How did you get into risk management and how long have you been in risk management?
I worked in several roles relating to business planning, information management and performance management, all of which involved elements of risk management. I was asked to help out the Council’s Interim Risk Manager at the time and when he left, I was asked to take on the role as a secondment for 12 months. That was 12 years ago!
What do you enjoy about it?
My role is primarily a strategic one, working at the heart of one of the largest local authorities in the country. I get to work with our Corporate Management Team on an almost daily basis and I derive great motivation from the fact that they treat me as a trusted advisor and welcome the constructive challenges that I put to them.
What challenges do you face in your business? What challenges are facing your sector?
My organisation faces many of the same challenges that others across the local government sector and wider public sector face. Years of funding restraint and uncertainty, allied with demand and inflationary cost pressures, have meant that Councils are having to make tough choices about the services they provide or commission and work incredibly hard to ensure they can still fulfil statutory duties and obligations adequately.
Do you have any specific risk challenges within your organisation?
Over the past decade, the volume of risks identified across the council, and their potential severity, has increased markedly. This has led me to warn our Corporate Management Team and Cabinet Members about the danger of us becoming desensitised to risk if we are not careful i.e. it is important not to get too used to looking at long lists of High rated risks and consider it the norm.
How are you addressing those challenges?
The first part of addressing the challenge was to raise awareness via corporate reporting. From there, I developed some additional criteria for what risks should sit on our corporate risk register and which could be delegated out to our directorates, which has helped to reduce the volume of risks on the corporate register.
My team and I have also been challenging managers across the organisation if we see High rated risks haven’t come down for some time, to ensure there is still a sense of urgency to mitigate them as far as possible, accepting that there will be some factors outside of their control.
How long have you used CORE?
We have been using the JCAD CORE system since 2017.
How does CORE help you in your role?
In an organisation of our size and the scope of the services we provide, it is critical that we have visibility of our risk profile. My central team uses CORE to swiftly access risk information relating to over 600 risks across all departments, as well as pull off reports that show trends, patterns and key changes.
We are now starting to utilise the API link alongside the V5 release of CORE, producing Power BI dashboards to present at management meetings.
How does CORE help your organisation?
The system is simple to use, not just for my team, but for the network of risk contacts across the organisation, which means they can input information onto the system without requiring lengthy training sessions.
Our Internal Audit function also has view only access to the system to aid the development of their risk -based audit plan and to view risks that are relevant to the audit activity they are conducting.
Would you be happy to occasionally talk to a potential user about your experiences of us and our products?
Yes.
Would you be happy to share a brief quote? Your thoughts on JCAD or the support services, or the product?
JCAD CORE is a user friendly system that gives us important visibility of our organisation’s risk profile in one place, allowing us to interrogate the information swiftly, and the friendly team at JCAD are on hand to provide support with any questions or issues that may arise.
