What Are the Key Takeaways from the Hydro one Case?

What are the key takeaways from the Hydro One case?

1. Involve employees in risk management process

Risk management will not be successful without the participation of all the employees. While it is important for the top management to emphasize and support the implementation of risk management, the role of ordinary employees are equally important. While it may be the top management that are more capable of assessing the impacts or likelihood of potential risks, it is usually the employees that are able to identify risks inherent to the company. No matter how well the top management has identified or assessed the potential risks, controls or measures that mitigate cannot function effectively without the full support of employees.

2. Alignment of COSO Framework/ ISO 31000.

Hydro One employs a similar concept as the COSO Framework or ISO 31000 to manage its risks. This shows the effectiveness of employing the COSO framework or ISO 31000 in real life example. A comparison between the steps employed by the management and the proposed guidelines by COSO framework is done.

Firstly, they identify their strategic objectives in the company by engaging the top management. This is essentially the objective setting of the COSO framework. After which, they went on to the event identification stage to identify possible events that might occur through polling of managers. Following that, they moved on to the 3rd stage of COSO framework which is risk assessment process. This was done through the Delphi-method for voting to establish the impacts of the risks on each strategic objective. From there, they will proceed on to creating an appropriate risk response and controls while ensuring information and communication are being managed properly. Then they can continue monitoring the changing circumstances faced by Hydro One.