Our risk register template is your foundation
A detailed but easy-to-use spreadsheet that walks you through the steps involved in identifying, assessing, and dealing with potential threats.
We've looked at the crucial role that Enterprise Risk Management can play in protecting your business from strategic risks, and shared some thoughts on how developing a proper ERM Working Group makes the difference between paying lip-service to this vital area of business and actually embedding it permanently into your culture.
But a working group is only as good as its processes – so now we’re sharing our Risk Register template to help you formalise the methodology.
Created by the risk professionals at Ecclesiastical, it’s a detailed but easy-to-use Excel spreadsheet that walks you through the steps involved in identifying, assessing, and dealing with potential threats.
You’ll find a series of tabs – including the Risk Register template itself and simple guidance and risk assessment criteria pages – designed to act as a springboard.
These allow your ERM working group and others to flag possible issues, from strategic and operational matters, to problems that might arise with your organisation’s people, to legal and regulatory challenges, to financial questions.
And they offer a variety of editable thresholds – scoring the identified risks from insignificant to catastrophic, and the likelihood of their occurring from remote to highly probable – so that you can award each a ‘risk score’ which informs your decisions as to prioritisation. (We’ve also included a heat map to give you quick and easy visibility.)
Importantly, the template also provides you with a constantly-updated record of actions taken, and thus provides an audit trail so that your board can have effective oversight of the state of play at any given moment.
As with our working group terms of reference, it’s intended to act as a call-to-action and a basis upon which you can develop your own Risk Register, tailored to your own specific needs.
Used effectively, and in concert with our ERM toolkit summary, it will help to accelerate and improve your decision-making, lead to enhanced performance and service outcomes, and reduce the risk of operational losses and disruption.
At the same time, it should give you a competitive advantage over less well-prepared rivals, and it will improve confidence in governance and reputational management.
Sarah Pearson, is Head of Enterprise Risk Management, at Ecclesiastical
