process
• Roles and Responsibilities
• Risk Appetite & Tolerance

During this session, we also helped the team identify ways in which risk processes and tools could be adapted to support improved contractor risk management.

By way of follow-up, we then delivered advisory support to the General Counsel in order to i) review the operator’s approach to setting and reporting on Risk Appetite, providing her with recommendations that she could take to the Board for approval.

This project delivered:

• Consistent familiarity with – and understanding of – key aspects of ERM across the Risk Team
• Common terminology for use across the business
• Enhanced awareness of the business case for risk management
• Improved operational tools for enhanced contractor risk management
• The opportunity to create improvements to the process of setting, monitoring and reporting at Board level on Risk Appetite