Agile Business Continuity

I was intending to discuss risk and it’s relationship with resilience, but have decided to expand a little on the subject matter I touched on yesterday. So today’s talking point is: if Key Performance Indicators drive behaviour, then what happens when we don’t maintain a measure of resilience?

Business metrics can be broken down into a set of seven broad categories:

Productivity: measures the level of output
Quality: measures compliance to requirements
Profitability: measures the ability to create value
Timeliness: measures the rate of output
Efficiency: measures the yield
Utilisation: measures the resource leverage
Cost: measures the cost of production

There may be more or less categories depending on your particular model, but you will note that none of these relate to the resilience of the organisation. One important result which senior management is trying to achieve within their own business is a notion of “predictability” which naturally leads us to the development of risk management and business continuity.

Let us put the measure of resilience (or predictability) to one side, and look at where unpredictability is created. You will immediately note that to be predictable the organisation needs the capability to deal with external events. To do this requires additional capacity and flexibility within the organisation. The creation of this additional capacity is often in direct conflict to a number of the other measures. Additional capacity will naturally incur additional costs, reduce utilisation and may very well impact other properties. In other words, a focus on some of these factors will actually reduce the predictability and therefore the resilience of the organisation.

One of the key reasons for maintaining Key Performance Indicators is to provide for a much more blended approach to strategy and planning by taking into account a broad range of factors. However, by missing out a measure for resilience to act as a counterpoint to the others, the organisation may very well be constructing an environment where predictability becomes less achievable.

In the next post I will discuss how risk relates to the notion of resilience.

Related posts:

1. What is Resilience?
2. Continuity Dashboard – Measuring Resilience Part 2
3. Measuring the Resilience
4. Risk Assessment – Measuring Resilience Part 4
5. Breaking Point – Measuring Resilience Part 1