4.1 Assessing action effectiveness

Actions are an important tool to reduce the risk level being faced. Where actions are used it is important that they are effective.

An effective action will generally have the following characteristics:

• It will be targeted at one (or more) root cause(s) (or consequence(s)) and will reduce the likelihood and/or the impact of the risk by a quantifiable amount.
• There will be evidence to show how this reduction has been achieved, ideally supported by performance measures.
• The action will also have been delivered in full and will have been delivered on time.

Actions that fail to deliver the promised reduction in risk level or take longer than promised would be deemed to be ineffective.

In certain cases the action may result in new controls being introduced. In these cases the effectiveness of the new controls should also be assessed (see Section 6 in this session on control effectiveness).