Risk List

Do you know why you do what you do? Is there anything else you should be doing? Risk List lets you manage the risks which may stop you reaching your objectives.

Manage your Risks

Do you know what might stop you from reaching your objectives? Risk List lets your link Risks to Objectives. Does the following sound familiar to you?

• I want to get more sales
• I want to improve customer service
• I want to spend less time doing [xyz]
• I want to Grow Big

Using Risk List as your Risk Management tool lets you assign risks against these objectives. You can’t get more sales if your website keeps going down. That’s a Risk.

Control your Risks

Once you know your risks, you can control them. Add controls and link them to risks. Assign an owner to the control. Make sure that it’s operational and helps you to manage the risk. For example running pingdom or other server monitoring tools is a control which helps you detect whether your website keeps going down. Classify controls

• Detective – is there a problem? What is your downtime report showing
• Preventative – if a condition is not met, then this will stop something going ahead
• Corrective – this is something which is done after something happens. If your site goes down you’d contact the host, complain, perhaps even move host

The above uses the risk of your website going down as an example.

Track Metrics

Do you know what measures your success? What should you and your team be focussing on?

• Grow monthly sales revenue
• Increase email subscribers
• Improve customer response times
• Grow Twitter following
• Create and track your metrics

Manage Processes

Do you know how your processes tie in to which risk you are managing? Who does what.

• See what’s due when
• See who needs to do what
• Set frequency (recurring monthly, weekly, daily)
• Mark complete / incomplete

Risk Dashboard Overview

Risk List adds new Dashboard widgets so you can see at a glance your Risk Information.

• See your risks on a Heat Map
• See your top risks in your Risk Overview
• Track actions
• View upcoming processes
• Plus much more

A brief Markdown Example

Ordered list:

1. Some feature
2. Another feature
3. Something else about the plugin

Unordered list:

• something
• something else
• third thing

Here’s a link to WordPress and one to Markdown’s Syntax Documentation.
Titles are optional, naturally.

Markdown uses email style notation for blockquotes and I’ve been told:

Asterisks for emphasis. Double it up for strong.

• Upload the plugin files to the /wp-content/plugins/risk-list directory, or install the plugin through the WordPress plugins screen directly.
• Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ screen in WordPress
• Add objectives. Link risks to objectives.
• Add controls and metircs to manage your risks.
• Track processes and actions and link to risks.

Why does managing risks matter?

Determining your business Objectives and Risks stopping you meeting them help you to know what to focus on. Do you know what could go wrong and stop you reaching your objective.

Are you doing enough to control (prevent, detect or correct) the risks that you’ve identified? Are you doing too much?

What is a heat map?

A heat map is a chart of your risks. If something will have a very high impact on your business (5) and is certain (5) then this should be the focus and would be flagged red.

If you have something which has a very low impact on your business (1) and is almost never going to happen (1) then this would be green. Spending too much time in this area may not be worth it. Since even if something does go wrong it’s very unlikely. If it does, it’s not going to impact you much at all.

What are controls?

Controls are what you to do lower either the impact, or the probability of something happening. If website availablity is a risk which you class as high. Then having pingdom running to alert you of downtime is a control against this risk.

Listing your controls makes you understand whether you are doing what is needed to be done to manage th risks you face.

1. 

   Manage your Risks Through your WordPress dashboard

2. 

   View a summary of your risks. Who owns them and their ratings

3. 

   Manage metrics

4. 

   View your Risk Dashboard Overview

5. 

   Manage processes and who does which step

6. 

   Create processes for anything

7. 

   View metrics and processes on your Dashboard

1.0

• Initial release.