Risk Register Software puts Easington on Track to Integrated Risk Management

The District Council of Easington presides over a twelve mile stretch of beautiful Durham coastline and the countryside, small towns and villages surrounding Peterlee, a town created just after the Second World War. The district is renowned for its lively spirit and ability to attract inward investment following the demise of the coal industry.

The Council received an “Excellent” rating under CPA and has been recognised for its strong approach to managing risk at both a Strategic and Operational level. Read more about this on the Audit Commission's website.

As with all authorities, Easington has a duty to its electorate to manage, with best endeavours, the risks to which it is exposed. Stuart Wardle, Principal Administration Officer at the District of Easington has tried many approaches over the past 12 years to embed risk management into the everyday behaviours of council employees. “I believe that risk management is a general management skill along with performance, people and financial management,” said Wardle. In the last four years, he launched a review of corporate risk that is now an integral aspect of the Council’s corporate business planning process.

The first corporate risk review identified thirty nine corporate risks. With appropriate actions taken, a further review removed a number of these existing risks and identified more than twenty new ones. The second review was extended to include the Council’s Service Units from which a further 220 risks were identified. “More importantly, over seventy of these related to inadequate resources,” said Stuart Wardle, “We had to find software to help us manage our risk register and to prioritise the available resources to mitigate those risks.”

To this end, District of Easington purchased five licenses of Risk Register Professional LA, the PC-based risk management solution developed by Risk Software Ltd. Risk Register was built together with the North East Key Risk Profiling Group and is used by authorities throughout the UK from Kent Fire Service and East Devon District Council to Derby City Council and Shropshire County Council.

“We have another corporate risk review in September 2004. This will also include a full review of risks to the Service Plans. It is a major piece of work and together with Risk Software people we are loading the risk data in anticipation of that review,” said Wardle. “The workload at review will be much easier to monitor and update through the use of Risk Register.”

“We chose Risk Register because it was easy to use and could be customised to suit our own hybrid risk matrix. The package isn’t just something that makes creating a risk register easier, it is genuinely a risk management tool which, for example, automatically generates reminders for required action plans and provides a comprehensive audit trail of all changes, updates and amendments. ” he said.

While Risk Register will be the tool that will help Easington DC develop their future requirements for managing risks, Wardle’s vision is for a product that integrates risk management into the day-to-day activities of council management and staff. Furthermore, by using the software, Wardle and his team have begun to recognise similarities and patterns in the way risks are described so that even though a risk may be identified in different departments to have different effects, it is the same risk or even class of risk. This will enable a more effective allocation of resources and facilitate the sharing of information and common solutions between Departments.

“We are aiming to produce a generic menu of risks so that managers can input the type of risk, and all its default attributes with one click,” said Wardle. “We will always have to offer the assessor the ability to input a unique definition and we need to find a way to ensure that assessors do not input a generic risk when they have identified something unique. These are issues which when confronted will go a long way to making risk management just another management discipline.”

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