Manage disasters and crises with operational resilience

Operational resilience is an organisation’s ability to continue to deliver critical services or assets after facing one or more disruptive events. Today the government and public service organisations face unique needs and conditions as they plan for disruption — how can they learn, adapt and emerge stronger than before?

The last two years have shown that government and public service organisations must adapt and respond to change quickly; maintain critical operations, infrastructure assets and services; and provide extraordinary support and services to people, businesses and communities.

According to a global survey from Deloitte, during 2020, only 23% of government leaders completely agreed that their organisation “can/could quickly adapt and pivot in response to disruptive events” (compared to 30% of leaders who felt that way across all sectors).

Therefore, if there was one thing we learned post-pandemic, persistence and perseverance were key, but preparedness was a better survival tactic. If you want to build operational resilience in your organisation, here’s how you can start.

Identify your critical operations or assets

The first step towards building an operational resilience framework is identifying and understanding your critical operations or assets. For government agencies, what are the essential services they provide or critical infrastructures assets they maintain — and what is the software, hardware, people, supporting infrastructure and information required to ensure continuity of those services or assets? We then must consider acceptable outages for the service or asset, associated subprocess and resources.

Scenario planning

Once you understand the processes and resources, you can more clearly think about the events that would disrupt them. Scenario planning is critical to lower the probability of disruptive events occurring and recover from them more effectively if they occur. Testing these scenarios and recovery steps should become part of normal business activities, leading to a more resilient organisation.

Using technology to support resilience

Trying to do operational resilience in spreadsheets and word documents is difficult due to the volume of resources and interdependencies of connected processes. At Protecht, we support our customers in the resilience journey by providing world-class technology to help better visualise the resilience building blocks. Best practice for operational resilience requires robust visualisation of end-to-end processes and possible points of failure in either critical support operations or supply chains.

Handling situations of distress

When in the middle of distressing situations that challenge the organisation’s operational resilience, stakeholders can quickly take these steps to manage the situation.

• Workforce planning. Hire flexible workers to fill critical processes arising from the unavailability of expected resourcing, quickly developing enhanced alternative onboarding and training programs while maintaining the hybrid/work-from-home arrangements.
• Pay attention to system and asset stability. Entities’ measures to improve stability through change freezes and delays to implementation could result in an increased risk of system outages in the future.
• Keep internal and external stakeholders in the loop through effective and frequent crisis communication.
• Keep track of the impact on customers, service providers and other stakeholders.
• Prioritise customer grievance management as well as a smooth communication flow and channels for customers to reach out.
   

Operational resilience isn’t just planning for a one-time event. It plans for a lifetime worth of events and changes that can affect the business. Since change can come in many ways — environmental, financial, governmental, economic and more, it is almost impossible to predict everything that can go wrong. However, it is possible to identify all key business operations, resources and vulnerabilities and prepare for them.

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