“Risk & Controls (‘R&C’) is engaged in a massive transformation impacting the entire PMI organization with the project Seed team being the driving force behind it.

The project Seed team has been working relentlessly with a lot of enthusiasm and dedication to achieve great milestones in 2020 and 2021.

Their courage to push the boundaries, navigating multiple stakeholders with a common objective and their resilience to drive a complex project has been an amazing achievement.

I am extremely proud of them!”

Marie-Pauline Lauret, Global Head of Risk and Controls,

You might not realize this, but Project Seed started 18 months ago.

It is a cornerstone to the transformation of our risk management, assurance and internal control practices.

With PMI’s journey towards a smoke-free future, the company has been introducing new products, business models, commercialization capabilities, technology solutions, and various other changes. Under these dynamics, it is apparent that the company faces new complexities, challenges, opportunities, and… risks.

Project Seed encompasses our activities to increase visibility of these risks and adequately respond to them by means of standardizing, optimizing and (re)structuring the company’s internal controls environment.

As such, Project Seed is the enabler for Risk & Controls to act as a true Co Pilot towards our internal business stakeholders. Providing full visibility of their emerging and evolving risks and how we are doing in terms of responding to these risks… not only locally in an individual market or central function… no, across the entire world!

As we pursue the vision of Project Seed we will enable business functions to understand and take ownership in an efficient way of their risks and controls.

The project team worked on establishing new processes and together with IT Corporate Platform on rolling out One GRC… PMI’s Governance, Risk Compliance platform which will ultimately serve as the glue that will hold the risk, assurance and internal control activities together.

But Project Seed goes beyond setting up new processes and a technology platform… the project is also about people and changing the mindset. This is why our project team works as a fully integrated project team connecting and bringing together SMEs from different business functions but also best in class contractors to benchmark with the industry best practices, creating a sense of community, way of thinking, communicating and working together.

As project team we started with a blank page, and as such it was a great opportunity to design brighter solutions with an important space to deliver and freedom to dream up and deliver better.

And because by definition each project comes to an end, Project Seed worked on building up a permanent office called GRC Office that will survive the project and be there to support business by providing accurate, relevant and actionable risk insights to enable decision-making.

Whereas Project Seed lived up to its promises by delivering Global Standard and localized processes, risks and controls, look forwards that the project team continues on introducing new GRC capabilities in 2022 that will help you and our business functions.

A big “THANK YOU!” It’s the people contributing to Project Seed that make its vision a reality… and this goes far beyond the boundaries of the project team itself.

Literally hundreds of people within Risk & Controls, tirelessly working on the localization activities, Finance teams and many other business functions providing their specialist inputs… this is what makes Project Seed a success!

And in all honestly, where nobody thought that the topics that Project Seed is dealing with would be perceived exciting, the project demonstrates as a true co-pilot how risks, where well managed, can be converted into opportunity.

We strongly believe the SFS Co Pilot Team Award would be a testimony for the project team, broader Risk & Controls, Finance and other communities who contributed, one way or another to the project.

Thank you all!