Colin Mcandrew Opening Address Transcipt

Colin McAndrew Vice President (Corporate Services)

Well welcome to Risk Awareness Week and the Risk Seminar. We hope that this will become an annual event and I’d like to congratulate Robbie and Tracey for their work in thinking about this as an idea and then putting it together. I’d also like to thank everyone who’s present for being present. It’s good to see so many people coming to the seminar today, it’s very encouraging. I’d also like to thank all of the people who are doing presentations during the day. It’s much appreciated and I think it’s good that the whole seminar is being recorded so that those who aren’t here or can’t be here, and when you’re a multi-campus university there are always people who can’t be here because they’re on another campus, and the proceedings will be available for other people.

The university has managed risks ever since it opened its doors, or even before it opened its doors back in the 1970s, but quite often in those early years, and in fact until probably not all that long ago, people really didn’t necessarily conceptualise what they were doing as risk assessment or risk management, they just did what they did. But over the last, I guess, 10 to 15 years the concept of risk has become more formalised, more structured and more explicitly articulated than used to be the case.

It’s actually 10 years ago this year that we first drew up a list of the key risks facing the university as a whole. In 2004 we engaged PricewaterhouseCoopers to help us think about what constituted the key risks facing the university and we started off with a series of workshops and brain storming and I think we had, at the first pass, somewhere between 25 and 30 risks which we eventually boiled down to about a dozen once we started thinking about how some risks were really sub-sets of other risks. And since that first exercise 10 years ago I think it’s true to say we’ve become more formal, more elaborate in the way that we have dealt with risk assessment, risk management and we now have risk registers at the corporate level and at the Group and divisional level which are quite detailed. And as Robbie knows we’ve just gone through in the last two or three weeks the process at Executive Group and Finance Committee of reviewing the corporate risk register where there are nine key risks identified for the university as a whole, and that register will go to the Governing Body Council on the 7th of April for consideration and endorsement. And at the same time now the annual review of the Group and divisional risk registers is being undertaken across the academic and administrative parts of the university.

So we are more elaborate, we are more sophisticated in the way that we think about risk and go about managing risk. But as Robbie and Tracey would say the important thing about risk is that you don’t get paralysed by the prospect that there might be a risk facing you. It’s not a reason for not doing something or for inertia. It’s about assessing how significant is the risk, it might be very insignificant and it may be a risk we’re happy to wear. If it’s more significant than that then the issue is how do we manage it so that it doesn’t get in the way of particularly the academic mission of the university, which is teaching and research. So that’s for me the heart of how we go about thinking about risk and dealing with risk. And of course an important part of mitigating risks can be business

of 2 continuity plans where it’s thought necessary to have formal plans in place if there’s a disruption to a key process.

So today there is a really interesting set of topics and an interesting array of speakers. I hope you find it very fruitful and enjoyable and I hope that you’ll make contributions by way of comments and questions to the individual sessions, thank you.