Corporate Plan 2019-2023

PM&C's Corporate Plan for 2019–20 to 2022–23, sets out how we intend to deliver on our responsibilities, and addresses our operating environment, our people and capability, our risk management and oversight and our key activities and performance measures.

Risk management and oversight

The environment in which we operate is complex, multi-layered and susceptible to rapid change. In order for us to accomplish our mission, we must engage with risk. The Department’s approach to risk management focuses on deliberate and practical environment scanning, the identification of real risks and opportunities and the development of sustainable mitigation strategies. These are essential underpinnings to provide a willingness to pursue considered risks and manage them.

The risks with which PM&C engages fall into three primary categories:

  1. risk to our staff;
  2. risk to the critical enablers of government for which we are responsible; and 
  3. risks in the quality of the advice that we provide to the Government.

PM&C’s operating environment is by its nature fast-paced. To maintain this pace we must look after our staff. We have established a PM&C Wellbeing Strategy, a robust framework to promote physical and mental safety. Over the next 12 months we will focus on embedding this strategy in the day-to-day operations of the Department.

PM&C has a unique stewardship role to sustain and protect the core functions of the executive branch of Government, as well as supporting the legislative branch. These critical enabling functions, through our support to the Cabinet as well as the broader Ministry, require the maintenance of deep expertise, and robust systems and processes. Failure of these functions poses significant risk to the country, to the Government, and to the Department. We set our risk thresholds to ensure that these functions are secure.

In a world where the public service no longer functions as the only source of advice to government, the cost of poor quality policy advice is high. We must ensure that the advice we provide is comprehensive, robust and informed. We must build and maintain trust with all our stakeholders.

We adjust our risk threshold in relation to the criticality of certain issues – we will not tolerate anything but low risk for our people, but we must be willing to take opportunities. To do this better, we are adapting our risk management framework to genuinely support decision making, while ensuring compliance with the requirements of the PGPA Act and the Commonwealth Risk Management Policy.