The disruption and dislocation caused by Covid-19 has underscored the need to plan for the unplannable.

In general, systems appear to have held up well in this pandemic and have not been tested to their limits of processing and operation.

There has been no wave of breakages that would point to a systemic frailty of individual technologies.

What is interesting is the combination of events that has created scenarios that were not necessarily planned for as part of a normal Disaster Recovery or BCP arrangement.

Consideration needs to be given to combinations of factors that can collectively change the risk profile of firms and indeed the industry where these factors affect a wide range of industry players simultaneously.

There is also a heightened level of systemic risk due to the impact on staff, which is not limited to the workplace.

Organisations that are heavily offshored in second or third world economies have generally had more adjustments to make than those firms who have retained a significant portion of local labour or who are more automated.

The assumption that your staff would be able to access a primary or secondary location proved incorrect. The advent of mass working from home has put additional stress on staff who live in more crowded environments, in areas with limited or unreliable internet or who simply don’t have access to a laptop.

Beyond these logistical issues, staff may be distracted by issues relating to health or the loss of friends or relatives.

We have seen traditional BCP assumptions on how best to move work between sites now being rethought with the pandemic disrupting all locations.

In this sense, distributed operating models are not a catch-all for resilience planning.

The principles that flow from an understanding of operating model design capacity – resilience planning – are increasingly focused on building resilience into technology rather than relying on people or offshoring.

When speaking to an organisation about the percentage of their staff that have been able to work from home and why, this has only been limited by their dependency on systems that do not conform to production management standards.

This has not gone unnoticed, and will doubtless be a key learning point from the pandemic.

The resilience agenda is real, is here to stay and is being practically applied in meaningful ways throughout the industry.

It is important to remember that when dealing with supply chains that cross corporate boundaries, we are likely to need to forge solutions that more simply traverse these boundaries and add value and resilience to both outsource suppliers and clients alike.

We will see an increased level of clarity of understanding and thoughtful designs around business-critical functions that addresses fortification and core processes in much the same way that BCP and DR plans do today.

We will also see an increased focus on selectively using additional alternate insurance-based arrangements for critical functions that represent protection against a breakage or outage. Progress looks set to continue apace.

Paul Roberts, CEO of Milestone Group has written a whitepaper looking at NAV production and the introduction of insurance based operating models. You can download an read the full white paper here.

 

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