Business Continuity and Operational Resilience are major topics that interrelate on numerous points. All organisations should take them into consideration to ensure that that their businesses are resilient and are able to address any incidents and/or interruptions in an efficient and timely manner.
What did our client want to achieve?
Our client, an insurance and reinsurance provider, was managing and approaching Business Continuity and Operational Resilience separately, despite the topics being heavily interrelated, where:
- Business Continuity was managed in a traditional BAU approach where all data was collected and maintained in a specific system
- Operational Resilience had a newer project-based approach due to the need to comply with regulatory requirements, where all data are maintained manually on Excel
As a result of the divergent approaches to Business Continuity and Operational Resilience, our client lacked a unified view of these two topics. Without which they would struggle to ensure their incident and crisis management and recovery planning capabilities were managed effectively.
Creating a one-stop solution to unify Business Continuity and Operational Resilience
In collaboration with the Operational Resilience team of the insurance firm, Wavestone developed a dashboard that unified the Business Continuity and Operational Resilience topics. The dashboard was designed to be one-stop solution for our client to search for anything related to the organisation’s business services in relation to the business service’s continuity and resilience data. The dashboards aim was to enhance their incident & crisis management and recovery planning capabilities.
Wavestone developed the dashboard based on a 3-phased approach:
Phase 1 – Scoping and Discovery Phase
During this phase Wavestone held multiple workshops with the client to understand the dashboard requirements, including: the number of views, audience, prioritisation, data sources, visualisations and dashboard refresh cadence.
Once the scoping was defined, Wavestone then performed the required data analysis on the various data sources in order to understand the formatting and structure of the data, identify data relationships and keys used to map across different datasets, as well as identifying any data anomalies or discrepancies.
Phase 2 – Data Modelling & Dashboard Design
The key focus of this phase was to design and develop the data model used to create the different views of the dashboard, where it could be tailored to a specific audience. Once the data model was developed, Wavestone proceeded to build the different views of the dashboard in order of priority. Wavestone held weekly meetings with key stakeholders to enhance the dashboard in an iterative and agile manner. Continuous data quality and assurance checks were conducted to ensure the dashboard accurately reflected the data as per the golden source.
Phase 3 – Handover and Closure
Wavestone held multiple workshops to ensure that the Business as Usual (BAU) Owners of the dashboard from the client’s side understood how maintain the data model and dashboard. Wavestone also developed a step-by-step guideline to ensure that:
- BAU Owners can refresh and maintain the data model and dashboard
- BAU Owners can refresh the golden source, and know the best practice when updating the dataset
- Users understand and can easily navigate around the dashboard
Improving the prioritisation and planning for incident and crisis management and recovery planning for business services
The Operational Resilience and Business Continuity dashboard is now used by Operational Resilience, IT Service Continuity Management, Third Party Assurance Teams and Senior Stakeholders.
The dashboard has sparked massive interest and garnered positive reviews and feedback from Senior Management: The dashboard “helps teams navigate and find the relevant operational resilience and business continuity information for a specific process, function or business service in a simplified and efficient manner by connecting various datasets.”
This has helped our client better prioritise and plan for incident and crisis management and recovery planning for a particular business service.
Wavestone’s flexibility in our delivery approach, combined with our expertise in Business Continuity & Operational Resilience topics and our clear understanding of our client and their requirements meant that we were able to deliver an impactful dashboard tailored to the client’s needs and requirements.
