Mastering Risk Management Podcast · Anthony Wilson

MRM 111 - Matthew Oleniuk

·36 min·2 clips

Standardize the processes first, then buy the software: Matthew Oleniuk's critique of Australia's Gov ERP project.

1. The Mastering Risk Management podcast, episode MRM 111, covers why large public sector transformation projects struggle and how risk conversations can protect their ambition. 2. Host Anthony Wilson, who has also sat in the chief audit executive chair, interviews Matthew Oleniuk, a former chief audit executive of a Canadian federal financial and insurance regulator who now runs theriskinsider.com from the UAE. 3. Oleniuk's core thesis is that risk is 'the other side of the objective coin' and should prepare teams to deliver a 'moonshot' rather than 'knock it down seven or eight pegs'. 4. He describes a career split between roughly 15 years in audit and earlier project delivery work across the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea, noting that project teams treat risk as a form to fill out while auditors treat it as paramount. 5. He contrasts sectors by saying private companies are forgiven overruns if a project becomes a revenue driver, while the public sector has no big hit to offset them, which breeds a risk-avoidance culture and layers of oversight. 6. Wilson raises Australia's Pink Bats insulation program, in which young workers died in roof spaces, and Oleniuk adds that politicians' claims like '5000 jobs' hide definitional questions about whether a part-time job counts as 10 hours or 25. 7. Oleniuk analyzes Australia's Gov ERP initiative, which aimed to standardize finance, payroll, HR and procurement across federal agencies, and says the human process-engineering work should come before any software purchase. 8. He recounts reviewing an in-house software implementation where executives said 'my team definitely uses it' while program officers said 'I work in Word and Excel and I copy paste', and Wilson mocks the line 'we're not going to change any of the standard processes'. 9. Wilson recounts telling a Risk Management Institute of Australasia audience about a project 10 years behind schedule and four times over budget, which turned out to be the Sydney Opera House, while Oleniuk cites the widely quoted figure that 50% of projects fail on scope, time and budget. 10. Project managers, risk professionals and public sector leaders will get the most from this episode.

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