It's a risky business

Back to work today after a week in the Lakes - great time, and we even got some fine weather and walking in. Got told about a great app for my iPhone called Runkeeper (not that I run!) which uses the GPS signal to track your walk, pace, altitude, photos etc and then posts it to a web site. Used it a few times last week, and apart from the day I didn't notice the battery on my iPhone had gone flat it worked well. If you're interested, there's an example below and you can click through for more details. I find it works best in fullscreen mode in hybrid view.


Anyway, back to work today and over 750 emails in my inbox, most of which I deleted without opening. Then onto a series of meetings, the first about managing risk. The University has a corporate risk register, and all departments have to maintain their own operational risk registers, which have to be updated every year. We work with risk all the time - it's embedded into everything we do. We compile a risk log as part of every project and we have a risk log at programme level. It's part of service management, especially change management, and all of our work on resilience is about managing risk. In addition, as part of Business Continuity and Incident planning we have a catalogue of physical risks and a business impact assessment for our services. What this means of course, is that what we do doesn't fit the template that the University has provided. Impact for example is difficult to define simply - the answer is often "it depends". On the time of year for example - losing the web service on a quiet Sunday in December for example has a very different impact to losing it in August on the day the A level results come out. So, we're reviewing all of our risks, adding new ones, expiring some, mitigating against the rest, and trying to pull them all into a format that fits the University template.