For PSDPs and designers
On an Irish project the project supervisor for the design process coordinates the safety work of the design team, and the designers work through the hazards their own drawings create. Someone will have to clean those rooflights, lift that precast stair into place, dig beside that party wall and replace that plant on the roof. A design risk register keeps the answer to each in one place: the hazard, what the design changed to remove or reduce it, who owns it and what is left for the contractor and, later, the safety file. This page shows how a design team can keep that register in Fidrel’s risk register, and where the register stops.
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The architect has a spreadsheet, the structural engineer another and the services engineer a third, each with its own columns and scoring. The PSDP merges them before each stage report, and by the time the merged copy circulates, one of the originals has already moved on.
“Working at height” and “manual handling” appear on every register and help nobody. The useful entry names the place and the decision: the parapet raised so the roof can be maintained without temporary edge protection, or the plant moved from the roof to a ground-floor plant room.
What the design could not remove has to reach the people who build the building and later maintain it. When the register is closed out stage by stage and filed away, the residual items that matter to the contractor and to the safety file are hard to pull back out.
A design risk register is not a list of construction hazards in general. Each entry should answer four questions: what the hazard is and where it sits in the building; which design decision creates it; what the designer did to eliminate it, reduce it or, failing that, make it known; and what remains for the contractor and for whoever maintains the building. Fidrel’s fields map onto that directly. Risk carries the hazard, Description the location and the decision, Category marks it as a design or health and safety item, Likelihood and Impact give the rating and Risk owner names the designer. Mitigation, whose prompt asks how the risk is avoided, reduced, transferred or accepted, carries the design response, Status shows how far it has got and Mitigation due says when the change is expected.
Risk register
Likelihood runs from Very unlikely to Very likely and impact from Negligible to Severe, each scored one to five. The risk rating is the two multiplied, from 1 to 25, and Fidrel bands it as Low below 5, Medium from 5 to 9, High from 10 to 16 and Critical from 17. Take replacing rooftop air handling units over a busy street: rated Likely and Severe, it scores 4 × 5 = 20, Critical. Moving the units to a ground-floor plant room might bring it to Unlikely and Major, 2 × 4 = 8, Medium. The Risk matrix beside the list counts the open risks in each cell, so the PSDP sees at a glance whether the team’s worst items are coming down from stage to stage.
Step 1
Add the architect, the engineers and the PSDP as members of the project with access to the risk register. Members who can write log and edit risks; anyone with read-only access sees the register and its matrix but changes nothing.
Step 2
Choose New risk, give the hazard a short title, describe where it is and which design decision causes it, and put it under Design or under the health and safety category. Rate its likelihood and impact, and Fidrel works out the risk rating.
Step 3
Pick the designer whose element it is as Risk owner; they are notified in Fidrel when named. In Mitigation, write what the design does about the hazard, and set a Mitigation due date for when the change should be on the drawings.
Step 4
Move the risk from Identified through Assessed and Mitigating as the work goes on, change likelihood and impact once the response is in the design, and set it to Closed when nothing more can be done at design stage.
Many design risk registers show two ratings side by side, one before the design response and one after it. In Fidrel, note the starting rating in the description when you log the risk, for example “initial 4 × 5, plant on roof”, and keep likelihood and impact as the live rating. When the design deals with the hazard, change the two scores and add a line to Mitigation saying what changed and on which drawing revision. Anyone reading the entry then sees where the risk began, what the design did and where it stands now, and the matrix shows only the current position.
Closing a risk at design stage does not make it disappear: what the design could not remove becomes information the contractor needs before work starts and the building’s future owners need afterwards. Filter the register by category to list the design and health and safety items, and by status to see what is still open. Projects that use Fidrel’s facilities management on the Irish site also get a folder structure starting with 01 Safety file, which includes a folder for residual risks, so the summary the PSDP prepares from the register can be filed where the safety file will later be gathered.
Because the risk register belongs to the whole project, the client’s commercial risks can sit in it too, from programme and cost to contractual and planning and building control items. The categories keep them apart: filtered to Design and health and safety, the list becomes the design team’s register; filtered to cost and programme, it is the project manager’s. Search looks through risks, owners and mitigation text, references run R-001, R-002 and onwards, and closed risks sink to the bottom while open ones are sorted by rating, highest first.
Fidrel does not carry out the design risk assessment, and it takes on none of the PSDP’s or a designer’s duties. The register keeps one current rating per risk, so the rating before the design change is not stored beside the one after it. Fidrel has no library of standard design hazards: every risk is written by the team. A risk is not linked to a drawing or a model element, so name the drawing in its description. Fidrel does not compile the safety file.
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Anything else on your mind? We are happy to help.
Talk to usNo. It gives the design team one shared place to record design hazards and the responses to them. What the PSDP prepares, and in which form, remains the PSDP’s decision, and Fidrel takes none of that responsibility on.
Yes, if the contractor’s people are members of the project with access to the risk register. Give them read-only access if they should see the register and its matrix without changing anything in it.
By category. Log design hazards under Design or the health and safety category, and filter the list on those categories when the design team reviews its register at each stage.
Likelihood times impact, each scored from one to five, giving a rating from 1 to 25. A rating of 17 or more shows as Critical, 10 to 16 as High, 5 to 9 as Medium and anything lower as Low.
Yes. Naming someone as Risk owner of an open risk sends them a notification in Fidrel that opens the risk itself, so they can read it and add the design response straight away.
Members who can write may delete a risk after confirming. For a real hazard that has been designed out, set it to Closed instead, so the record of the decision stays in the register for later stages.
