4 beliefs to adopt to achieve a strong culture of resilience

We know you. You know that a robust business continuity program is imperative to support your organization’s resilience the day something goes wrong. You are seeking to systemize and optimize your program, but your patience for generic collaboration tools and patchworked systems is as stretched as your resources.

You want to achieve seamless visibility, understood dependencies and aligned priorities. You must account for varying requirements and regulations per country, division and type of facility, and refuse to settle for a platform that cannot easily cater to your uniqueness. You want all contributors on board right when you need them to input, exercise and activate their plans.

We know you, because we are business continuity and resilience specialists too ― and we want to build smart resilience.

Over the past two decades, we have implemented and activated thousands of business continuity programs, trained hundreds of professionals and raised awareness for countless individuals through our exercises.

Let us share with you 4 beliefs to adopt for implementing a strong culture of resilience.

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4 beliefs to adopt to implement a strong culture of resilience

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Performing exercises makes your recovery faster and fit for purpose

Organizations that perform regular exercises have been proven to be the fastest and fittest to recover after a crisis. As practitioners, we might daydream that each participant invited to our tabletop exercise will be thrilled to test their skills during a simulation that will be a company-wide echoing success. Unfortunately, the results are often rather disappointing.

However, an energetic exercise is vital to any successful business continuity and disaster recovery program. When some or all the participants are in a virtual environment, creating a real-world drill can be a challenge, but there are strategies to make your exercises more realistic and to inject life into them!  

Having overseen hundreds of simulations and exercises, onsite and virtually, with numerous clients from various industries and with up to 200 participants, we believe that performing great tabletop exercises, walkthroughs, drills, simulations, and technical recovery, as well as learning through active minor incidents is the key.

Helpful resource : To learn more, take the BCI course on Designing and Delivering Effective Exercises

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Expanding access to contributors

We believe in expanding access to contributors, not limiting it. To really understand the business and its interdependencies, more stakeholders of the organization must be solicited for their respective input.

How to do so?

‍Let's use the case of our award-winning BCM software, ParaSolution. Its smart yet simple forms, directly accessible via email link promotes timely collaboration and input of essential knowledge – covering all your blind spots. Your team can then increase your contributors’ input rate with streamlined processes and during an incident, you can even engage your staff right away through web or mobile app with the most current information and plans.

Expanding access to contributors also means facilitating the eventual planning and response process. Tools that integrate emergency notification functionalities (email, SMS and voice) will then be useful to optimize the contribution of your various stakeholders, as you can track tasks and and see the evolution of the incident response.

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Everything that can be automated should be

We believe that everything that can be automated should be. Over the years, we have witnessed tremendous improvement in our clients’ BCMP management capabilities, simply by creating ongoing day-to-day workflows.

Workflows truly are important to gain efficiency and it is one of the strengths of ParaSolution. For this capability, we have won the 2018 BCI Americas Awards for our innovative, highly configurable workflow functionality, being accessible to any internal or external contributors without their having to log into the system. We have also won the 2021 BCI Americas Awards for our bidirectional-connectivity data module (BDC). This module connects ParaSolution to multiple data sources throughout the client’s organization and makes the ParaSolution-processed data available in that organization’s data analytics and reporting tools. It has also been recognized by the Canadian Scientific Research and Experimental Development program.

In the end, we believe in synchronization, not duplication. A BCMP automation is also an orchestration solution.

Read our blog article : 7 benefits of managing business continuity exercises with a BCM software.

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Constantly evolving BCM operability

We believe in increasing organizational resilience through constantly evolving BCM operability.

Plans must be malleable, editable, contextualized and available when needed. Decision makers and solution implementers need standardized and actionable plans, with embedded approval processes, to ensure restoration of critical activities when the storm hits.

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Need more advice on how to implement a strong culture of resilience? 

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