October 14

‘Well, I guess this is it,’ Bobbie thought to herself as she looked down at the pile of notes next to her and then back up to the form on her screen. ‘I can’t put this off any longer. Time to actually put this bad boy together.’

She looked down at the screen and selected ‘Market and Financial’ from the threat categories and started typing.

A couple of hours later, she stepped back from her desk and stretched before heading down to the kitchenette for more coffee. She had made great progress and was mad at herself for being so hesitant to start the actual analysis. 

‘Just like doing our taxes: always worse in theory than in practice.’ She thought, remembering the same feeling she had every April. She would put off doing their taxes for weeks before finally knuckling down and pulling out all the receipts, bank statements, and invoices she and Alex saved. In the end, because everything was neatly organized, it only took her a couple of hours online and everything was done.

That morning had been the same. 

Bobbie was thankful for the time she had spent working on the definitions and terms she was using, sense-checking these with the key individuals up front. By the time they finished their interviews, they were all speaking the same language or at least similar dialects. She’d been ordering her notes as she went, marking these up and making comments along the way so now it was now simply a case of filling in the forms. The software she was using was pretty intuitive and easy to navigate so there wasn’t a lot to do other than select the right values and then type in – or in her case cut and paste –  explanatory notes to help put things into context. 

She was pleased to see her progress in real time as the software’s dashboard started to reflect the risks she was adding and she was looking forward to showing this to Xav. 

‘He does like a good metrics dashboard,’ she thought. 

Fresh coffee in hand, Bobbie returned to her desk. She quickly cleared a few priority emails to keep things moving on the HSE front before she popped her headphones back on, logged back into the risk management platform and became lost in the report again.

By mid-afternoon she was done.

‘Time to let that soak overnight then I can start to sense-check things tomorrow,” she thought as she closed down for the day. There had been a few too many late nights these last few weeks and she was looking forward to getting home in time to enjoy a relaxed evening with the twins.

 By Friday, she’d cleaned up her results and put together an accompanying set of slides to help put things into context. All that was left now was to start sharing the results with everyone.

Unfortunately, that was going to prove to be the trickiest part.