One of the senior management’s responsibilities is to provide oversight of areas within their scope. There are various tools utilised, including reasonable steps:
– allocation of roles and responsibilities to lower level of management,
– setting policies and procedures.
These may be considered pervasive or descriptive arrangements. In practice, the main mechanisms to demonstrate that oversight responsibilities are exercised is through MI reporting and taking actions when things are out of order.
- MI reporting is in place, it is periodically reviewed and demonstrates certain KPIs and threshold breaches, especially in the clearly defined format of RAG statuses
- Incidents have already happened, registered and escalated, and remediation/ reactive steps are now being taken.
It is much easier to deal with information which has already been generated and identified and brought to the attention. It is then easy to follow-up and escalate.
- Generate input datapoints – the challenge is moved upstream and it is usually difficult to initiate datapoints that will go into this reporting. Generating inputs will follow it’s own path and usually there some pathway from bring broad ideas as a soft observation, then adding more meat and structure to it, shaping up and fine-tuning, changnig and adjusting. In the end, it may end up as a solid data point.
- Aggregation of silo data points, into a holistic picture – another type of challenge exists when we are looking at items in isolation, not taking a holistic mindset. It may all be working in each individual area, everything is fine on a stand-alone basis for each of the parts; but the entire piece is not functioning. And nobody wants to take ownership of the entire scope, with all structural disconnects, misalignment, interdependencies, etc. Raising datapoints on such structural issues is really touch… it will definitely face lack of accountability to answer the question ‘who is not doing what’ – it’s just there is noone taking the responsibility and accountability for the entire piece. Or usually, the person asking this question is actually who is not doing smth about it beyond only asking a question.