In this special Risk! Engineers Talk Governance episode, due diligence engineers Richard Robinson and Gaye Francis discuss the recent IT outage that affected systems worldwide and the importance of criticality and resilience.

Main take-aways include:

• The outage was predictable and foreseeable. It was a critical incident.
• You can't gold plate a single system so that it won't fail.
• The importance of redundancy – ensuring you've got another independent system that doesn't rely on the primary system.
• Engineering organisations are required to look at the credible worst case scenarios that can happen and what you can do and put in place to make sure that they're managed
• You need to positively demonstrate due diligence about what you're doing. And due diligence means that you take into account the credible critical issues.
• When doing these reviews, you have to talk with the senior decision makers, who understand the business’ critical requirements.

If you’d like to find out more about Richard and Gaye’s work, head to https://www.r2a.com.au.

The book they refer to is Due Diligence Engineering and can be purchased online at https://www.r2a.com.au/store/p/r2a-engineering-due-diligence-textbook.

In the final episode of season three of the Risk! Engineers Talk Governance podcast, due diligence engineers Richard Roberson and Gaye Francis discuss the theme of criticality and design in the context of climate change and sustainability due diligence.

They discuss:

• The consequences of redirecting rivers for irrigation,
• Why the Victorian Government built the, to now, unused desalination plant, and argue if they should be considering the potential impacts of global warming,
• Three possible design solutions: Sun shields, increasing cloudiness, and fertilising the Southern Ocean to address climate change, and
• How knowledge, technology and costs of design solutions are constantly changing.

The textbook where the three design solutions are highlighted is R2A’s Engineering Due Diligence which you can find at https://www.r2a.com.au/store/p/r2a-engineering-due-diligence-textbook

For more information on Richard and Gaye’s due diligence work, head to https://www.r2a.com.au/.

And if you have any comments, feedback or topic ideas for Season 4, email us at admin@r2a.com.au.

In this episode of the Risk! Engineers Talk Governance podcast, due diligence engineers and Co-Directors at R2A Richard Robinson and Gaye Francis, discuss town planning disasters and the need for consequence planning.

This follows Gaye’s recent conference paper at the International Public Works Conference where she detailed the VCAT decision around the major hazard facility and the planning law associated with it. But in this podcast, they reflect on other natural hazards like floods, bushfires, dam breaks and how town planning can address (or fail to address) these before they happen.

The biggest question they ask is rather than a focus on recovery, why aren't we building resilience into our infrastructure and/or seeing how we, as a community, build to be able to withstand some of these disasters? And how this is a shift from thinking from risk planning to consequence planning.

They also discuss the mismatch between town planning requirements and WHS/OHS legislation.

If you’d like to learn more about Richard & Gaye’s work, head to R2A at https://www.r2a.com.au