Tetra Tech EC & Risk Assessment
Discuss the evaluation of the risk management and compliance process at Tetra Tech
The risk management and compliance process at Tetra Tech is -- if you want to use a buzzword more often associated with the digital revolution than with a waste management enterprise (like, frankly, Tetra Tech) -- "crowdsourced."
Certain aspects of Tetra Tech's process seem almost enthusiastically aware of the SOX provisions protecting corporate whistle-blowers (of the sort who might have ratted out Enron or the sleaziest subprime-mortgage-vendors of the Florida panhandle a bit sooner than actually occurred, and whom Sarbanes-Oxley seems positively to encourage) as outlined in Fletcher and Newell's study of Tetra Tech: they quote management as stating to the employees "You have an obligation to raise your hand and say if I do it the way you are making me do it, it is not going to be optimal. Everything is about continuous improvement." (Fletcher and Newell, page 9).
The fact that this is framed as an ethic of continuous improvement, not as a step towards allowing inmates to run an asylum, seems to indicate that the chief benefit of crowdsourcing is that it makes risk-management into a Wikipedia-style group-project where anyone can correct an error of fact. It seems mostly designed to force potentially out-of-touch senior management to actually pay attention to the day-to-day details of the activities their subalterns plan and perform. But in its emphasis on the planning stage as being more important than the execution, Tetra Tech's strategy is definitely to be commended.
1a. Review case Exhibit 2 and analyze the components of the process as they relate to effective risk management
The flowchart named "Exhibit 2: Schematic of Task Initiation Procedure" (or TIP, as the authors of the study call it) shows Tetra Tech's own home-made map for how they approach the management of risk -- which is potentially very large in the toxic waste cleanup industry in which Tetra Tech is apparently primus inter-pares. It was instituted when two projects in one of Tetra Tech's predecessor companies got into the remediation business, which involves removal of toxic sludge and things like that, under the government's Superfund to bankroll such cleanup projects under oversight of the EPA. They rapidly discovered, with a Superfund cleanup site in New Jersey in particular, that problems of environmental devastation are, if anything, under-assessed in terms of the potentially increased financial (not to mention health) risks to the company if the ramifications of the cleanup are not fully understood before the job is undertaken.
The chief thing to remember here is that, while many businesses have cried foul over environmental legislation like the Superfund even existing at all, anyone who has the most passing interest in Superfund legislation would surely have recalled the notorious "Love Canal" case before accepting a Superfund cleanup job in New Jersey which assessed the job as relatively quick, clean, and easy. Love Canal was, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, shorthand in the mass media for a toxic waste cleanup gone horribly wrong: precisely the sort of thing that Superfund legislation was put in place to take care of. Love Canal was a neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York, who discovered that over twenty thousand tons of toxic waste had been buried underneath their streets and homes by the Hooker Chemical corporation. The crisis began with the discoveries of birth defects and anomalies (including increased incidence of miscarriage) and grew until by 1978 President Jimmy Carter was forced to declare the area a State of Emergency -- for reasons of health, marking it as the first occasion on which the federal government disbursed emergency funds for anything other than a natural disaster. Love Canal was, of course, a primary impetus for the enactment of CERCLA, the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act, which established the Superfund in the first place to pay for this kind of work to be done. Twenty years after President Carter declared Love Canal a state of emergency, medical doctors were still warning in 1998 that -- given the increased risk of cancers (including leukaemia) that had been documented from persons who had lived in Love Canal -- the site still represented a "public health time bomb" whose massive costs were going to grow yet more massive within short order.
In other words, one could point to the fact that the original...
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