02 May
Rank your CCM risk
A risk ranking matrix can help you to understand how to breakdown your CCM project risks.
What is a risk ranking matrix?
It’s a simple 2 axis chart that plots the consequences or impacts of an event on one axis and the likelihood of and frequency on the other. It helps you to quickly assess your risks and the ones that should have priority. Once prioritised you can plan your organisations response to those identified risks.
How to use it?
The 2 questions we need to ask are:
- what are the negative repercussions from a risk event taking place?
- what is the probability of this happening?
The table below gives a typical categorization of risk severity and their likelihood.
Table 1: Classifying risks & their frequencies
| CONSEQUENCES: | FREQUENCY: |
| Marginal: risks that have no negative consequences or pose no threat | Rare: minimal probability of occurring |
| Minor: there’s a small negative consequence but this can be managed and doesn’t materially impact success | Unlikely: an uncommon event with a small chance of occurring |
| Moderate: these risks bring some negative consequences. They can impact on projects and your organisation | Possible: these are risks that regularly occur. Perhaps a 50% chance of happening |
| Major: these risks have significant and serious effects on projects and organisations | Likely: Better than a 75% chance of occurring |
| Severe: extreme negative consequences – they can cause entire projects to fail or disrupt the BAU operations of a company | Almost certain: >90% – no explanation needed |
Applying it to a matrix
Once we have an understanding of consequences and frequency, we can create our matrix and from there we can identify risks and their potential impact on your organisation.
Now the fun bit – applying to CCM projects
Systems don’t operate in isolation, and a CCM platform is no exception. Integrating the platform into an existing environment will provide many business, technical and operational challenges. Are they all understood? And adequately rated and prioritised from a risk perspective.
From our experiences here’s some of the “gotcha’s” that regularly occur & should be assessed and prioritised in any project/implementation plan.
- If outbound communications are part of a larger transformation or digitisation project, then CCM is a part – maybe 20% of a total project – but it can hold up a project going live. If you cannot send “stuff” to customers then it affects your brand, your collections, your market share and potentially creates a regulatory event
- Identifying what should be in scope for the CCM platform, and what other systems should handle. This is a big one and quite often the CCM platforms are not fully leveraged due to a misunderstanding or misalignment of capabilities
- Underestimating what is involved in preparing the data from core systems for the CCM tool – the same implications as in #1
- Vendor professional services can be a) really expensive, and b) be costly because they don’t have onshore resources (and maybe you cannot offshore because of data sovereignty). Our experience has been that cost blow-outs are usually one of the 2 key drivers for external quality assurance
- Upgrades are significant in terms of cost and time; you have to test all the integrations with other systems
- The CCM technology and how it works mean that you have to significantly modify the way your systems work or create work arounds
And as an example, here’s how we’d rate #1 for a sample customer . . .
Background: A major project such as a replacement Policy Administration System (PAS) for an insurer. One of the ancilliary functions for the PAS is a new Customer Communications platform. The legacy documents and templates need to be migrated to the new platform to support all the lifecycle communications related to Underwriting (new business & renewals), Claims and Billing. If the CCM part is not rated and managed, then the impacts on the project can be high to critical.
Summary
In any project, whether it’s specific to a CCM or ECM platform, or where they are part of a larger implementation such as a core system replacement, it’s critical to avoid one of the main reasons projects run over budget and/or late. By understanding where the risks lie, the dependencies and the scenarios to manage or mitigate risks you’re better prepared to make a success of your project.
Written by Steve & Shane, April 2020
