Resilience Management Definition

 

Resilience management is the process of integrating all of an organization’s protective activities under one, clear, management structure. The methodology is subdivided into two areas: readiness and response.

 

Readiness

 

Readiness activities are the things that an organization has in place to prepare for or to prevent an incident from happening. There are numerous readiness activities, and no organization will carry them all out; instead, organizational leaders will determine those that are most appropriate for their organization. Examples of readiness activities include operational resilience, business continuity, disaster recovery, and various governance, risk, and compliance processes. Whereas traditionally these activities were carried out in their own separate silos, with resilience management these areas are all centrally directed.

 

Response

 

Response activities, such as crisis management and emergency notifications, are capabilities that an organization has in place to manage an active incident or crisis. They are designed to ensure that the organization can quickly and effectively respond to any event to minimize the impacts and to manage a rapid return to business as usual. Taking a resilience management approach ensures that all response activities are coordinated holistically and efficiently.

 

While many executive leaders are confident in their ability to manage one crisis at a time, many struggle when there are multiple disruptions occurring simultaneously – especially if key players are missing. Taking a holistic resilience management approach helps manage simultaneous incidents, with strategic crisis leadership having clear information from ­– and strong communications links with – all the different response teams that may be active.

 

 

Why Resilience Management?

 

Resilience management brings many benefits, including:

 

  • Integration: threats to the organization are many and varied, including such things as operational disruptions, life safety events, cyber & IT disruptions, and supply chain risks. Previously all these areas would have been managed separately by often non-communicating teams. Resilience management brings all these silos together under one effective umbrella.
  • Efficiency: traditional silos often result in wasted expenditure and resources  – resilience management allows the organization to manage all protective activities in one over-arching management process; helping to provide strategic clarity, maximizing budget and resources, and linking together previously disparate activities into one seamless whole.
  • End to end strategy: previously the strategic direction of protective activities was often unclear with multiple managers reporting to a variety of organizational directors. With resilience management, strategy flows from the resilience management leader across the various readiness and response areas. This enables an end to end strategic approach to be taken.
  • Agility: organizational change is accelerating and the need to respond quickly is a competitive differentiator. Resilience management enables agility, allowing rapid adjustment of readiness and response areas due to the clear understanding that the organization has over these; and due to the clear lines of communication and responsibility that are in place.

 

 

 

Moving to a Resilience Management Approach

 

Moving to resilience management involves three main requirements:

 

1. It requires a clear commitment from top management and the organizational board. Taking a resilience management approach will require a shake up of existing structures and the strategic requirement for resilience management needs to be clearly communicated and led by a C-level officer.

 

2. It will require a central management system – Castellan’s software provides this solution: allowing your organization to view, develop, and manage all your readiness and response activities in one place, with clear dashboarding giving strategic leaders the ability to see all the necessary reports simply and clearly.

 

3. It will require technical leadership. Restructuring to resilience management requires some effort. The move is often best made using a phased approach with an assessment of the maturity of existing protective activities, with decisions made on which can be plugged straight into the resilience management structure and which will need some redevelopment work. Castellan provides assistance in this area: our team of resilience management experts can provide as much support as your organization requires. We can work alongside your existing readiness and response teams; or, where your organization needs additional resources, we can provide a complete managed service where we take responsibility for developing areas of readiness and response on your behalf. Chat with our team to learn more.

 

Download our Getting Started with Resilience Management guide for more information. Within you’ll find a built-in worksheet which you can use to map an end-to-end view of your operations, from suppliers to customers, for each important product and service.