Tools & Templates to Manage Risk and Compliance
18 August 2015 at 11:00 am
BNG NGO Services Online is offering Not for Profits and service providers a suite of new tools and templates to take the pain and peril out of managing quality, risk and compliance.
Keeping the various quality, risk and compliance processes of an organisation in order and up-to-date is often an administrative nightmare of juggling spreadsheets, paper records and even post-it notes.
Online quality management system Standards and Performance Pathways (SPP) has recently introduced new tools for managing risk and compliance, and common planning activities. With these tools, organisations can manage all these activities from a single point, streamlining and safeguarding their quality, risk and compliance work.
The risk and compliance registers and the planners now form part of an integrated quality management system, joining the SPP standards self-assessment and reporting functions.
The registers and planners have been designed to assist organisations with the myriad different processes they need to record and track. Commonly, organisations use combinations of spreadsheets, Word documents and hard-copy documents to deal with everything from the risk management plan and incident reporting to reminders about due dates for insurances and reports.
This lack of connection between various components makes meeting quality, risk and compliance requirements unnecessarily complex and challenging for organisations. They are often seen as separate elements and systems for managing them are not connected in any way.
Monitoring a variety of processes across different systems is not only difficult and time-consuming, but puts the organisation at risk. When there are disparate and disconnected ways of keeping track of critical activities, it is very easy for things to be missed.
It is particularly important that the role played by ‘meeting standards’ is understood. From its work with a wide range of organisations in the community services and health sectors, BNG NGO Services Online (BNG) reports that many organisations do not understand how to get value from working with quality or service standards, and struggle with risk and compliance.
“There is a tendency in the sector to see “doing your standards” as a once off exercise, only to be repeated when accreditation is required again,” BNG Manager NGO Resources and Quality Standards, Tanya Merinda said.
“This means that organisations are not getting the benefit of using standards to really drive good practice as an ongoing activity. They may be putting themselves at risk by not understanding that meeting standards is actually about maintaining standards.
“An essential requirement of standards is the many ongoing processes used for governance, management, operations and service delivery. These all need effective information management, review and updating to keep them current, and streamlined, integrated systems for managing these processes are critical.
"We wanted to take the pain, peril and post-it notes out of managing risk, compliance and planning, and to give organisations a simple, integrated way of working with the many requirements that flow from meeting standards, legislation and general good practice. Apart from being necessary for recording and monitoring, these systems also provide the critical evidence that an organisation is meeting mandatory standards, funding requirements, legislation and other regulations.”
The registers and planners that BNG have added to SPP are customisable, enabling users to set up spreadsheet style records according to their own design. Every register and planner can be equipped with due dates, tasks can be allocated to individuals, and, most importantly, weekly email alerts provide reminders of actions that are due.
To get users underway, there a number of templates for managing the most common forms of risk and compliance, including:
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Compliance Register Delegations Register Organisation Internal Audit Staff Training Register Organisation Bank Register Conflict of Interest Register Asset Register |
Workplace Health & Safety Incidence Register Risk Management Audit External Complaint Register Continuous Improvement Plan Strategic Plan — Action Planner Staff Development Plan
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You can take a look at the templates yourself with a free two-week trial of SPP here
Online Presentation — Risky Business? Have your standards slipped?
BNG is holding a webinar on Wednesday, 2 September at 12pm (EST) that will give you a guide to maintaining standards beyond accreditation, and ensuring that the critical systems are in place for regularly monitoring risk and managing compliance.
Without the right systems for maintaining standards, your organisation may be vulnerable. Your organisation may only go through accreditation every two or three years, but meeting standards needs to be an ongoing and regular activity for your organisation if it is to maintain its reputation.
The webinar will look at tools for tackling and streamlining:
? Risk analysis and management – protecting the organisation where it is vulnerable.
? Making sure plans are in place and that people know what they need to do and when.
? Legal and contractual compliance.
? Quality improvement activities.
To register for the webinar, click here
