Risk management

Organisational activities that are worth doing usually involve some risks. Our goal is to help you understand those risks, to clearly identify them, and to work out how much effort is required to manage them.

To do this we first work with you to clearly define what it is you want to achieve. After all, risk management is only useful if it helps you achieve your goals.

We work with you to identify and characterise the risks to those goals. This step can take a variety of forms and we prefer to involve those people who are important in achieving your goals. This can include not your work colleagues but also important customers, or others with a strong interest in what you are setting out to achieve.

We help you to rank those risks so you prioritise the ones that are worth spending time and effort on reducing or treating. Some risks may not turn out to be worth any effort while others will be so important that they justify real effort to reduce them.

Lastly and most importantly, we will help you to establish the critical actions needed to reduce or eliminate major risks.

For more insights on risk assessment please see our resource on

Identifying and estimating risks

Our experience

Our risk management experience covers areas as diverse as large government projects, major engineering design works and special events such as conferences.

One of our directors is a founding member of the New Zealand Society for Risk Management. We keep close tabs on risk management standards and techniques and have worked to apply these in areas as diverse as managing flood risk, advising on decisions in the siting of risky facilities such as explosives manufacture, and managing risks for major conference events

We have worked across the spectrum risks from precisely defined projects to areas where it is sometimes hard to work out what the risks are. For example we recently helped a major industry work out the risk of deviating from well defined international standards for emission of air pollutants. In this case the science was well understood and a quantitative risk could be established. We have also worked in helping understand and manage the risks in new science areas such as genetic modification. In this case lots of the questions that should be asked were far from clear.

In all of these cases we provided clear and comprehensive tools and advice to enable the right risks to be managed to the right extent.

To find out how we can help please contact Steve Vaughan - srv@insideoutworks.co.nz