I suppose that software can prompt you to ask the right questions but I have never seen something that will produce something that I could deem ‘suitable and sufficient’.  With these all singing and dancing pieces of software, what tends to happened is you enter some details, tick some boxes and it says something generic  like more training required.  It is usually based on the assumption that all problems are down to operator error not management failure (it is of course the managers that buy this stuff)

Software can be useful for managing some of the actions. For example in the last job me and the IT department came up with an Access database based system (for nothing more than a cup of coffee) that staff used to report incidents and then I would do the legwork of investigating and following up and all the system did was record what I had done and keep all of the bits together on the database. It did not do anything like try to establish root causes (I did that)

It was useful, as I could then down load all the reports every quarter onto a spreadsheet and then use this to create pretty graphs for the quarterly reports which kept management happy.

For recording risk assessment I started to use document control software introduced, by the quality team, to help manage the ISO 9001 system. People did the risk assessment , I checked them on the system and ‘authorised’ them if they were ok sent them back if not and then the system sent nagging emails to people who had not reviewed their risk assessments after a year.

It worked but I did the leg work.

I was quite proud of our little system and then another agency showed us what they had bought. It was good, but essentially did the same as my improvisations. It had cost them about 100 grand and need about 20 grands of support per year.  I felt I had gotten the better deal!

Andy,

Datix (for example) doesn't work like that as far as the risk management side goes. It doesn't have tick boxes (well, not like the ones you seem to be thinking about), it has forms with as much free text as you would like, and a matrix for risk rating. It also has a sophisticated reportin engine. The advantage of doing it on the system is that it allows whoever is responsible for risk management to see every assessment, which when an employer has over 1,000 workplaces as mine does, is an advantage. It also will aggregate risks from similar assessments, which solves the perennial issue of risk information flow within an organisation.

Gerry, well, as you can see above, we have over 1,000 workplaces, paper just doesn't work in that sort of context. For one thing it can take weeks for paper to find its way from one site to another, and that can be just too long. It looks as though your context is different, and paper will work in a small number of locations, but not in a dispersed organisation like ours,

John