Introduction
Over the years, our team has been engaged to deliver fit-for-purpose documentation for several clients, primarily high-profile mass gathering events within the region and further afield. As one would imagine, we have seen our fair share of documents and have also authored hundreds.
Upon engagement by an event organizer, promoter, or venue, the expectations are that, based on your expertise, you provide them with the deliverables they are expecting at a high standard that can be communicated to the end user, be it guards, presented at boardroom level in a non-complex security format, and most importantly, protect you and your stakeholders when things do go wrong.
Laziness
Laziness is one of the major drivers for copying and pasting work. From experience, a threat-vulnerability and risk assessment, a security operational plan, policies, plans, and procedures all take time, often hours of work, to work in conjunction with stakeholders in a collaborative format to ensure each stakeholder's expectations are captured and accounted for. Security should never work in silos; it should enable the operation, not restrict it.
Lack of Expertise and Professionalism
Remember, we have been engaged based on our area of expertise within a certain field, be it crowd safety management or security governance at major high-profile events. With this come both the expectations of those who have engaged our services and the presumption that you can offer these services based on what you are marketing, selling, and communicating.
Fit-for-purpose and meaningful documentation takes time to author, develop, and improve. Often, these are working documents that evolve through the lifecycle of a project; very rarely does the document remain in static form. Based on this, the author of these documents not only needs to possess expertise in the specified area operationally but also at a governance level to ensure they align with the project's vision and future endeavours.
Lack of Computer Literacy
Authoring these plans is one thing, but how they are created is another. Remember, these documents are not only for you but also for stakeholders, and when things do go wrong, they may end up on a review board by emergency services, organizational board members, a criminal court, or a lawyer’s office. Considering all these factors, the documentation needs to be appropriately formatted with ease of navigation, appropriate spelling, and grammar.
With an array of online courses and online tutorials available, we believe that there is no excuse for industry-leading security and crowd safety management companies and practitioners not to have a high level of computer literacy. We engage with organizations weekly that expect this and ask about these skills.
Examples of Negligence
SABRE Risk often engages with clients who have either changed security providers, and we are tasked to pick up existing documentation, or ask us to review planning documents to identify if they are fit-for-purpose, and in fact, copy and paste. You would be alarmed to find out that most of the documentation we review is, in fact, both copy and paste, meaning that it is not fit-for-purpose.
We recently reviewed a security risk assessment for a project in Abu Dhabi. The author of the document failed to proofread the document and change the project name, which was for a similar event in Dubai, which was mentioned numerous times throughout the document, with captured risks not relevant to the project or the organization.
Another example of negligence that we have witnessed is that people assume that working on one major event is a copy and paste from another, meaning that the documentation gets renamed, the mention of the project or site gets changed, and it gets recycled.
Our Approach
Our team at SABRE Risk has years of experience authoring plans from scratch, supporting clients on new projects, and using sites that have never been used before. Our team has coaching-level skills in computer literacy and has adopted ways to both secure and watermark documents that are not visible to the reader, meaning that if someone intended to copy the content, they would be unable to circumvent the restrictions we put in place unless they possessed a high degree of skill.
We believe that anybody can copy and paste a document, but understanding its content and having the capability to deliver it is another thing. Remember, when things go wrong and you are standing in court being asked about the document you authored with your signature on it, how well do you know its content? And could you categorically stand by your documentation?
Conclusion
The team at SABRE Risk works from the foundations to deliver planning documents that are fit-for-purpose and will stand the test of time, post-event, event-time, and post-event. We work in conjunction with stakeholders and aim to set and improve industry standards in the region.
operations@sabre-risk.com
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