This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Almost no operational failure starts with a machine. It starts with a person making a decision that looked entirely reasonable at the time.

How the failure actually happens

Someone approves an exception because the client is important. Someone skips a check because the check has never once found anything. Someone knows the workaround and never writes it down, and then leaves. Six months later there is an incident review, and every individual decision in the chain was defensible. That is what operational risk is. It is not a register of unlikely disasters — it is the accumulated cost of small reasonable choices nobody was watching.

What this course covers

Thirty-three lessons in five blocks. The risk framework first: the heat map, the fraud triangle, the 4I model, cognitive bias and conflict of interest, ISO 31000, the risk hierarchy, escalation, leadership-team dynamics, risk culture, the three lines of defence and the high-reliability organisation. Then the place risk materialises — the process: mapping in five different forms, waste, standardisation, maturity, process architecture, and the full toolkit for finding a root cause, from 5 Whys and 8D through SIPOC, prioritisation matrices, DRIVE and ICOR. Then verification: checking a claim, a company or a person from open sources using Boolean search, X-ray and Google Dorks, with the ethics of it stated plainly. Then continuity: capturing what lives in one person's head, running retrospectives on mistakes, and measuring whether any of it is used. Finally the audit: express maturity scoring, a weighted checklist, four data collection methods, the RACI, the gap analysis and a roadmap with a return calculation.

A note on the folder names

Two blocks were recorded for a people-function audience. The risk material is general — ISO 31000, the three lines of defence, the fraud triangle and the high-reliability organisation do not change by department, and the function appears in two lessons out of ten as an example of a risk owner. The audit block demonstrates its method on one function, but the method itself — audit levels, weighted checklists, gap analysis, RACI, payback — transfers to any of them. The verification block comes from a course on advanced internet search, and its last two lessons are taught as recruiting and sales techniques.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike Pritula. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 33 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working material: the heat map, the fraud triangle, ISO 31000, the three lines of defence, five map types, 5 Whys, 8D, SIPOC, DRIVE, the audit checklist and roadmap

• A full audit demonstration on a real 200-person company

Where to start

Take the last thing that went wrong in your area and ask which control should have caught it. If you cannot name the control, that is the course. Enrol now and start today.