Risk Assessment Questionnaires

 

VisiRule, and related software from LPA, enables you to build complex survey and questionnaire software solutions for risk assessment and self assessment simply by drawing a flowchart, or importing an Excel spreadsheet or Word file.

The key objectives for any self assessment questionnaire are:

• ask the right questions at the right time

• analyse the answers to identify the potential weaknesses and vulnerabilities

• give the meaningful and executable advice

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The VisiRule Risk Assessment tool supports:

• visual creation of questions, branches and associated question logic

• versatile custom scoring and analysis functions to assess answers

• association of text fragments for Yes, No, Don't Know answers for each question

• dynamic document generation for producing custom reports

• exporting of session answers via XML to other processes

• variety of delivery methods; HTML forms, chatbot-based, data driven

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Why Assess Risk?

• A well built risk assessment tool can help the relevant department identify weaknesses and vulnerabilities and make suggestions which can feed into a strategic plan, corporate compliance program, and crisis management plan.
   

• An effective assessment considers the risk management process, risk-tailored resource allocation, updates and revisions, and lessons learned.
   

• Once legal, financial and business risks are identified and prioritized, controls can be created to limit risk and expose any residual risks.
   

• An effective risk assessment process is essential to the integrity of the entire company, and supports good corporate governance.

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VisiRule knows how to automatically construct and ask a dynamic variable sequence of questions depending on previous answers. This is ideal for building self-assessment and compliance questionnaires which are not too long and stay relevant.

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You do not want every visitor to be asked exactly the set of questions. VisiRule lets you create separate conditional branches to deal with each answer. In this way, users are only ever asked questions that are meaningful and relevant to their situation. 

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How to Score Risk Assessment Questionnaires

You can assess the user's responses using simple scoring strategies (all questions carry equal scores), or weighted scoring (some questions are more important than others), weighted answers (some answers score better than others), weighted sections and sub-sections (some sections are omitted, some sections are more important than others), thresholds, min/max and even non-linear scoring algorithms. There are many options available to combine scores which affect the overall result.

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Risk Assessment Outcomes & Recommendations

You can include rules and formulae to calculate the risk and provide dynamic recommendations as to how to mitigate depending on the degree of risk calculated.

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Report Generation

You can use the VisiRule document generator to publish the content of the assessment using a document template and so generate a fully instantiated document instance with the calculated scores and bespoke advice.

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ChatBot Delivery

You can now also deliver your questions using an interactive ChatBot. This allows the user to ask their own questions as you ask yours!

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Visual Design

Thanks to its graphical design approach, VisiRule makes it much easier to manage the various branches and where required, combine them to continue down some unified path.

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Ask the Right Questions

VisiRule allows you to organize your questions in a structured way so you can ask the right question at the right time; no more annoying questions which clearly are not relevant to the user's own situation. As answers to questions are given, the appropriate logic is executed and the next question to be asked determined and presented. In this way, each user is asked a dynamically computed sequence of questions personal to them and their answers. If you want, you can also include extra fields for them to volunteer their own explanation and observations about the answer.

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Design the Presentation

You can use HTML to customize how individual questions and pages are presented, say to change the font size or style or include some links or graphic or video. You can use CSS - Cascading Style Sheets to customize the themes. 

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Evaluate the Answers

VisiRule provides a powerful expression language to examine and test answers. Expressions can be simple tests such as "Age > 21" or "Status = Married" or complex tests such as "Residence < [House, Flat] and Value > 100K".

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Personalize the Results

Once the questionnaire is completed and all the questions have been asked, VisiRule delivers its conclusions based on the answers given and generates its outputs. It also collects up and reports on any extra information entered.

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Decision Analytics

Each visitor leaves a footprint of their visit, the path they took and the conclusion they reached. You can collate and analyze these to gain insight into how effective your charts are, and, by capturing feedback, what changes can be made to improve their performance. The new VisiRule Analytics package allows you to do this from within a browser.

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Expression Language

By providing a powerful expression handling language, VisiRule supports 'Skip Logic', 'Branch Logic', randomization, calculations, menu re-ordering, answer validation, consistency analysis, response extraction, scoring, scripting, Compound Logic and Delayed Branching and much more:

• Skip Logic allows some respondents to skip directly to some future question or page

• Branch Logic enables you to take respondents down different paths based on their answer to a question

• Compound Logic enables you to combine the answers to multiple questions

• Delayed Branching means you can refer back to questions asked much earlier

Intelligent, interactive questionnaires reduce the annoyance encountered when respondents are asked to answer questions which obviously do not help contribute to a solution. Similarly, respondents can get quite engaged as the questions get more relevant and move closer to a possible solution.

 

By allowing you to concentrate on the structure and expressions of the answers as well as how to ask individual questions, VisiRule makes it easier to design and manage large, interactive diagnostic and advice systems. VisiRule Author allows you to directly manipulate the divergence and subsequent convergence or merging of separate branches.

 

How to structure risk questionnaires

VisiRule charts will typically ask different sets of questions as a result of someone answering, say, 'Male', as opposed to, 'Female', or 'Smoker' as opposed to 'Non-Smoker'. By understanding the interdependency between the different questions, VisiRule can, at run-time, dynamically construct and re-organize the questionnaire based on the current set of answers that the user has given. This helps ensure that question sessions are personalized, shorter and less annoying to users.

 

VisiRule supports a wide range of question types and integrates with web technologies for displaying graphics and links to external pages and resources for, say, explanations. Whilst the default behavior uses the direct matching of answers and expressions, you can also implement more complex scoring schemes.

 

As many visual tools have shown, organizing ideas and logic in a graphical manner can help you structure your risk assessment application. And with VisiRule, the diagrams drawn are directly executable, and can be used to construct and dynamically re-construct the associated sequence of questions.