By large I'm thinking of, say, 1,000 or more employees.

I am a risk analyst at a large aerospace company; my job is to help determine cost, schedule, and technical risks for our programs and help develop mitigation strategies for those risks.

Monday and Tuesday I was invited to be a panelist at a conference on computer modeling and simulation; I was invited because the people at the company hosting the conference read a paper I published on integrated cost & schedule risk analysis. Even though the conference didn't focus on risk, they thought that I could contribute something of value.

What I found out is that there don't seem to be many companies out there that have a clue what risk is, much less how to manage or mitigate it.

I have been considering for some time that I might want to start my own consulting business, and the results of the conference reinforce the soundness of that idea.

What I'm looking for, therefore, is a potential client base. (My wife wouldn't dream of letting me give up a steady paycheck without a whole lot af assurance that the career change will work, financially!) If people here work for large companies that may give me an avenue for approaching them about risk analysis in their businesses.

Thanks in advance for your responses, suggestions, and so on.

 

I work for a company with 85 000+ employees worldwide. I don't know if you'd be able to get work with them as a consultant since they have a HUGE risk analysis and safety team. You can't spit without them doing some sort of analysis on it.

That said, if you're getting at risks in terms of development and delivery of product or something, that might catch there attention. Could you be a little more specific on the types of risk you're involved in analysing? Personal risk for employees (ie, personal safety), product risk (cost of production vs. projected returns, expected returns), failure risk (reduction of safety factors vs. expected failure), etc, etc....?

 

Principally cost, schedule and performance risk.

If, for example, you have estimated (or budgeted) $10 million and 18 months for a development project, how likely is it that it will really cost $10 million or less? Could things go really well and allow the project to be completed for $9 million in 15 months? If everything goes wrong could it end up costing $20 million and take three years? How likely are these to happen? What might happen to cause either of these? What can you do now to try to avoid future problems?

These are (generically) the sorts of questions that I ask. The answers provide the means for quantifying and mitigating the risks.

Personal safety and failure risk are much more difficult areas mainly because they are much harder to quantify monitarily--if you can reduce the risk of injury by 30% is it worth $100,000? $1,000,000? $10,000,000? The analytical approach is similar, and my techniques would be useful, but the value of the results is more nebulous.

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by magician
... my job is to help determine cost, schedule, and technical risks for our programs and help develop mitigation strategies for those risks.

.... (My wife wouldn't dream of letting me give up a steady paycheck without a whole lot af assurance that the career change will work, financially!)

 

I work for a very large company too. I'm pretty sure but not positive that we have a whole staff of "bean counters" as we like to call them that analyze stuff like that all day. Good luck with your project though.

 

Does Autonation work? They have a lot of people working for them in the corporate and the dealers that they own.

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by tritium_pie

 

I just got hired at a nationwide insurance company for autodealers and auto garages...I think they understand risk. Maybe I am thinking of the wrong type of risk

Ryan

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by tritium_pie
there's something amusingly ironic about these two statements.

 

I work for a financial services arm of a "Fortune 5" company. Last year, I spent a few months working on delivering IT solutions for our risk team. These systems focus on the risk around financial instruments and not project risk. They have a pretty deep staff on hand, but are willing to look outside their team for other specialties. However, those folks tend to be the top of their category. IMHO, I'm guessing you'll need to do some work for smaller companies while you make a name for yourself for the big guys.

Sounds like the classic risk / reward dilemma.