For those members who are new to the practice of higher education risk management or onboarding a new staff member, this episode highlights several URMIA resources that should be on your radar. Lou Drapeau, URMIA resource manager, talks with host Jenny Whittington about the new URMIA Shorts video tutorial series, progress on a complete update of the invaluable URMIA Resource Guide, and more resources for professional development.
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For those members who are new to the practice of higher education risk management or onboarding a new staff member, this episode highlights several URMIA resources that should be on your radar. Lou Drapeau, URMIA resource manager, talks with host Jenny Whittington about the new URMIA Shorts video tutorial series, progress on a complete update of the invaluable URMIA Resource Guide, and more resources for professional development.
Show Notes [member-only content, login required]
Connect with URMIA & URMIA with your network
-Share /Tag in Social Media @urmianetwork
-Not a member? Join ->www.urmia.org/join
-Email | contactus@urmia.org
Give URMIA Matters a boost:
-Give the podcast a 5 star rating
-Share the podcast - click that button!
-Follow on your podcast platform - don't miss an episode!
Thanks for listening to URMIA Matters!
Jenny: Welcome everyone, this is Jenny Whittington, URMIAs Executive Director, and welcome to URMIAmatters. As URMIA has reflected on our resources over these months from working from home, one of the efforts that we’ve been working on over time is the resource guide, so I have guest, my guest Lou Drapeau with me. Lou, say hello.
Lou: Hello, everyone.
Jenny: And Lou and I are going to talk about the resource guide in the second part of the podcast, but one thing we wanted to talk about early on are the, kind of a newer resource that we really haven’t highlighted, we actually shared it with the membership late last year, around the Boston conference, and this is the product of our former education manager, Christine Eick, she unveiled, and came up with a concept about URMIA shorts, so Lou I know you are involved in some of the evolution of that project, and I know we unveiled it at the annual conference, will you speak to the URMIA shorts a little bit?
Lou: Sure, the idea with the URMIA shorts is that they are short tutorials on various risk management topics. Right now there are four URMIA shorts in the URMIA library, one on risk financing, one on the risk inventory, on about 10 things to know about contracting, and one kind of general introductory one about the risk management process.
Jenny: Great. How long are the shorts? Do they vary in length?
Lou: Oh, they’re anywhere from 6 to I think about 12 or 13 minutes, something like that, they’re very brief tutorials.
Jenny: Terrific, and I know last year when Christine was on board, this was kind of one of her projects that she championed, so she is the voice of the risk management process that folks might recognize. Can you share who did the other recordings?
Lou: Yeah, the contracting one was done by Pam Rypkema, the risk inventory one was done by me, and the risk financing was done by …
Jenny: Chris Duble, right?
Lou: Chris Duble, right.
Jenny: Chris Duble is the Chair of the URMIA Affiliates Committee, and I think he’s been involved in the Risk Management 101, and we renamed that session at the conference to be the Foundations session. He’s been involved in that in the last couple years with you guys, right?
Lou: Yes, he has.
Jenny: Yeah. Okay so I know one of the reasons Christine created the URMIA shorts is that historically URMIAs always had a pre conference program at the annual conference, really targeted to people who are either first-time attendees, or new members of URMIA, they might be new to either risk management or new to higher education, and it’s always a pretty popular program at the conference and I believe her idea was to just keep doing these in little bursts so they could live in the library, so people could have short tutorials on them. Would you say that’s good advice to new members?
Lou: Oh, absolutely, and I think we ought to, we should probably do a few more of these on different topics that are of interest to the membership.
Jenny: Yeah, I think that’s a great call to action here, for anybody listening to the podcast. I know we have a lot of mature members who listen to URMIAmatters so, if there is a topic that you might like to do a short on, we would love to add that to the library, so please reach out to Lou or myself and we will get that process going. Another thing is that we have been, Lou has been involved in several of the strategic task forces over the last year or so, and when URMIA did our strategic plan, we divide it into several different task forces, and Lou was kind of in charge of managing the resource guide task force, and these shorts that we just talked about, these short tutorials, actually fit really well into the resource guide. Loou, will you just tell everybody about what the resource guide is all about and just in summary what your task force has done so far?
Lou: Okay. The resource guide is basically a conglomeration, if you will, of a whole bunch of different resources that could be helpful or valuable to not only risk managers, but some of the other disciplines that risk managers deal with, and it’s been around for a number of years, we’ve tried to keep it updated, and add some new documents and new resources as they come available, but the task that the task force is dealing with was just to update, number one to look at all of the various resources in the resource guide and make sure they are up to date or see that if they weren’t, if we could find some additional resources that could replace the older ones that were a little bit more up to date. So, that was a major part of the project and we did go through every one of the resources in the resource guide and review it and do some updating and changing. The other thing that the resource guide, that we’re trying to do with the resource guide, is to update it and make it a little bit more modern and maybe a little bit more user-friendly. So, really that’s more of an IT aspect of the whole thing, so we’re still working on that part of the process. I think we’ve got some great ideas, so as we move forward we’ll be making some announcements on it and hopefully the resource guide will be an even more usable document.
Jenny: Yeah, I can’t remember exactly what year it was when we published the resource guide, but it was early on in my URMIA career, where the Board recognized that we needed to develop a resource for people that were new to risk management and/or new to higher education, so it’s really a very, it’s a valuable resource that we have on our site, and over the last month or so I’ve spent more time looking at it, being involved in Lou’s project, and there’s really a goldmine of resources there and it actually reminded me, a few years ago we were invited to do a risk management track at ACUA, the auditors association in higher education, so we actually, we were, I think we had to do maybe three full days on risk management, so we actually used the resource guide to be our roadmap. So, we actually have powerpoints created, and that were delivered by probably six different people over those three full days of programming. So that is another valuable resource. I remember specifically Donna McMahon delivered the areas of risk in higher education, which included athletics, and recreational facilities, automobiles, environmental health and safety, international programs and travels, student issues, minors on campus, and honestly that took up a day because there is so much complexity to all of those. Lou, when you look at the resource guide, are there any areas that you’d like to highlight for the members?
Lou: Well, I think one of the major points to make about the resource guide is that it is not only URMIA documents that are in the library or other places on the website, but we also have links to related websites and other information, so it’s not just URMIA information, it’s other kinds of information that may be useful to the membership.
Jenny: Yeah, that’s a great point and I think we look at further refining it and updating it, I think there’ll be more and more of those outside links because they’ve lived in different places on our website and different places in the library, and I think it makes really good sense to consolidate them here. Yeah, we’re reconvening kind of phase two of the task force work with the staff in early June, so I would ask the members who haven’t looked at the resource guide, to please check it out. You have to be logged in to the URMIA website to see the resource guide, and this can be a little tricky for some people that aren’t always logged in to our site, but our site is actually very different from when you're logged in vs. when you’re logged out. So, when you are logged in to the URMIA website, it is under professional development, and I urge everybody to check it out and I know that we would be very open to getting feedback on any of the resources, and if you have additional resources that you think would be valuable to any of these different sections of the website, and let’s just go over those quickly. It starts with the risk management basics, it includes enterprise risk management, risk assessment, and then I already mentioned the areas of risk in higher education, risk mitigation, financing risk and insurance, risks and contracts, regulatory compliance, and managing incidents and claims. And since we just talked about the URMIA shorts, the video tutorials, and we were talking about adding potential ones, this is another call out to our audience. If anybody is willing to take some of those topics that aren’t among the short videos right now, I think these topic areas would be a great place to start. So, anything else you’d like to add on the resource guide? Oh, I didn’t mention that we have a link to the suggested reading list. Will you speak to that for a little bit, Lou?
Lou: Sure, the suggested reading list has been around for a number of years, and we tried to update it every six months and so what I do is post a notice to the membership that if there are any documents, any reading materials, books, magazines, whatever it might be that might be of interest to the membership that are not currently on the list, please let me know and we will add them to the list and there’s generally a link in there on where you can find the material or purchase the book, whatever the case may be, and there’s a lot of interesting and helpful materials that are on the suggested reading list, we did just update it a couple of months ago, so it’s fairly current.
Jenny: That’s great, I don't know if I’ve looked at it since it was updated in February, but it does look like it is a robust list and I like how you have highlighted the new ones in red so it’s easy to see which ones are the newest ones on the list, so….
Lou: Yeah, that’s something we started fairly recently because we went from the old list to the new list you couldn’t immediately tell what was new if you looked at it before so I thought that was a nice addition.
Jenny: Terrific. Good idea. Well, this I think, I would encourage everybody listening to, I would really encourage everyone to look into the resource guide, again it’s under professional development, I’m sorry, it’s under publications… You should have corrected me, Lou. It’s under publications on the website, so what I told you a few moments ago was incorrect. The resource guide is the first item under publications. I would encourage everybody to look at it and I just want to give a shoutout, it was Pat Fowler who was our first knowledge center, kind of retired risk manager who actually put the framework of the resource guide together, so I know it had to be around maybe 2010 or 11 when we published it, and I believe Steve Bryant from Texas Tech was instrumental also in this project. He felt it was very important to get this resource out. So, again just a shout out to anybody, everybody listening in the membership who is familiar with it or as you review it, if you have any suggestions, we are open to improvements, and I know I’m getting more and more excited because I think aesthetically we’re going to make some improvements that will make it much more modern, as Lou said, and probably easier to navigate just with current web usage, so any closing comments, Lou?
Lou: Well, I would, just like you did, urge everyone to take a look at the resource guide. It is a very valuable asset and resource for risk managers, and the other people that they deal with.
Jenny: Great. Well, I think that’s going to be a wrap for this URMIAmatters. Everybody have a great week.