Is the cheapest fix on your risk list the best one?
A priced risk register: five things that could go wrong this term, what each would cost, and what it costs to make each one less likely. The cheapest item on the page returns three times its cost, and one of them breaks exactly even, which is a genuinely useful answer.
Words on this sheet
- Cohort: One group who start together and are counted together: an intake of students, a class year, or the customers who joined in the same month.
School Starter Risk Register Pro engine
After you install, this is the model to open.
What Could Go Wrong This Term?
- In your spreadsheet, click the Sortia icon in the strip of icons down the right-hand edge. No strip? Click the arrow at the bottom-right to open it. You can also use Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.
- Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
- Pick the card with that name and click Load this template. It arrives on a new tab with real numbers already in it.
This one runs on a Pro engine, and every free install includes five full-quality runs on your own numbers, shared across all five Pro engines rather than five for each. After that, Pro is $199/year.
The answer
- On the register
- $29,400 expected exposure, $15,330 after every mitigation
- The biggest risk
- $18,000 under-enrollment: 0.4 odds of a $45,000 hole
- The best ratio
- 3x confirming the room costs $250 and clears $770
- The coin flip
- $0 the marking buyout exactly breaks even
Plain answer: this term's risks could cost about $29,400 if nothing is done about them; the mitigations listed bring that down to about $15,330. Five things that go wrong in a teaching term, each with a probability, what it costs, and what it would cost to make it less likely. Click Run. Total expected exposure comes back at $29,400, led by under-enrollment at $18,000, and the listed mitigations take it to $15,330.
Now read the net-value column, because it turns a list into five separate decisions. Two are obviously worth doing: the extra recruitment push clears $3,250 for $3,500 spent, and the briefed standby lecturer clears $1,200 for $600. One is worth doing on the ratio alone: confirming the room booking in writing costs $250 and clears $770, three times its cost, and takes about ten minutes.
That is the most common shape in a real register and it is why registers are worth building. The largest exposure is almost never the cheapest win, and the cheapest win is usually an administrative act nobody thought to write down. The second placement partner is the one mitigation on the page that does not change a probability at all. A partner can still withdraw, just as often as before, and what the second partner buys is a smaller loss when they do: the impact falls from $30,000 to $12,000 and the row clears $700 for $2,000.
Worth knowing that the register handles both kinds of mitigation, because most real ones are the second kind. The marking buyout is the interesting row. It costs $1,800 and removes $1,800 of exposure, so its net value is exactly zero. The register is telling you the truth: on money alone this is a coin flip and you should decide it on something else, which here is probably whether your colleagues can absorb the marking without the term falling apart in other ways.
A net value of zero is not a failure of the model, it is the model saying the question is not financial. Second run: change the under-enrollment probability from 0.40 to 0.25, which is what a term with a strong applications pipeline looks like, and rerun. Total exposure falls to about $22,650 and the recruitment push stops being worth its cost, coming back at minus $3,500.
That is the correct answer and it is worth sitting with. Mitigations are not permanently good ideas, they are priced against a probability, and when the probability changes the answer changes with it. To adapt it, replace the five rows with the risks from your own term planning meeting, put the impacts in whatever currency or unit your budget uses as long as every row uses the same one, and leave the last three columns blank on any risk you have already decided to accept.
The model
It arrives on a tab called Template: Programme Risks, carrying these columns:
- Risk
- Probability
- Impact ($)
- Mitigated prob
- Mitigated impact ($)
- Mitigation cost
Once it is in your sheet
- The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
- Change the numbers to yours. The sheet marks which cells are inputs and which hold formulas, and most labels carry a note explaining the row.
- Press the run button at the bottom of the panel. It is labeled for the tool you are in, and the result lands on its own tab, with a written reading of it beside the figures.
Never used Google Sheets? Start here goes the whole way, in seven steps, and assumes nothing.
Next question
- Which class should go to the hired hall?Fit the Timetable Without a Clash
- Did the workshop actually move anyone?Did the Training Change Each Person's Score?
- How many teachers will next summer actually need?How Many Students Next Term?
- Build the course yourself or license one?Is the New Course Worth Building?
- Does a small cohort need fewer replies?How Many Responses for a Course Survey?
- How often does the cohort miss its budget?What If the Cohort Does Not Fill?
Every model like this one, and the method behind them: Schedule risk analysis.