Why You Need to Stop Using Narrative Risk Assessment Reports

As the number of our software demos increases, we’re hearing certain questions more and more. One of the most common questions we hear during a demo is, “What does your risk report look like?” They’re often surprised when I reply that there is no narrative report.

Your customers don’t need a narrative report. They need a project management tool. The purpose of a report is to explain what’s wrong, but that doesn’t actually help remediation. And honestly, reports usually don’t fulfill their purpose in a user-friendly way—they’re long, hard to read and impossible to understand at a glance.

You need a way to quickly review all of your issues at a glance. As you review them, you also need to prioritize them and categorize them. That means filtering and sorting as needs and preferences change. Text-based reports can’t do that. They also can’t provide project management to help resolve issues.

We saw the shortcomings inherent in risk reports and tossed out the narrative reports altogether. What you need isn’t a report—it’s a corrective action plan.

What Is a Corrective Action Plan?

A text-based report simply tells you what’s wrong and what to do about it. But to do it comprehensively, you could have a 60-page report to slog through. On the other hand, a corrective action plan is an interactive tool that:

• Lets you sort and filter your issues
• Displays comprehensive details at a glance
• Helps you identify your top priorities
• Gives you specific actions towards resolution
• Provides project management tools to track your progress

While reports can list the problems and provide recommendations, a corrective action plan takes you every step of the way through resolution. A report just provides a snapshot in time, but a corrective action plan is dynamic—it shows the current status of your efforts as your team resolves each issue. The difference can hardly be overstated.

Handpicked related content: Use Corrective Action Plans to Boost Your Profits

Circadian Risk’s Corrective Action Plan

Our risk assessment software automatically generates detailed corrective actions for every issue you identify. Not only do the corrective actions provide a remedy for each problem, but they also prioritize the issues so your customers understand which ones to tackle first. They can even create a budget, set due dates, and even assign tasks to other users. Our Corrective Action Plan is a project management tool that doesn’t just review vulnerabilities and deficiencies, but provides the means to manage those items for greater accountability and remediation.

Circadian Risk gives you a highly visual dashboard that’s easy to use and provides deep insight. Customers love the digital format, because they can filter the issues they want to see and focus their attention on high-priority fixes.

And our Corrective Action Plan cuts your reporting time by as much as 80%!

Other solutions attempt to tackle the problems inherent in risk assessment reports by revamping their risk assessment reports. When the report itself is the problem, reformatting it won’t help. You’ve still got a report. What you need is an interactive Corrective Action Plan—and Circadian Risk is the only risk assessment software that provides it.

See the Corrective Action Plan in action—get your personalized demo today!