Over the last few months our awesome mob members have published several papers and blogs about the journey to Dynamic Operational Resilience.
We have talked about:
What it is and what are the benefits?
What are some of the challenges?
and in the last blog, we started looking at one of the biggest challenges……Embedding an operational resilience culture.
Put bluntly, Dynamic Operational Resilience will only happen if firms embed a resilience culture.
In this blog we are going to cut to the chase and outline the top 3 challenges we see that are preventing a resilience culture and provide some practical actions you can take right now.
The Challenges
1
Operational Resilience requires firms to think and collaborate ‘end to end’. However, not all firms are structured that way. The risk team may have different reporting lines to the cyber team to the third-party team etc. Bringing together different functions with different agendas and requirements is proving challenging.
2
Firms are undertaking more transformational and regulatory change than ever before. Operational resilience is falling down the priority list and senior management just don’t have the time to focus on it. It is becoming a regulatory ‘tick box’ exercise rather than an opportunity to fundamentally improve the customer experience.
3
Operational resilience is new, so it requires a different way of thinking, operating and behaving. In some respect this makes it hard! Therefore, rather than trying to build a resilience culture with clear accountabilities, firms are re–badging business continuity teams as operational resilience and delegating all responsibilities to this team or existing compliance teams.
The Actions
There are many actions you can take to address the above challenges. One of the critical actions is getting engagement across the business so everyone is working towards shared goals, specific actions we suggest are:
Build a network of representatives from across all three lines of defence who can collaborate and build a single view and taxonomy. Start the engagement from day one and ensure you maintain the momentum throughout the programme. Allocate dedicated resources to drive this activity.
Define the business outcomes/success factors and identify the benefits realisation metrics from the offset to drive aligned thinking and shared goals. Use these inputs in communication and engagement activities with the wider community to ensure they are well understood.
When planning communication and engagement activities remember that true engagement needs a good blend of message out and feedback. If you want people to get on board with the change and maintain their interest build this into all updates and conduct sessions where you discuss progress in delivering business outcomes.
Executive sponsorship and visibility are critical to provide strategic direction, timely decision making and support with clearing any blockers that arise. This is important to operational resilience programmes where there is a high population of impacted users with differing reporting lines and priorities. Stakeholder analysis and use of a real-time heatmap can be beneficial to ensure all executive stakeholders are adequately engaged.
By Tanya Dodds
‘The Imaginative One’
