#46 – FICTIONAL RISKS – UMBERTO TUNESI

Umberto Tunesi pixOddly enough, though it is often said that imagination – or fiction – can never match reality.

Arts – generally speaking, such as literature, poetry, music, painting, sculpture, and so on – often anticipate real risks or thoroughly analyze them.

Why is it so?

Artists, be they writers or musicians or painters, etc., are not trained risk assessors, let alone risk managers.  However, if not all but certainly some of them have a – let me say -‘sense of risk’ that’s uncommon, and often superior even to risk’s experts. Continue reading

#45 – HOW SECURE ARE YOUR AUDITS? – UMBERTO TUNESI

Umberto Tunesi pixThere’s a mighty black and white, six minutes long documentary film enclosed to the italian progressive rock band PFM / Premiata Forneria Marconi Stati di Immaginazione (States of Imagination) music album.  Its title is La Conquista (The Conquest), it shows how a savage Indios tribe succeeds in building, with very poor means, a bridge crossing a very dangerous river, to ensure its survival. Continue reading

#44 – IN-PROGRESS PROCESS METRICS – UMBERTO TUNESI

Umberto Tunesi pixEspecially in quality business, we’re very much used to control processes via product characteristics when setting up the process, then let the process run under no control unless we sense some problem, ultimately checking the process again at the end of the production batch, via product characteristics once more, before delivery to customer.  This is the essence of process – control and SPC.

This preceding is typical both for tangible products and for services. Continue reading

#42 – RISK: A PRODUCT – UMBERTO TUNESI

Umberto Tunesi pixRisk, a Product: what a bewildering idea!

Actually, it’s not quite a bewildering idea.

RISK = PRODUCT
When we look at some official definitions of risk, such as “the possibility of incurring misfortune or loss” and “to act in spite of the possibility of injury or loss”, and we compare them with the ISO 9000 definition of ‘product’, that is “result of a process” (3.4.2), any enterprise, that is a process, may incur in misfortune, injury or loss.

Therefore, the equation holds true: risk = product. Continue reading