Where do you start when it comes to improving operational resilience? This article looks at two different ways to set about it. Plus, check out how a financial services organisation achieved compliance.

 

Resilience (noun): the ability to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness

Recently, we examined the benefits of and steps to achieving and maintaining operational resilience. It’s a complex area; knowing how and where to begin can be a challenge in itself.

Depending on your starting point, the BusinessOptix platform provides two approaches: top-down and bottom-up. How do you know which is best for you?

Two ways to approach operational resilience: top-down or bottom-up

Here are some of the key points to consider

The top-down approach

What is it?

This approach sees you identify your important services first. Then assess their risk at a service-wide level before beginning process-level mapping.

It will work for you if:

  • You’re in a large organisation and the first critical step is building a shared, high-level understanding of operational resilience risk
  • You need a simple way to understand and visualise the biggest areas of exposure, to prioritise future work
  • You are focused on meeting ongoing self-assessment obligations in a simpler, more repeatable and centrally governed way

The bottom-up approach

What is it?

In this method, start with service processes to validate and deepen your understanding of the risks at service level. Then, using this detailed understanding, create a service-level summary to share and analyse at a higher level.

It will work for you if:

  • You want to dig deeper into certain services or risk areas to ensure that you’re addressing any short-term challenges
  • You have a limited number of business services, and it’s most important to map and assess exactly how they are exposed
  • Your organisation has a strong process-level understanding of how it operates. And can use this as an informed basis for summarising key vulnerabilities

Case study: how a financial services organisation achieved regulatory compliance

The financial services sector must demonstrate resilience by 2025. This covers performing process mapping and testing, and investing in operating within impact tolerances.

The problem

A large provider of financial services solutions faced significant challenges:

  • A high volume of process errors in the client services department
  • Processes documented in different applications (Visio, Word, PowerPoint, enterprise architecture (EA) tools)

This made it hard for staff to follow processes accurately, and created unnecessary costs in correcting avoidable errors. It also burdened managers with extra costs in confirming and demonstrating regulatory compliance.

The solution

The organisation used BusinessOptix as a single tool to replace the mixture of applications.

Its ready-made templates and stencils allowed for quick, simple, standardised documentation of current processes. All processes are recorded in a central, easy-to-read format, making it effortless to find and follow them. And capturing supporting work instructions helped improve efficiency and compliance.

The BusinessOptix compliance functionality also enabled the team to capture regulatory controls and demonstrate their use within processes.

The results

The business experienced multiple benefits, including:

  • Major reduction in the number and cost of process errors
  • Easier discovery and application of process instructions
  • Elimination of variance thanks to consistent process definitions
  • Less time and effort spent in keeping processes up to date
  • Reduced cost of managing audits, thanks to the ability to demonstrate compliance
  • Greater confidence in operational performance

The business is expanding the use of BusinessOptix to other departments to extend the benefits. And it’s using other capabilities to deliver cross-functional process improvement.

Get help with boosting your resilience

BusinessOptix will strengthen the resilience of your business model. It allows you to understand, scenario-test and report on processes and resources supporting important business services.

We can help you implement its 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.