"Description: This course examines the ways in which a senior security manager can use the principles of risk analysis and risk management to better position a defense organization, process, or mission to anticipate and mitigate adverse events and consequences and to pursue new opportunities. This course expands the study of risk to include threats, consequences and impacts of events, the value of assets, and a broad view of countermeasures and vulnerabilities. The course examines the concept of risk "gain" in risk management decisions and the ability to calculate and package the analysis for presentation to decision-makers in a comprehensible, consistent, and objective fashion.
Learning Objectives: This course is designed to enable students to:
- Evaluate a wide array of risk management philosophies and methodologies across a representative group of agencies and issues
- Analyze and prioritize valued assets of a specific program, operation, installation or organization
- Analyze and discuss challenges to assigning value to assets and articulating relative value of non-similar items and non-structural assets such as human life
- Synthesize challenges to gathering timely and accurate threat information in an all-hazards environment particularly very infrequent events and future adversary capabilities
- Evaluate and articulate challenges in determining all significant vulnerabilities of a specific program, operation, installation or organization
- Identify, compare, and contrast risk management methodologies and tools used within DOD and other agencies
- Compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of a variety of common vulnerability assessment and risk assessment tools
- Evaluate the role that assumptions play in risk analysis and management and how to incorporate assumptions into studies
- Determine, articulate, and defend the weights assigned to risk factors during analysis and discuss effects of weighting
- Recognize the role that mitigation strategies should play in reducing overall risk by addressing any or all of the three risk factors
- Synthesize the current trends in the risk management community in addressing complexities in each of the three risk factors and their combined analysis
- Evaluate how risk management could be applied to a specific program, operation, installation or organization as a student project
- Analyze possible security measures to reduce risk to an asset as determined and articulated in the student project
- Synthesize objective and balanced benefits and costs to contending risk mitigation approaches in a fully documented final paper
- Present this synthesis, and accompanying uncertainties, in a comprehensive and balanced risk analysis and recommendations to senior agency leadership"
