WeTrack was born out of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games by project and venue managers who wanted to improve the way we plan and deliver events. Our risk and issue management for events and venues has helped organisations make their operations more secure and it is an increasingly popular module. Here, we introduce it, explain its purpose, and set out what we hope for our clients to achieve with it. It is being used by events, venues and organisations as varied as Rugby League World Cup 2021 and Commonwealth Games - Team England.

Simply, it allows you to save costs by identifying risks early, prevent dislocation between project plans and risk registers, and get training and consultation on best practices.

The basic principle is this: if an event or organisation defines objectives without taking risks into consideration, the chances are that they will lose direction and get into serious trouble when issues occur. We've seen the challenges of an 'informal' approach to risks and issues and isolated risk registers. So we link risks and issues to the tasks that they affect and allow for easy notification to all parties involved, so that any challenges can be dealt with in the most time and cost-efficient way possible.

So how does it work in practice? Risks and issues in WeTrack are rated by impact and likelihood, which automatically calculate a RAG status of red, amber or green, depending on the severity of the risk. Impact is categorised into negligible, minor, moderate, major and catastrophic levels of risk; likelihood is categorised into highly unlikely, unlikely, possible, likely, and highly likely, and a sixth level of issue for when a risk becomes a reality. Our action step functionality allows you to setup your mitigation and contingency plans, assigning them to action owners, giving them due dates, and marking them as complete when they are done.

We've produced a series of articles on risk and issue management:

Manage risk early and well to save money. The later issues and incidents are dealt with, the more expensive they become. Use risk management software, because that enables a psychology of being open, transparent and accepting about risk.

Venue and event risk in a re-calibrated world post-COVID. We all face huge uncertainty in our operations, and risk, issue and opportunity management is an avenue to tackle those uncertainties. There is plenty to think about to tighten up your processes, contingency plan for issues, and exploit any opportunities.

Seven best practices for managing risk in your event planning. Risk management can seem confusing at first, but following a few simple principles can help you establish a risk management framework that fits your business. This piece provides some best practices for doing just that.

You can explore full module functionality through our risk management webpage, or explore our help centre. We'd love to tell you about our automated risk reporting and mitigation and contingency planning. For a full introduction, get in touch below and we'd be delighted to give you a demo.

We have also produced a comprehensive white paper aimed at helping events, venues and organisations to deal with uncertainty. Click here to read The Complete Guide to Risk and Issue Management.