Relevant Contents
Need Tailored Business Continuity Insights?
Contact Us Now for Personalized Guidance!
It’s no longer enough to have a solid business continuity (BC) program. Organizations today are increasingly expected to reach the higher level of preparedness known as operational resilience (OR). In today’s post, I share my tips for achieving this elevated state of organizational readiness.
[Related: Operational Resilience vs Business Continuity: Why You Need Both]
Closing the Gap Between Continuity and Resilience
By now, most practitioners know that the bar has been raised: in addition to having a BC program that can help them recover quickly from disruptions, responsible companies should develop operational resilience, the ability to maintain a minimal level of functionality no matter what.
Where BC is about responding to outages to quickly restore mission-critical processes, systems, and technology, OR involves hardening the organization in advance to increase its ability to maintain uninterrupted functionality in the face of challenges.
Regular readers of the blog will know we’ve written quite a bit about OR in recent months. In “Beyond BC: An Always-On World Requires Operational Resilience,” we looked at the origins and motivation behind OR. In “Operational Resilience vs Business Continuity: Why You Need Both,” we explained how OR complements rather than replaces BC.
One aspect of OR that hasn’t been discussed much, by me or anyone else, is how to achieve it. The subject can be daunting to practitioners, many of whom get mired in the question of how to implement OR, especially if they work at larger organizations.
The topic is too big to cover comprehensively in a blog post, but I’d like to share a few suggestions to help will point the way.
9 Tips for Building Operational Resilience
Here are a handful of tips I’ve found useful in helping organizations move from theory to practice when it comes to operational resilience.
1. Own the Shift
Recognize that operational resilience is now part of your role. Educate yourself about it, and expand your mindset. Don’t just think about responding to and recovering from disruptions. Start thinking about how you can set up your staff, processes, systems, and facilities so they can withstand shocks and continue to function.
2. Focus on What Matters Most
The scope of operational resilience can feel overwhelming, especially in large, complex organizations. Don’t try to boil the ocean. Start by identifying your most critical people, processes, systems, operations, and facilities—those that are essential to keeping the business running. Concentrate your initial efforts there rather than trying to tackle everything at once.
3. Leverage Existing Analyses
Your business impact analyses (BIAs) and threat and risk assessments (TRAs) provide a strong foundation for resilience planning. Use them to understand where you’re most vulnerable and to guide your efforts in protecting your most essential processes, systems, personnel, and facilities.
4. Put People First
Resilience starts with people, not technology. Identify your critical personnel, build succession plans, and ensure cross-training to reduce human single points of failure. Having an alternate worker who can do 60 percent of a job is better than not having anyone doing it.
5. Don’t Forget Manual Workarounds
For your most essential processes, ensure that you have proven manual workarounds. Test them so you know they work in practice, not just on paper.
6. Strengthen Your Ecosystem
Look beyond your own walls. Start with your top five suppliers. Also assess your facilities and technology: redundant network and hardware, secure data centers, and reliable backup power are all key to minimizing single points of failure.
7. Develop a Roadmap
Building OR takes time, money, and persistence. Capture easy wins early to build momentum, but also plan for initiatives that may take years to fund and implement.
8. Take the Long View with Leadership
Executives often hesitate to fund resilience efforts until after a major disruption. Educate them that resilience is an investment, not a cost—one that protects revenue, reputation, and customers. Use your data to make the business case.
9. Prove It Works
Resilience isn’t real until you’ve tested it. Move beyond tabletop exercises and simulate real-world conditions. Run your generators at full load, practice manual workarounds and failover to backup data centers, and train staff until they’re confident in their roles. Exercises are where weaknesses surface—and where you gain the chance to fix them before a real crisis.
By applying these practices consistently, you’ll steadily improve your organization’s ability to take a licking and keep on ticking, in the words of the old watch commercial.
Building Resilience, Step by Step
Organizations today are expected to go beyond business continuity and achieve operational resilience. That means designing your people, processes, and systems to keep essential functions running no matter what challenges arise.
To increase your organization’s resilience, focus on what matters most, prioritize your people, strengthen your ecosystem, and validate your plans through real-world exercises. These and the other tips outlined above can help you turn resilience from a lofty ambition to a practical reality.
Achieving operational resilience is a journey, and you don’t have to go it alone. If you’re interested in receiving tailored guidance on how to implement OR at your organization, please get in touch.
Further Reading
- Beyond BC: An Always-On World Requires Operational Resilience,
- Client’s Guide to Hiring a BC Consultant
- Critical Assistance: How a Consultant Can Strengthen Your Crisis Management Program
- Operational Resilience vs Business Continuity: Why You Need Both
- Get Out the Map: Why Your BCM Program Needs a Roadmap
Michael Herrera
Michael Herrera is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of MHA. In his role, Michael provides global leadership to the entire set of industry practices and horizontal capabilities within MHA. Under his leadership, MHA has become a leading provider of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery services to organizations on a global level. He is also the founder of BCMMETRICS, a leading cloud based tool designed to assess business continuity compliance and residual risk. Michael is a well-known and sought after speaker on Business Continuity issues at local and national contingency planner chapter meetings and conferences. Prior to founding MHA, he was a Regional VP for Bank of America, where he was responsible for Business Continuity across the southwest region.
