Beyond Operational Resilience
Operational Resilience is far more than just a regulation that develops better recovery times for your services. It is significant opportunity and the foundation for a more dynamic and strategic approach to business.
Whether your organisation is in business to make money, to provide value for customers or both, it is essential to understand how the business operates and to be able to identify what does and does not work in order to achieve the business' objectives.
Operational Resilience can be the launch pad for a greater understanding of the firm's business model.
We at BCS have seen and worked with many types of firms over the last 20 years. We have seen a reoccurring pattern over this
time with firms that have grown extremely quickly, making more money that could have been expected, sooner than expected, even continuously over prolonged periods.
These firms continue to expand, rather than grow, and too often we have seen instances of these firms suddenly failing and, sometimes, disappearing quicker than they arrived.
We have seen this resulting in redundancies or business impacting cuts being applied, sending the firm in a downward spiral. Market conditions are invariably blamed as the cause and in some instances this is fair. However, even if this was the cause, it doesn't mean that failure wasn't avoidable.
More commonly, the true cause is a lack of an understanding of the business, how it operates, how it makes money, how it loses money, business outcomes, customer outcomes and its vulnerabilities and risks. The importance of this visibility cannot be underestimated.
This also applies to large organisations, where pure scale means that sight of the business is lost and there is no visibility of what is good and what isn't, what is driving great results or poor performance.
Firms fail to act when business is good. After all, everything is working and going well. Why bother to analyse the organisation?
This is precisely when this should happen. It is when a business can best cope with change, when choices are available, when it can best prepare for the future and assess its strategy and operational investment. By the time issues arise, it is often too late or too difficult to identify or rectify these.
A Retrenchment Strategy takes effect, redundancies and cuts are made because the firm has reached critical point and is unable to identify where the issues are in order to remediate or mitigate. It has no alternative but to make rash reactive decisions that actually harm the business. Had the firm understood its business better, it may have been able to identify and address these issues pro-actively or before the point of no return, saving jobs or avoiding cuts.
Implemented in the right way, Operational Resilience can be the basis for better understanding the firm's business model, understanding its vulnerabilities and risks, enabling development of Operational Risk or Value Stream Management.
Engaging with BCS can be the start of that journey. Talk to us to see how we can support your firm.
For more information, download our Operational Resilience Brochure
