How to achieve and maintain operational resilience
Operational resilience matters to every business, whatever sector it operates in. Here, we examine the benefits of resilience, and outline seven steps to achieve and maintain it.
Financial services sector must demonstrate resilience by 2025
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published final rules and guidance on operational resilience in 2021. These aim to ensure the financial services sector, its infrastructures and businesses, can prevent, deal with and learn from operational disruption.
The rules came into force on 31 March 2022, and by 31 March 2025, firms must have:
- Performed mapping and testing to enable them to remain within impact tolerances for each important business service
- Made the necessary investments to enable consistent operation within the impact tolerance
Operational resilience is vital for all types of business
The term describes the ability to respond to and overcome problems that might cause disruption or financial loss. Achieving operational resilience means you can deliver business operations and core services in the midst of disruption.
Disruption can cover a wide range of areas, from cyber-attack to product supply problems to natural disasters. Or pandemics, as we’ve recently seen.
Future-proof your business and your team
Achieving operational resilience benefits both the way the business runs and how it’s perceived externally. It’s about future-proofing (as far as possible) and could mean the difference between surviving and not.
Creating a resilient culture is vital. Poor resilience affects morale and performance; if you’re always in reactive, crisis mode it’s stressful and draining. It makes it impossible to plan, be creative or do your best work. Greater adaptability will boost confidence as your team see that they can cope with challenges.
As well as increasing business sustainability, developing resilience can contribute to building customers’ trust in your organisation. If they see you can meet their needs and deliver during challenging times, it could help you retain or even gain business.
How to achieve and maintain operational resilience in seven steps
Step 1: what does resilience mean to your organisation? Use an operating model or capability map to identify your most important business services. Add metadata so you can assign each service to its correct stakeholder and capture baseline performance metrics.
Step 2: add impact-tolerance metrics, limits and other data to the models at business service level or lower. This will help subsequent analysis to understand how well recovery services perform.
Step 3: model and map your supporting resources – like people, systems, third-party relationships and risk framework. Models and data in BusinessOptix are searchable and reportable, with a full audit trail of changes.
Step 4: run different events, using scenario modelling and simulation, to identify bottlenecks, breakpoints and vulnerabilities.
Step 5: easily analyse the vulnerabilities using configurable reports and dashboards.
Step 6: document the lessons learnt, based on the results of modelling and simulation. Attach these to the process and roll up to the business service. This will provide the foundation for improvements, plus an easily accessible history for internal and external auditors.
Step 7: ensure you maintain resilience with annual reassessments. BusinessOptix lets you distribute tasks amongst stakeholders, with a full audit trail of responses and outcomes.
Get help with boosting your resilience
You might be a financial services organisation, racing to prove compliance ahead of the 2025 deadline. Or simply want to test and boost your operational resilience.
We can help you implement BusinessOptix functionality to:
- Mine and model processes and scenarios
- Integrate risk and control measures
- Create supporting audits to prove compliance
Claim your free, personalised demo to find out what it can do for your business.
