Tips for Resilience Success

When done right, a business impact analysis gives finance and operations managers the information they need to make well-informed decisions that build organizational resilience. But doing a BIA right can be a big undertaking. To prepare for success, make sure to:

Choose your team wisely. As noted earlier, you'll need a strong cross-functional team with engineering and finance expertise, but you don't want to break the bank in the name of protecting your business. Keep it lean, but not understaffed. FM Global clients often find it makes sense to use our loss prevention engineers in conjunction with our client service team and our business risk consultants for a BIA. They've already gathered a fair amount of the data in the underwriting process and loss prevention visits, and they're skilled in such efforts. If you don't have the internal staff, you may have similarly well-positioned partners.
Be candid. A BIA team is not an audit team. They're completely on the side of corporate management. Give them full access to facilities, people, and books, and make it clear that management should welcome the BIA team. No one benefits from secrecy in this process.
Establish momentum and maintain it. Rather than conducting one massive BIA for an entire multinational organization, which could take months or even years, break it up into smaller parts. It's helpful if each discrete project can be completed in a two- to three-month time period for a division, major product line, or group of locations. Then plan subsequent projects to keep the effort moving forward, expanding teams if possible to cover more ground. In this way, the organization can experience rapid and clear progress, bolstering support for these efforts.
Have a clearly defined process. Start out with a kickoff meeting where you set a strategy, timetable, and list of anticipated deliverables. Next, schedule visits and interviews of key management and operations staffers, possibly also distributing questionnaires. Then perform the thorough analysis of all the data. Draft a final report and send it out for comment and fact-checking. Finally, implement the BIA's recommendations.

Resilience is a critical ingredient of a sound business model. It not only enables a company to endure potentially disruptive circumstances, but also positions the company's management to capitalize on opportunities presented when competitors fail to do the hard work. An organization that can demonstrate its resilience to clients and shareholders gains an advantage over organizations that can't. That's why every organization needs to take action to become resilient.

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