Operational Resilience - Emerging Issues
Stuart Beattie has been looking at how operational resilience is now front and centre in the minds of business continuity professionals, in particular across the financial services sector. Crisis Solutions are already seeing how the new regulations are starting to form part of our clients' thinking and objectives when planning and running a crisis simulation. We thought it would be interesting to share some of the common considerations we’re currently discussing with clients:
Do we have an effective communications plan that will allow us to effectively communicate with internal and external stakeholders? We regularly hear that firms have a crisis communications plan with holding statements to use in a crisis. However, when tested it is rare for these to be used and precious time is often wasted drafting even relatively simple holding statements from scratch.
We need our crisis management performance benchmarked against best in class to allow us to monitor capability improvement over time. This is important and at Crisis Solutions we benchmark against best practice from leading organisations in a variety of sectors.
Increasingly clients want to involve Board members in the crisis simulation either as participants or observers.
The post exercise report should clearly set out what actions are required to build the organisation's capability. Exercises can no longer be seen as an isolated annual activity, it needs to be ongoing to enhance the organisation's capability.
Increasing numbers of our clients want to simulate the failure of third party providers and sometimes wish to involve them in the crisis exercise. Regulators and customers don’t have a relationship with the third party and there is no option to pass the blame, so clients need to know how they would react in the event of issues at a third party.
Multi day exercising is becoming more common to allow operational teams time to consider the implications of a particular crisis on their actual business at that point in time. Time is taken by the ‘Bronze' team(s) to consider the impacts of the crisis to the client’s immediate business requirements and critical processes. This allows for more powerful briefings to Gold and Silver teams detailing the actual impacts the crisis would have to their business.