Risk and opportunity assessment

What is the best time interval to assess/re-assess the risk and opportunity?

Answer:

It is difficult to give a straight answer. That will depend on your organization’s context and interested parties. For example, in my country, last December a lot of organizations updated their risks and opportunities register. Then, February and March came, and coronavirus’s lockdowns freeze economies and outdated all those registers.

So, set a frequency that could match your context and interested parties. For example, technological organizations working at the edge, may need to use shorter intervals. You can set a yearly deep assess/re-assess exercise followed my monthly or quarterly lighter exercises together with monitoring and analysis of performance.

Do I need to have operational and strategic risk and opportunity assessments separately?

Answer.

Technical answer: No, you don’t. It is your organization’s call.

Experience-based answer: It is better to separate strategic and operational risk and opportunity assessments. That way, participants could work at different abstraction levels without having to continuously change from one to another. Ideally, I recommend an iterative approach to avoid daydreaming and losing contact with the ground.

• Start with strategic level
• Use strategic level as an input to the operational level
• Use the operational level as an input to fine tune the strategic level

Perhaps the following information about risk and ISO 9001 could be useful for you:

• Article - How to address risks and opportunities in ISO 9001 - https://advisera.com/9001academy/blog/2016/06/21/how-to-address-risks-and-opportunities-in-iso-9001/
• Free webinar on demand - How to implement risk management in ISO 9001:2015 - https://advisera.com/9001academy/webinar/how-to-implement-risk-management-in-iso-90012015-free-webinar/
• Enroll for free course - ISO 9001:2015 Foundations Course - https://advisera.com/training/iso-9001-foundations-course/
• Book - Discover ISO 9001:2015 Through Practical Examples - https://advisera.com/books/discover-iso-9001-2015-through-practical-examples/