SORM Publishes New Texas Enterprise Risk Management Guidelines

In 2020, the State Office of Risk Management set out on a mission to replace the Risk Management for Texas State Agency (RMTSA) Guidelines with something new, informative, and easily accessible.  With the help of over 100 seasoned professionals with several years of risk experience, we are excited to finally publish the new Texas Enterprise Risk Management Guidelines, or TERM Guidelines.

This project, which took almost two years, started with the assignment of an Advisory Council that consisted of several members from several state agencies and universities. With each volunteer having already full-time obligations with their own jobs, scheduling meetings and assigning teams in a virtual environment, thanks to COVID, presented some unique opportunities to work differently. It isn’t often that over 100 state employees can meet regularly work together to create such a robust yet straightforward resource for state entities.

The volunteers were divided into seven teams that corresponded to their specific risk specialties or areas of interest and were assigned a SORM facilitator to lead discussions and meetings. The teams shared their expertise and collaborated to develop a new guidebook that follows a simplified framework to address context, approach, application (CAAR).

This framework adheres to the global risk management standards adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO 31000), and distills each chapter into the following four major sections:

• Context – Risk Factors. Describe the scope, nature, impact of the risk; from inventory identification.  (ISO 31000 nomenclature is “scope, context, criteria”)
• Approach – Summarize the best practices and how they address the risk; may include +/. (ISO 31000 nomenclature is “risk assessment”
• Application – Show how it’s done; what to look out for; conditions precedent/exigent; exemplars; steps. (ISO 31000 nomenclature is “risk treatment”)
• Resources – Include links to resources and tools; internal reference/external links

With the framework established, the remaining challenge was for the diverse teams to write their chapters without defaulting to the technical language they had acquired through years working in their fields of expertise. The ultimate goal of this project was to create plain language guidelines that anyone could use to develop more detailed and individualized risk management programs.

SORM would like to thank the members of the Advisory Council and specifically, SORM’s Chief of Strategic Programs, James Cox, who served as the leader of this initiative. We hope you find these guidelines easy to navigate and encourage you share your feedback as we continuously update and manage these guidelines to be a useful tool for the state of Texas. The retired RMTSA Guidelines are still available as a resource until they are permanently phased out of use.

To view the new TERM Guidelines, please click the link below.