Risk Specialist – Planning and Reporting At UNOPS

Background Information and organizational context

The United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) is the operational arm of the United Nations (UN), supporting the successful implementation of its partners’ peacebuilding, humanitarian and development projects around the world. Mandated as a central resource of the UN, UNOPS provides procurement, financial management, project management, infrastructure and human resources services to a wide range of governments, donors and UN organizations. UNOPS has over 7,000 employees spread across 80 countries.

UNOPS operates in the world’s most challenging environments under a demand-driven and cost-recovery operating model, meaning that UNOPS environment and projects are inherently risky. This makes risk management, strategic planning and corporate reporting core competences for UNOPS and fundamental parts of its governance framework. Risk management in particular is integral to ensure UNOPS strategy aligns with UN values, supports the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, and enables UNOPS to fulfill its mandate.

UNOPS Risk Unit is part of the Risk and Compliance Group (RCG) which amalgamates key Second Line of Defence functions at UNOPS Headquarters. Under the direction of the Chief Risk Officer, the Unit is responsible for the enterprise risk management, information security and risk transfer functions, while the RCG is responsible for corporate reporting. The Unit’s role is to oversee that UNOPS strategy and key decisions are risk-informed, check that portfolio risk exposures are escalated and addressed in a timely and effective manner, and support other teams’ risk management activities at Headquarters and field offices worldwide. Jointly with the RCG, the Unit coordinates the Quarterly Management Review, a key institutional activity to facilitate an insightful, timely and thorough flow of quantitative and qualitative information—from across UNOPS to senior management—on recent performance, current issues and future challenges.

Functional Responsibilities

Under the guidance of the Risk Management Advisor – Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), the Risk Specialist is responsible for supporting the Risk Unit in reviewing and continuously improving ERM capabilities specific to policies, processes, roles, technologies, offices and project delivery contexts. The Risk Specialist also supports the Risk Unit—and the RCG more broadly—in coordinating strategic planning and corporate reporting processes to enable quality decision-making across UNOPS. This includes gathering, analyzing, interpreting, presenting and forecasting data on UNOPS financial, people and procedural performance, as well as insights related to partner engagement and institutional transformation. The Risk Specialist contributes to the implementation of initiatives to advance the above functions across UNOPS headquarters and its regional offices.

Strategic planning, decision analysis and corporate reporting:

• Perform trend analysis, scenario planning, stress testing and other horizon-scanning activities in collaboration with other teams across UNOPS headquarters and its regional offices.
• Support the development and deployment of decision analysis methodologies to foster high-quality partnership, engagement and investment commitments.
• Consolidate, analyze, visualize, quality assure and contribute to the interpretation of quantitative and qualitative information on UNOPS quarterly performance across different areas (e.g., finances, partnerships, operations, people and culture and risk management).
• Collaborate closely with key information owners from multiple units across UNOPS headquarters to facilitate a thorough, efficient and interactive flow of information; and jointly develop forward-looking insights to inform senior management.

Continuous improvement of risk management approaches:

• Perform analyses of complex portfolio-wide risk exposures; develop risk scenarios ranging from strategic to operational themes; and model risk probability distributions based on historical information and in the absence of such.
• Support risk reporting from all angles (e.g. portfolio exposure, reputational, third-party, global risks) through data consolidation, analytics and visualization; dashboard development; expert and field interviews; and secondary research.
• Assist in developing and rolling out bespoke risk escalation protocols and map those to performance metrics.
• Conduct reviews of UNOPS risk policies, processes, taxonomies, dashboards and assessment criteria.
• Contribute to the continuous improvement of UNOPS risk management by tracking the latest risk identification, assessment, evaluation and communication methods and techniques; staying up-to-date with relevant trends; and applying best practices.

Capacity building and knowledge management:

• Contribute to develop and provide risk management training, coaching and facilitation support to UNOPS and its regional offices.
• Ensure full documentation of risk management approaches and activities to enhance knowledge-sharing and transfer within the Risk Unit and across UNOPS.
• Help establish and promote a risk management network (i.e., Community of Practice) for effectively transferring knowledge, sharing innovative solutions and capturing lessons learned across UNOPS globally.

General responsibilities:

• Establish priorities and develop work plans for supervisor approval.
• Provide regular updates on progress of priority initiatives agreed with the supervisor(s) and demonstrate accountability for effectively carrying out the appointed duties.
• Support the Risk Unit’s management activities, to help ensure the effort is well coordinated and coherent across key functional domains.
• Collaborate with key stakeholders within and outside the Risk Unit to ensure continuous on-the-job learning and harvesting of internal benchmarks.

Impact of Results:

The successful achievement of results by the Risk Specialist – Planning and Reporting affects UNOPS ability to deliver against its mandate, protects UNOPS reputation and builds future operational resilience. Key contributions of this role include: 1) supporting effective management of risks on an enterprise-wide basis, 2) maximizing the quality of key decisions made in challenging and uncertain circumstances, 3) building future project delivery capacity and, consequently, 4) strengthening UNOPS competitive position as the partner of choice.

Education/Experience/Language requirements

Education:

• An advanced university degree (Master’s degree or PhD) preferably in risk management, economics, finance, statistics, physics or related fields
• A first-level university degree (Bachelor’s degree or equivalent) with a minimum of two (2) additional years of relevant work experience may be accepted in lieu of the advanced university degree

Experience:

• A minimum of five (5) years of professional experience in risk management, corporate strategy or performance management (required)
• Experience working in an international context (e.g., global company, international organization, international consultant) (required)
• Experience in quantitative and qualitative risk analysis (required)
• Experience in data management, analytics and visualization (required)
• Experience in strategic foresight and horizon scanning (required)
• Experience in developing information dashboards (required)
• Experience working with big data and/or risk models using Python, R or SAS (desirable)
• Experience in community development and relationship management (desirable)
• Experience in project-based organizations (desirable)

Certifications:

Certifications in risk management (from IRM, RIMS or similar) and/or decision quality (such as an SDRM certificate) are considered an advantage.

Languages:

• Fluency in English is required
• Fluency in Spanish and/or French is considered an advantage