Risk Management for Meetings and Conferences
Category: Risk Management | Feb 23, 2010 |
Hurricane. Terrorist attack. Avian flu outbreak. Staff strike. Missing attendees. Is your heart beating fast yet? Meeting planners today have more worst case scenarios that need to be planned for than in the past. September 11th completely changed our idea of risk management and the Avian flu was not something that meeting planners considered a year ago. This past May, two attendees at a conference in California went missing during a Saturday tour trip. Luckily, that story had a happy ending, but what if it didn’t? You don’t need to have a plan for each and every situation that might arise, but some thought and planning can help reduce your risk and help things run smoothly if a situation arises.
Make a Plan
The first step is to draft a risk management plan, including planning for risks such as natural disasters, accidents, technology situations (ie. power outage) and human-caused risks (ie. speaker is a no-show). Risks specific to the destination, venue, attendees and program should also be included. The plan should outline responses to different situations, the responsibilities of staff members, facility staff and hired security and how media will be managed.
Your risk management plan should be reviewed and revised yearly and as new possible risks arise.
How to Minimize Your Risk
The three best tools to minimize your risk are a site inspection, the contract and insurance.
Site Inspection
During your site inspection, it is important to find out what type of emergency plan the venue has including evacuation plans, what type of training their staff has and the type of emergency equipment that is on site. In the case of a health emergency, find out which staff members have CPR/First Aid training and how they can be quickly identified. To avoid an allergy related emergency, be sure that the food will be labeled on buffets and breaks.
Contracts
All contracts including those with speakers and performers should include Force majeure clauses that is, what will happen should a situation arise that is beyond the control of either party. This should include things such as strikes, wars, threats or acts of terrorism, weather, travel advisories or disease outbreaks. Also include a catch all provision that will cover anything else that was not listed.
Insurance
It is important to understand your commercial general liability coverage for each event. If you are going to have anything held off site, be sure that you are covered if you are temporarily off business premises. Also find out if there are any exclusions in the policy such as physical activities or alcohol use. It may not be worth it for every event to pay for event cancellation insurance, so think each event through carefully to determine what is best for you.
Do you need help with your risk management plan? Contact Designing Events at info@designingevents.com or 866-867-1933.
Watch the video related to risk management
Part of the “Expansion Pack” of videos accompanying the video “How It All Ends.” See “How It All Ends: Index” for a roadmap to guide you through the expansion pack.
Understanding and allocation of risks involved in any investment or work is called risk management. First, you need to do a thorough study of the subject to understand the risks involved. Then for each risk you choose a way to allocate it such as buying insurance or having some contractual obligations for other parties involved in the work or the investment.
If some competent engineer/analyst has done a FMECA or FMEA, an FTA, and other safety analyses. AND, these analyses have been peer-reviewed and corrected (if necessary), then I see no need for further modelling.
If the system in question is dynamic (changing part types, changing design, changing configuration), then yes, an ongoing model with a full-time or most-time risk manager may be necessary.
Even if the risk manager is not doing his/her job, a continuing model wouldn't be necessary. A simple peer review of the existing models and analyses would be all that is necessary.
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http://www.meridianlink.com/articles/security_risk.pdf
http://www.netaddiction.com/articles/eia_framework.pdf
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Internet+Risk+Impact+Summary+Report+for+Q3+2003-a0113377379
First you need to learn to spell interpretation correctly. Mistakes like that in a resume are really damaging.
You may find a course at a community college. I took one from Dun & Bradstreet by correspondence years and years ago and found it quite helpful.
In business, the term operational risk management (ORM) is the oversight of many forms of day-to-day operational risk including the risk of loss resulting from inadequate or failed internal processes, people and systems, or from external events. Operational risk does not include market risk or credit risk.
Good for you. But there is no such thing as MBA in risk management, or MBA in marketing, of MBA in finance. The MBA is a general broad degree covering a wide variety of business issues and training students for careers in managing any area of business up to CEO. MBA students study accounting, finance, marketing, statistics, management, economics, strategy, policy, leadership and similar courses. The MBA was developed because people with technical backgrounds getting promoted into management are not always able to manage, and people in management often don't understand the technical fields they manage. That's why MBA programs prefer students with degrees in other than business and with 2-4 years of work experience. Their graduates learn to manage and can speak the language of the people they manage, whether that is engineering, chemistry, medicine, music, or any other field.
Many MBA programs offer concentrations, but this usually amounts to 2-3 elective courses in a specific field in the second year of the program. So don't worry about a concentration but be careful in choosing the right program. If you find one with Risk Management courses, consider the quality of the school first, and the concentration second.
Before you consider which MBA program is for you, consult the Official MBA Guide, a comprehensive free public service with more than 2,000 MBA programs listed worldwide. It allows you to search for programs by location (US, Europe, Far East, etc.), by concentration (finance, marketing, aviation management, health management, accounting, etc.), by type of program (full-time, distance learning, part-time, etc), and by listing your own criteria and preferences to get a list of universities that satisfy your needs. You can use the Guide to contact schools of your choice, examine their data, visit their web site, and send them pre applications. You can see lists of top 40 schools ranked by starting salaries of graduates, GMAT scores, and other criteria. It's the best service available at http://officialmbaguide.org.
You'd do a lot better researching the general principles of risk management strategy before asking individual insurers (it's a huge subject)
You can read up on various principles through the IAIS which is pretty much the lead organisation in the world for setting requirements for insurers.
http://www.iaisweb.org/index.cfm?pageID=2
Also ..a personal tip …. although obviously rules are different from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, some of the most comprehensive and yet concise I've seen are the Australian ones (they are very hot on risk management in Aus).
You can read the guidance notes here….
http://www.apra.gov.au/General/General-Insurance-PPGs.cfm
That way you can target your questions and get a much better response
What is Quality Assurance?
The answer will be something along the lines of fitness for purpose.
Also, perhaps you could do a bit of research on the Prince2 project methodology…….it covers all of the areas you are interested in.